Teaching Strategies

Work during 2016
Over the last term my team and I have been working towards developing learning blogs with our students.
I created a year 8 blog which now acts like the old traditional white board. Students now have access to learning 24/7 and from anywhere in the world. Parents and whanau members can also go onto our blog and look at the work students are doing, help students at home and check on the progress students have made via students own learning blogs.
We have also utilize the use of google classroom when sharing practise activities, reading material, assignments when students are needing their own individual copies.

The beauty of working this way is that it allows the teacher to become more of a facilitator of learning by freeing up time to work with individual students, students can work together using shared google doc (and they don't even need to be in the same place to do this) and with time it is my hope that the students become self directed learners as they also have instant access to information they are interested in.

One of the negative aspects of working online and this is the only negative that I see at this time is that students are often very distracted by gaming, facebook, youtube and social networking.
Hapara student dashboard is being trialed at the moment and might help in providing greater on task behaviour.
One of the other ways to combat this issue is to include some of these sites into the teaching programme. ie social networking, youtube, facebook. which I often do in maths and inquiry.

Below is a link to our blog. You will also noticed is that it also links to our student blogs. Please feel free to look through them and make some positive comments on their work. Our students love reading positive comments about their work.
http://tarawerayear8.blogspot.co.nz/

The Classroom of 2030

An interesting and inspiring watch.

Inspiring students of the future

An inspiring video of how I aim to run my classroom.

Using the 5c's, Choice, Collaboration, Communication, Critical thinking, Creativity.

After years of teaching I have come to the conclusion that teaching should be based around research/evidenced based teaching programmes and strong relationships with students.

I enjoyed watching this video. It confirms for me my interest in developing future proof teaching techniques and helping students to develop critical thinking and essential skills.

"Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think."

Albert Einstein-1879-1955

2015 reflection

This has been a fantastic learning year for me. I started the year at James Street school. During term 2 I made a change to teach a year 8 class at Tarawera High school.

On my arrival I first noticed that the class seemed to be in a state of disarray. The students lack structure and routine. They had a teacher that had had a lot of time off and a term of relievers.
Drawing on my experience gained from PB4L, the Incredible Years programme and 15 years of teaching experience, I knew that I had to develop a strong trusting relationship with the students and set a class programme where all students felt like they were being successful in their learning.

I tried group teaching in reading, maths, and writing but found that the students weren't able to self manage and needed whole class teaching in order to develop a healthy classroom environment and establish a level of order.
At the same time I started to develop a relationship with some of the more challenging students in the class and their parents.
I found that providing  one on one time with these students enabled them to share their interests with me, home life, their concerns and social issues, which enabled students to start developing trust in me.

During this time I developed a relationship with home through phone calls, texts, and inviting parents to meet with me during my release times. Taking sports group also help to create the connection with students whanau.

I have also gain professional development in the use of google docs, google classroom and using
e-asTTle. I am still currently in the process of upskilling in e-asTTle and have a course to attend later in the term.

Using Google Classroom

Over the last two weeks I have been using Google classroom. It did take a bit to set up. Loading students google mail addresses, learning how google classroom works, loading work and identifying which students are following the activities assigned.
I am still learning how to track kids learning using google classroom.
Below is a link of PD that I have been following.

http://teachingtarawera.blogspot.co.nz/2015/08/using-google-classroom.html

The students are enjoying working from google classroom and have been saving a lot of their work to their personal learning blogs.

Using data to plan for next teaching steps

The below examples are students that I have identified in numeracy and literacy that needed extra support in their learning. I have changed the name of the students.
The use of I.E.P's (individual educational plan) or individual pathways helps to focus teachers when planning for the next steps. The idea behind I.E.P's are about being specific and reflective on both the activities using and teaching methods.
Here are the examples and personal reflections on learning.

Using ICT in teaching

Today my eyes were opened to the use of technology in the classroom.
I have been using technology for many years in teaching to help motivate students, engage them in new learning and for evaluation and assessment purposes. Today however was the first time I was able to invite a student who was sick at home into our classroom lessons.

Using Facebook, messenger and shared google doc's, students were able to work together, sharing ideas, thinking, and recording their learning.

The beauty of this way of learning was that it was completely student driven.  They were self motivated, enjoying the learning and were engaged. Once the learning was completed for the day their learning was sent to me via google mail. I was able to give direct feedback and feed forward.

Using google doc's also enabled students to take their work with them and continue learning after the school day.
The future of teaching and learning is exciting.

