Teaching Portfolio

Today we walked through the junior and senior collaborative spaces. I was interested to see either side of the middles and how collaboration looks across the school. What did I see? junior classes meeting all together for their morning hui and news sharing reading interchange lots of scaffolding in the junior block for self-regulating learning and routines instructional groups teachers on the same page Questions/queries I have: spaces were still quite separated ratio of finished work to scaffolds and supports This walk through highlighted several things about collaboration for me. It was interesting to see the differences in teacher presence in the two different spaces. One teaching team were very much a united front with the children and seemed to be reading each other's minds whereas the other team were targeting children through smaller groups. I think we do the instructional grouping in our practice very well and would like to continue to work as a team with ...

rephrase issues and problems as complexity - social complexity (people based) -  high  or low? - systems complexity -  high  or low? sometimes we don't know what the problems are or how we can deal with them ways of knowing - how to we make sense of the world around us? Discourses? inferencing is the key to changing a wicked mess into a simple puzzle Levels of mental development/ability to cope with complexity. Once you are on one level you wont regress Instructional - want answers from somewhere else 'google search' mentality, don't create solutions but look for help elsewhere, waiting to be told what to do socialising self-authoring self-transforming your ability to deal with problems and solve problems so your world doesn't become too complex each filter influences: what you communicate how you communicate how you receive information what you do with the information Ladder of inference - can we use this to teach inferencing? ...

Walking through the middle and senior classes today we saw a variety of literacy programmes, most classes were doing writing (between 10.20-10.40) with one doing reading. We have been struggling with teaching writing in our collaborative team as I am concerned that teaching in a big group when modelling means some children's needs aren't being met. We have also found it hard to balance the planning and teaching as a team. When walking through other classes we saw lots of whole class teaching and modelling with one class working in groups. Writing groups is something I have tried before and haven't made work for me but I really enjoyed watching the teacher with her small group. This group were listening to each others' writing and then discussing improvements that could be made. I would like to introduce this to my writing programme as I feel this is a very authentic way for children to get feedback from their peers. I have used written 2 stars and a wish feedback with...

Today I had the chance to pop in and see what the iPad Clicker group have been working on. I was blown away by the stories the boys in our team have written. They were all eager to share with me what they had written and you could really see the pride in their work. I would love to share this back with the class. It was great to see the engagement from these children who sometimes appear disengaged or frustrated in the mainstream classroom. One of the boys commented that using the iPad was much easier than writing with fingers! I have tried to use iPads with these children in the classroom during their reading programme which they enjoy however haven't had much success with writing. The Clicker app looked great for these children and I look forward to them being able to use it in the classroom in the future.