PL Day Term 2 reflection on Education Council Standards

Professional Learning Day                                           Date: 27^th April 2018

Areas of professional learning: Education Council Standards Seesaw and reporting to parents

Standards for the Teaching Profession (Our Standards)
Te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership Demonstrate commitment to tangata whenuatanga and Tiriti o Waitangi partnership in Aotearoa New Zealand.	✔
Professional Learning Use inquiry, collaborative problem-solving and professional learning to improve professional capability to impact on the learning and achievement of all learners.	✔
Professional relationships Establish and maintain professional relationships and behaviours focused on the learning and wellbeing of each learner.	✔
Learning-focused culture Develop a culture that is focused on learning, and is characterised by respect, inclusion, empathy, collaboration and safety.	✔
Design for learning Design learning based on curriculum and pedagogical knowledge, assessment information and an understanding of each learner’s strengths, interests, needs, identities, languages and cultures.	✔
Teaching Teach and respond to learners in a knowledgeable and adaptive way to progress their learning at an appropriate depth and pace.	✔

Reflections and new learning: Education Council Standards I am very familiar with the old standards having been both a beginning teacher and a mentor teacher not that long ago. To me these new standards seem to make much more sense and less repetitive. As a relatively new teacher to SHS it was nice to have the opportunity to reflect on how we meet these standards as a junior team. I feel we meet the majority of the standards really well especially around teaching and design for learning. An area we struggled to fill in was Te Tiriti O Waitangi Partnership. As an IB school our language of focus is Spanish. Therefore many of the commands and words that would usually be used in Te Reo in the classroom are Spanish instead. I feel I would like to focus on this more in my practice as it is an area I’ve put on the backburner while I’ve got to grips with a new school and new systems. Seesaw and reporting to parents I’m glad to hear other people are finding the expectations around what to put on Seesaw confusing as well! I feel I put lots of snapshots up last term which showed what was happening in the classroom each day. An area I feel I was confused about was reporting assessment to parents. I interpreted this as formal, standardised assessment as well as the final inquiry outcome. Therefore this is what I posted. This was very teacher directed and I often wrote out the captions for the girls to include. I like the idea of a format or template of what needs to be included. I think this will make my captions more relevant and hopefully increase parent engagement.

How this reflection and new learning will impact on my practice: Education Council Standards Previously I considered biculturalism and integration of Te Reo Māori a strength of mine and I need to refocus on this skill in my current classroom. I think this will be challenging in some ways as the timetable is already full of extras and specialist subjects. Trying to carve out a time for Te Reo Māori teaching could be tricky. I also have girls who are new to NZ and have little to no knowledge of Māori culture and language. For this reason I think it is important to integrate it further into my classroom programme.   Seesaw and reporting to parents My QLC is focused on increasing the complexity of my girls’ self-reflection. I would like to take the templates Fiona showed us and rework them to be year 3 friendly. I think a fill-in-the-gaps type approach will work well to help my girls focus their reflective comments. I had considered using the two stars and a wish reflection format this term however I think this will still result in quite shallow reflections. I will continue to unpack this further with my girls and develop a format that works for them. As a teacher I will focus on making sure all my captions have a context, learning intention and reflection.