Photos of learning

 

 

 

     

EOTC and Physical Education

Over the last seven years in have running the school sport and physical education programmes.
Including the GO4it programmes, sports leadership programmes.
This role has covered teaching physical educational activities, introducing and running sporting programmes and activities. I have also being running our school athletics, cross country, softball, rugby 7's, soccer and other sporting codes.

I have been a member of the inter-school cluster sports association and the eastern bay sports association.
One of my biggest roles was running the inter-school athletics sports.
This involved booking fields and sports gear. Coordinating with participating school and the local athletics club, setting up and running the days activities, recording and passing on results to schools.
During this time I have also run syndicate camps. The latest camp I was involved with was December 2014 where we took the students to Hamilton. The past years we have been to the beach and bush. During all of these camps it was crucial that parents were on board. They needed to be aware of school expectations and protocols and their requirement during camp and leading up to camp. RAM's and planning for these event were also another important issue. In order for these to take place all RAMs and planning needed to be past by the school BOTs.

Below are some examples of the planning, photos, training the I was involved with.

 

Teaching Inquiry

This is my first attempt at using teaching as inquiry as a method of teaching and as an assessment tool. These students were selected as a result of observations noted during my guided reading programme. This process took 6 weeks but could go longer. It is important to note that anecdotal notes were used throughout the process to track students progress and the effectiveness of my teaching methods.  

Teacher Inquiry Process: - 2013 Focusing Inquiry: Reading (Serenity, Mya, Utah, McKenzie, Mason, Charles, Mystery)

Wk 3 term 2- Wk 7 term 2

What is the intended learning outcome? Students will be able to use expression, voice projection and use punctuation                                                                            correctly

Why is this important? Phrasing correctly helps with understanding text

                                           Able to read confidently and competently to an audience.

Teaching Inquiry:

How do I enable the students to hear their own reading?

Using ICT to record voices.

Students to identify own errors and discuss how they can

improve.

Make a story book using ‘little bird tales’ web site.

Record a play using Audacity.

Personal reading using web cam.

Students that are not confident to read easier book in order

to focus on the expression, projection and punctuation.

What are my next learning steps?

Teach students to using ICT to record their reading of text. Self evaluate.

Focus on volume, expression, use of punctuation and

fluidness.

What resources will support this?

Web cam

Audacity

Little bird tales

Teaching and Learning:

So what did the students do / learn?

Read to small groups.

Shared reading out load with small groups.

Share a range of written language.

Learning Inquiry:

What are the students’ next learning steps?

Students have made huge progress. Serenity stills needs ongoing

support to project voice. Mya has moved down a group to

practise these skills with an easier text. Other’s doing well with

the above skills. All students have made gains in confidence.

Reciprocal Teaching

I have spending the morning reading about reciprocal teaching in reading. (BES Exemplar 4 Reciprocal teaching and Reciprocal teaching a schoolwide core teaching and learning strategy)
Next Monday our senior school which I am apart of will be visiting Edgecumbe Primary school to spend a day learning more about this reading/teaching strategy.

My first thoughts are that it seems like a great strategy to use. First of all it is evidenced based and secondly it can be used across the curriculum subjects, not just reading.

The main ideas behind this approach is that the teacher teachers the skills of 'Clarifying, Questioning, Summarising and Predicting to students. Students then use this approach themselves and in turn taking on the role of the teacher.

I feel that this is very empowering for the student. The reading stated that when well implemented, reciprocal teaching has been shown to improve students' skills in reading, comprehension, metacognition(learning about learning), social participation, and self management.

I was particularly interested in the case study of the year 5 and 6 students and the students comments.

One student said, "It helps me understand what I am reading" (year 5 student), another said,"I used to think I was dumb; now I know I am not".

Success using this programme will be based on the quality of teacher scaffolding.
So my first job will to gain a deeper understanding of this process in order to have greater success of implementing it into my class reading programme.

Teaching Maths

My stage 6 students had a great time sharing their thinking. Students were using proportional thinking to solve multiplication problems like 73x8=...

Here are some of their workings

                  

IEP's

I've spent Thursday (first teacher release day for 2015) working on my IEP's for my at risk students. I used last years end of year data to highlight my at risk students. I ended up having around half my class on my at risk register, covering literacy and numeracy.

Sharing end of year data between teachers via e-Tap can save a lot of time. However, I found that a lot of the data was out dated or inaccurate, furthermore making it very difficult to highlight the students next learning steps. I was able to go back through their red profiles and make my own OTJs on the individual students ability.

Great resources that have helped have been the literacy learning progressions, the english language literacy progression, NZ math standards and the NZ curriculum framework document. TKI and nzmaths have been excellent web sites to help me develop teaching strategies and ideas to help me develop my students next teaching steps.

