Author: damoon

On 27 July 2016, I took my first learning power profile, and the results were rather curious. Curiosity and Sense Making where the areas of strength for me, Hope and Optimism, Collaboration and Belonging not far behind. The areas that needed greatest improvement were Mindful Agency and Creativity. On 19 October 2016, I took a second learning power profile and found results that were even more curious. Collaboration and Belonging had improved the most. This was not at all surprising because I fe...
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After 5 weeks of sheer madness, and 2 weeks of catching up on the gazillion things I put off because of what will henceforth be known as the 'block', I've finally found a moment to share my thoughts on how the block went. It seems natural to start with what I wanted to achieve in the block, and whether I achieved those aims. My first aim was to be able to have at least great lesson with each class. With the Year 7 class, that moment came when I taught them the difference between sexual and ase...
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After 4 weeks of periodical teaching Year 7s and Year 11s, one thing that I've truly come to appreciate is the professional relationship with my mentor. Initially, I was reluctant to take risks. However, with her encouragement, I've tried different things with varying amounts of success. I've had a couple of difficult moments, particularly with Year 7s, which I've jokingly called my 'Hiroshima'. Had I not tried, I wouldn't have learnt so conspicuously about what works and what doesn't work. Co...
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After speaking to Anne about my research proposal, I've settled on my research question - how much can teacher immediacy and differentiation (in concert) help to attenuate disengaged behaviours amongst students?
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For the last couple of weeks, I've spoken to many people about an experience I had in a Year 8 Science classroom, and this has had an impact on my approach to the glut of assessment tasks I've just had. The experience in question was that the Year 8 students were learning circuitry in groups, specifically how to convert text-based descriptions of a circuit into a sketch, and also into a scientific diagram. The vast majority of the class was engaged in this activity, whereas there was one group,...
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An interesting conversation came up last Thursday with the rest of the InSITE group: Does the way we as teachers learn bias the way we facilitate students' learning? We all agreed that it does. So what can we do about it as teachers to avoid our own metacognitive biases attenuating the learning of our students? From my perspective, this requires three steps: We need to know how students learn. We need to know how to facilitate the various ways students learn. We need to apportion our tea...
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It is better to know how to learn than to know.
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This was my interpretation of the meaning behind a 'narrative methodology': Narrative methodology is important to us because our field revolves around people – their life stories and learning journeys. This is significant because we can use those stories to further gain insight into how those around us develop as people and learners, and so we become more adept at developing and learning ourselves as a result.
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The first truly confronting thought I've had in my learning journey has been transforming from a facilitator of adult learning to a facilitator of adolescent learning. The greatest cause of discomfort was the thought of not being able to get the kids 'on my side', so to speak. To make them want to learn from me. From my experiences, moving to different classrooms and observing many teachers, the idea of getting the kids 'on side' has been rather influential. You have to get adolescents to buy ...
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