Four minute walk through

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 the children to increase the bonds in our team.

The physical environment in the different spaces was also interesting. I really liked the ownership the children had over access to materials and their own belongings, this is something we have found challenging in the space we have and something I would like to think about carefully for next year. The children we saw had huge buy in to what they were learning and how they moved around the space independently. I loved this passion for their learning and the flexibility the teachers showed in going with the student's passions. I want to incorporate more of this passion to our classroom next year!