Activity 8, Week 32: Changes in my Practice

Week 32: Activity 8 Changes in my Practice

I was looking for something interesting to study, to extend and challenge my thinking.  My Principal encouraged me to pursue Mindlab’s Digital and Collaborative course.  I was already working within a collaboration for 3 years but wanted to broaden and explore my understandings of what effective collaboration is.

I’ve particularly enjoyed investigating leadership styles and theories.  This has lead to understanding my own others’ and being more deliberate in my approach.  This, combined with resilience training and profiling has helped me gain deeper understanding of how to be more effective in my leadership.  Gaining perspective on stakeholders and change makers has also been particularly interesting and useful.

Criteria 4: Demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of professional personal practice.

A large part of our study involved reflecting on our practice.  True reflection is never easy, and being honest about where improvement is needed is not only confronting but then the next step is to actually do something about it.  This part has been the most challenging and rewarding as I know my practice and those around me has improved as a result.  For example, the way I lead staff meetings (on my areas of leadership) has changed, we are more deliberate in our technology use, using the SMAR model to extend thinking, increased student agency, increased student reflection to name a few.  I have been incredibly challenged by time this year and have had to be disciplined in keeping on top of the work, especially in the second half of the course.  This has been quite stressful!  I have really enjoyed interacting online and will continue to do so.  I find it very valuable reading other peoples reflections and extending my professional context.  Learning about and using the 21C rubrics have had the most impact on my practice.  We keep them in mind now when planning programmes.

Criteria 7: Promote a collaborative, inclusive, and supportive learning environment.

As stated previously, I’ve been working collaboratively in groups of 3 for 3 years.  This year I am in a partnership which is new.  Our class works collaboratively and this is one our school values “learning together”.  What specifically has changed however, is the the concept and definition of collaboration.  I noticed, early on, that our children weren’t collaborators as such, they just worked together quietly.  I wanted to redefine this to them, and Jo and I (my co-teacher) model discussion and disagreement to them, saying, this is what it looks like when we disagree, getting them to truly understand how to be critical and argue in a “professional” learning type way.  This hasn’t got to exactly the place we want it with all children yet, however I believe we have made big strides in this area.  We have done the same thing as a staff, defined what collaboration is and how to be critical buddies in our teaching practice. 

My dreams for the future.

My Class: We have dabbled this year with flipped learning and we will dabble some more next year.  I want the children to develop and use collaboration at the next level, rather than just working together.  I see our vision for the school changing, from working together to collaborate.  I’m ensuring our planning pushes the children’s thinking and for us as teachers not to be afraid of new technology.  I don’t want to be left behind and I don’t want our tamariki to think school is “not relevant”.  I want to continue to build a learning environment where children thrive and are enthusiastic about their learning.

My School: I want to keep working on being critical buddies within our school and not be afraid or offended to receive or offer advice.  I want us all to be the best that we can and move together as a cohesive powerhouse ready to take on new professional challenges. 

Thanks Mindlab team and G+ colleagues for a great year of learning.

References

Osterman, K. & Kottkamp, R.(1993). Reflective Practice for Educators.California.Cornwin Press, Inc. Retrieved on 7th May, 2015 from http://www.itslifejimbutnotasweknowit.org.uk/files.

Ministry of Education (nd). Practising teacher Criteria and e-learning . Retrieved from http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Professional-learning/

Villa, R., Thousand, J., Nevin, A. (2013) A Guide to Co-Teaching