Now that I have created my IEP's I will share with my students their new short term, measurable goals and how the students and I will work together to help them meet these goals.

The last challenge is fitting this learning into my teaching programme. I am targeting some of these issues through my maths and literacy teaching inquiries.
I look forward to reflecting on the students progress at the end of the term where students data will show progress.

These IEP's are working documents. I find my self reflecting on these questions...
1. Will these activities engage my students?
2. Are my students needing more scaffolding especially in writing?
3. Am I targeting students interests and cultures?
4. Am I teaching to the very next learning steps and do I know what they are, and if not where can I find the information I need to teach their next steps?

I have found that the more I think about my student's learning needs the more questions I have about my own teaching effectiveness and knowledge of learning.
In conclusion, if I ever stop my own learning I guess then that will be the day to put down the white board markers, close the classroom door and look for a new challenge else where.

Maths PD Teaching as inquiry

Today Roz lead our Math PD staff meeting.

I am a priority learner in maths. I am below/ well below the NS.
I looked at the national standards in maths and identified students in my class the students at are below the national standards. Using the data I have and OTJ I made a plan of how I'm going to move these students from stage 4 to stage 5. What I have identified is that these students need to be able to make smart number splits to 10 instantly. From here I will target students making greater splits. For example 7+3=10 so 27+3=30. Students need to be able to make the link between grouping to ten from smaller to larger numbers.

I am meeting the national standards expectations for my age/year.
I have noticed that some students that are meeting national standards (stage5 and 6) have multiplication gaps. I have identified 3 students at stage 6 that needs support recalling 2,5 and 10 times table facts. Not being able to recall these facts will make learning new strategies in stage 6 and moving to stage 7 increasingly difficult. This term my goal is to help these students learn these facts. Students that are working at stage 5 also need to learning these facts. I've started teaching adding groups of numbers over 100. We are currently advanced counting. However subtraction and being able to use subtraction strategies need further development.

I am already above the national standards for my age/year.
Students in my class that are above the national standards in my class need to using only multiplicative strategies.
I am using ideas from NZ maths and using the NUMPA book 6 and 7 to help plan learning. I have noticed that some of these students have gaps in their Mult/Div knowledge, so my aim is to identify what the gaps are and target these as part of my maintenance programme.

Making Smart Goals

This afternoon Ana Byrne lead us in a staff meeting about setting up At Risk register for at risk students. We had to look and students literacy and numeracy data. Compare students data with the national standards and using data create smart measurable goal. These are to be reviewed at the end of the term. Below is an example of the smart goal.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ziZRyYHRVqQXb405CWFKQzLnFTt63Ae-yGAUUiKAplo/edit#slide=id.p4

James Street School            At Risk IEP   2014

NAME:	DOB:	YEAR: 4	Learning Area: Reading	TERM: 1
Data: What is the data telling me? What is the priority for this student to learn?	Short Term Goals – Specific and measureable To be achieved within 1 term		Strategies: How am I going to teach this? What differentiation will be needed?	Review: Specific to goals and effectiveness of differentiation
He is reading at level 13. He is needing to learn blend sounds, and first 100 sight words.	To learn all of the first 100 sight words.		Use flash cards of unknown first 100 sight words. Daily practise with (Students name).	Yes he has learnt the first 97 sight words and some initial blends.
He now needs to learn the next lot of sight words. 200 sight words.	To learn all of the 200 sight words.		Use the same strategy as the above. We will also trial S.T.E.P.S computer based reading programme to improve word knowledge, blends, reading skills and comprehension.	Made great progress with STEPS and is getting a lot of enjoyment from his successes.  Now knows the first 200 sight words.
He now needs to learn the next 100 lot of sight words,	To learn all of the first 300 sight words.		Continue using the STEPS programme. Test the 300 sight word list. Write out flash cards to the unknown words to practise daily at home and school. Test weekly.	Make excellent progress. Knows 300 sight words. Strategy work well.
He is now working at 7-7.5 reading age. STEPS programme has helped and teaming up with home to continue to push his reading practise.	Develop sentence comprehension and word knowledge.		Clozed reading and word comprehension tasks during guided reading. Use pictures to illustrate meaning of unknown words.	I have not spent as much one on one time with him this term. He is also going to rainbow reading and making progress. Comfortably working at level 21/22. During guided reading I have been sowing in new vocab.  He has been able to discuss ideas in detail and is making good links to personal experiences. I stayed away from clozed activities as writing tends to be a block for   (Students name).