Teaching Portfolio

I have been thinking a lot about the behaviour we are seeing in our team at the moment and how we can manage certain behaviours to ensure learning is not compromised. The class has been becoming increasingly difficult to teach effectively when all together as the behaviour becomes very disruptive on the mat. We have met with parents of individual children and some improvement has been made by these children however there is still a large group of about 15 kids that are very disruptive during whole class teaching sessions. I feel that consistency and fairness are key to managing behaviour in the classroom and we need to re-evaluate how well we are doing this. Things I have brainstormed are: - more student involvement when on the mat - I need to think about this more and how to manage these interactive sessions - shorter times spent on the mat all together e.g. aim to be up and moving by 9.10 - do we need to work in smaller groups (this feels like it's going against what we are ...

We have been struggling to keep all the children engaged in whole class discussions when all 50ish children are on the mat. At the start of the term I did a couple of time samples on children on/off task and found that over the space of a 15 minute modeling session almost all the children were off task at one point or another. This made me think about how much teacher-talk we do compared to how much thinking and talking the children do. I use think-pair-share quite often, especially in writing before sending the children off to write independently. I would like to expand my use of these style of strategies to promote more child engagement in whole class sessions. So far I have tried: - Think-pair-share - Staggered brainstorming (pairs, then 4s, then 8s) - Sharing writing work with a buddy/two buddies at the end of a session instead of all the children sitting listening to one person - Divided tasks e.g. write on half the whiteboard each - swap These have all be quite good at...

This year I am trying to increase my communication with parents via a weekly email. After talking to parents last year and this year there was a strong consensus that they prefer an email over checking a blog every week. I still upload photos to my blog as and when and direct parents there in my weekly email if something new has been added. Over the past couple of weeks I have received some positive feedback about my communication style - it is nice to know my efforts are actually being read! HI there I was talking with Mary Kate in the weekend. She was full of praise for Emily and how she handled the change for Caitlin. She said that there was some nerves and tension on Monday morning. But by the afternoon they had gone. Last week she did not have any moments before school with Caitlin over not wanting to go to school. Mary Kate and Dion were really impressed with the email that Emily sent as a break down of Caitlin's week. They felt this showed that you had taken time t...