Lincoln Primary Visit

We went to visit Lincoln Primary to observe their collaborative practices. I found this a very interesting and worthwhile time as I felt we have had a really successful collaborative term and wanted to investigate the where to from here.

Something that has been concerning me for some time is the lack of movement between our groupings across the core subjects. There are some children that I have not taught this year and as we approach 3-way conferences I have realised I don’t feel I could confidently talk about these children’s learning. This made me reflect on wether we are truly demonstrating collaboration or wether we are still cross-grouping in a sense. At Lincoln they work in a power of 3 and rotate their instructional groups every two weeks. I feel this would be too short a turn around for us as we have such varied needs however I would like to begin rotating groups next term to ensure we all teach all the children. I am thinking a 3-week turn around would be possible as this would give each teacher time to develop a strategy etc before moving on to a different group. I am hoping this will also have a spin-off effect of being in-class professional development for us as we are teaching many different levels and stages. I would also like to adopt this approach to introduce some multi-level grouping and discussions to promote Tuakana-Teina in the classroom.

I didn’t want to focus on the physical space too much as I strongly feel collaboration is a mindset rather than a classroom however one idea I would like to implement was the idea of ‘zones’. At Lincoln they split the classroom into three teacher zones, I would like to use this terminology and signage next term to remove the labels of Room 22 and 23.

Student choice over their learning is something we have been trying to increase this term. I feel we have addressed this well during literacy time however it could be improved in maths. I really like the idea of the children opting in to workshops they need to learn however I do have some reservations about how to manage this. At Lincoln they have the benefit of a power of 3 with 60-odd children which helps to manage these transitions. I would like to try using workshops for strand options first and hopefully gradually build up to running and maths programme this way.

Lots to think about next term!