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Jumping into several new topics starting Friday ... after a couple of weeks of very necessary being the student of teaching rather than the student-teacher practicing! teaching a full topic at the beginning of semester, with time to really consider the approach and content as a whole, was a very strong experience ... by lesson 3 I had gone a bit too fast, then got to give the students something to practice the core stuff, starting easy, and to work on while I helped fill in some gaps individuall...
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I'm helping with a weekly 1/2 hour session with 4 year 7 students needing help to get their maths up to a level they can effectively participate in year 7. Working with these students is looking like being very worthwhile for them, some longer term individual help is much needed, and certainly is not in the DET budget! As well it is a very valuable insight for me into the kinds of understanding, or not, that students bring to high school from primary, and how the basic number stuff usually lear...
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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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Well I'm now back in the UK for three months about to engage with learning frameworks for how the UK can renew its infrastructure systems. That was a gruelling but productive three months with you guys helping to set up the InSITE programme. I've learned a lot myself and it's pushed me way beyond my comfort zone. Here are some of my take aways: what really matters is our purpose - and we maintain our integrity by staying true to our purpose Purpose and Identity are twin sides of the same c...
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This is the video for this week's check-in. https://youtu.be/ThHt2miXBV0
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This is the video for my check-in. https://youtu.be/9Me4g7-usHI
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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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