Four minute walk through

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Today we walked through the senior block. Several things stood out for me:
  • very individual classroom styles, wall displays varied greatly from class to class.
  • children working predominantly at desks
  • quiet noise level/calm environment
  • differences in collaboration
Questions/thoughts
Something that stood out for us was the different styles of collaboration. One partnership we saw referred to their individual classes as being classes within their team. The way the physical space was set up also clearly defined who teaches in which room. Dean and I made a deliberate choice to not specify who teaches who or in which room. We have set our space up as 'ours' with one teacher station and the rest of the space for the children to work in. Are the different collaborative styles effecting our children? We have had several year 3 parents this year very confused about the way we collaborate compared to the juniors, is this going to happen again for our year 4s next year? How to we clearly explain this difference to parents when we are all in different stages of our journey? I think this may be adding to some of the resistance we've encountered from parents, they don't see a cohesive, school wide model and this is being reflected in their willingness to embrace collaboration. Hopefully with time they will feel more confident about different teaching styles and partnerships.

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