Syndicate meeting 12/8

During our syndicate meeting last week Norah visited and brought along a bright and colourful bucket and explained that this is a metaphor for filling the buckets of others.
The bucket represents the mental and emotional thoughts and feelings that we have Norah asked us to think about how we feel when our bucket is full and then when it has been drained. This lead me to going online to find out a bit more.
When your bucket is full you feel confident, calm, secure, patient and friendly you will have positive thoughts and you would expect positive results.
And take the time to think about your bucket overflowing there would be a happiness that would spread to those around you and if you received a happy smile or positive feedback or compliment there would be a great big ripple effect.

Now let's think about if your bucket was drained how would you be feeling there would not be so many positive thoughts and it would be easy to be sad, nervous, insecure, negative, stressed, worried and even possibly physically ill, affecting your behavior and emotions leading you instead to empty the buckets of those around you.

After doing more online reading, I want to think about bucket filling and how my actions and words affect others and not intentionally dipping into the buckets of others.

Staff meeting 11/8

At this week's staff meeting, we took time again to view and discuss another set of possible questions pertaining to the ERO school visit in week 6. Again we worked in small groups and then shared our findings with the meeting. our questions this time were 
What does effective teaching look like for our school?

What does moderation look like in our school? 

Again very insightful discussion took place and I have made some notes for my own reference and a collection of answers to these questions over the 2 meetings will be available to us in the near future.    

Staff meeting 4th August

Focus of tonight’s meeting is ALLs Accelerated literacy learning.

Ana explained that the focus for All’s was looking at what has been successful, what are the barriers to learning, and what have been useful resources. That we were first doing this as a small group discussion and then sharing to the meeting as a whole.

What I took from the small group I was involved in was a couple of Shelley’s ideas. Like having a shopping list of ideas for her children and involving children numbering their ideas 1, 2, 3 then this becomes what’s the first thing that you are writing about then what’s next going back to the shopping list to remember what they have decided to write about, also in use for her low learners is a picture planner where they draw a picture of what they are writing about so they have a visual to refer to for their writing.

Then sharing continued staff-wide with many meaningful successes, barriers to learning, and useful resources shared.

Can’t emphasise enough how valuable it was to be involved in the sharing and problem solving with peers.  Ana also gave us all accelerating writing achievement by Rebecca Jesson a senior lecturer in the faculty of education at the university of Auckland reading to peruse in our own time.   

Staff meeting 21/7

For our staff meeting guided by Ana, we read a 1^st chapter copy from the book Learning in the fast lane 8 ways to put all students on the road to academic success by Suzy Pepper Rollins. Having not read this book I am only summarising my thoughts from this copy of the 1^st chapter.

In this chapter we deal with the issue of remediation and how this could be hampering our students that are deemed to be the furthest behind (gathered from the many various diagnostic pre-testing that teachers perform routinely) and that it is widening rather than closing the achievement gaps.

Suzy Pepper Rollins an experienced classroom teacher and educational consultant explains her belief that the best way to support struggling students is in the acceleration of their learning. Pepper Rollins goes on to explain her thoughts and how to implement her steps.

Including make standards and learning goals explicit to students i.e. learning intentions (Ana gave us all a copy of How I explain the importance of learning intentions to my class, Barabra Anne Alexander)  

Increase students' vocabulary—a key to their academic success; Build students' motivation and self-efficacy so that they become active, optimistic participants in class; Provide rich, timely feedback that enables students to improve when it counts; Address skill and knowledge gaps within the context of new learning.

After our reading, we then participated in a Rubric evaluation of the Effectiveness of classroom teaching practices for students achieving below curriculum expectations in literacy.

Being involved in a discussion at where your peers think their classroom practises and expectations sit within the rubric was interesting and thought provoking.  

Think maths

Really enjoyed a chance during the term break to go along to Mt Manganui intermediate with colleagues for a maths symposium. Taking the time to learn about developing spatial awareness in geometry, algebra in the early years and number sense. These work shops had very informative presenters along with an impressive key note speaker was well worth the time.

Staff meeting 24/3/15

Writing moderation

Before the sharing of student writing examples of a recount, we spent time previewing the New Zealand curriculum writing standards, for  more about the reading and writing standards including using the standards look here http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/National-Standards/Reading-and-writing-standards

After our preview of the examples we got together in small groups to share and compare the process of writing to ether confirm or adjust writing levels of students this was a group collaboration to establish an understanding of what the standard looks like and whether the student has the requirement of the achievement level. This lead to various discussion to use the evidence to judge each students writing in relation to the national standards making an overall teacher judgement from specific evidence gathered and teacher experience from a particular point in time.  

I see the need consistence and comparability both in the task set and the marking and to understand is close enough good enough to establish an agreement of their writing level. This is easily said however I am thinking not so easy to be done in practice.  

For a Ministry of education Moderating asTTle writing power point look here  http://connect.vln.school.nz/p11095800/     

Staff meeting

An interesting presentation from Ana about the Ministry of Education revised  e-asttle writing complete with online video  explanations. This online tool is designed to assess childrens' writing progress from years  1- 10 by providing a variety of communicative purposes ie describe, explain, recount, narrate persuade. A valuable tool with quality exemplars to track student writing.

Amber and Roz spoke about GGL and showed a tracking graph (which was informative as I had little knowledge of what happened from the form being filled out and the child spoken to, nice to have the elaboration)

A staff meeting with a difference

The architect came back and presented two different plans for incorporating the special needs unit in a new position within the school. These plans prompted a lot of discussion and have been displayed in the staff room for our feedback, both plans have pro's con's and interesting points which will make it very interesting to see which plan comes to the front.

1st label post

Developing my Learning

A great and informative teacher only day,

A lot of learning going on and some hair pulling :( but I have managed to keep up and develop some new knowledge of blogging :) 

Community breakfast

What a great day for an early start, with the sun shining we served a hearty breakfast to our tamariki  and whanau