Activity 8 - Applied Practice in Context - Changes in my Practice
Well I have made it! What a journey, so many speed bumps along the way, when I put my hand up and said how keen I was to do the course I certainly did not fully understand what the course entailed. I was so lucky to be in a school with some inspiring e-learning masters, they tutored, encouraged, supported and challenged. They were so positive and excited for me to embark on the Mind Lab journey. Having 3 colleagues on the journey as well was helpful too, even if we didn't all attend the same face to face venues. there were opportunities to touch base easily when needed. Certainly once we went to distance learning and further school PLD, meetings, report writing et al began to surface they were the people whose incidental conversations kept me going. Thanks team.
Moving in to a new school with some fabulous e-learning behind me and feeling competent, the confidence had taken a huge dive with initial struggles for connectivity, change in devices and use thereof and young enthusiastic colleagues making me draw back as my insecurities came to the fore, and believing this "dinosaur" was failing badly. By participating in the Mind Lab postgraduate certificate I have been challenged into thinking about myself as a practitioner and my classroom practice, and seeing new purposes with digital tools to benefit our students while affirming and improving my skills.thus enabling me to see ways to further enact these skills in to my daily practice when I can access devices.
As Confucius said "Learning without reflection is a waste. Reflection without learning is dangerous."
For me I often found myself in the "pit of learning" on more occasions than I care to count. To put myself in students shoes and walk their path has certainly made me more reflective, I felt I was working reflectively but now see that I was reflective but at the lower levels as identified by Zeichner and Liston's five levels of reflection.
The latter 8 weeks have certainly been my favorite part of this course. Sharing and reading others thoughts and aspirations and future plans has been inspiring, however without the face to face, the initial contact and connections being developed I could not have engaged in this part of the course fully and no doubt would have remained a lurker. I have regularly written anecdotal notes following planning sessions, lessons, everyday classroom incidents, and even things to try with room layout. I also have kept notes of students conversations, and recently after some in depth observations, students positive comments about my feedback and next steps to them, it was enlightening to hear such deep positive responses and has made me reflect on how much more I can, could and will do to ensure this interaction I have worked so hard to get students to engage with becomes even more individually focused and my aim is to now develop these conversations into an individual learning log for each, I. am even thinking of a blog for them from me.
So where to from here...there are three areas of the PTC especially around e-learning that I wish to continue to have as my focus:
Criteria 1: Establish and maintain effective professional relationships focused on the learning and well-being of all akonga,
which then goes hand in hand with
Criteria 6 : Conceptualize, plan and implement an appropriate learning programme,
and starting on Tuesday this will be started as our new team met to collaborate our terms focus based on our term 2 data and student voice, its exciting to be able to bring new ideas to the table that will hopefully mean we can provide deeper more meaningful differentiated learning to our akonga.
and Criteria 7: Promote collaborative, inclusive and supportive learning environment. While I think we have worked hard to provide a good learning programme, we still have a long way to go with self-management, safety and learning around the good and bad features of the WWW. As we constantly strive to make our students 21st Century Learners and use technology to link them to 21st Century learning experiences, we need to manage our students cyber safety, time for some personal sharing about cyber bullying and facebook trolling, and the impact it can have on a "normal life'
So the journey hasn't ended it has just scratched the surface, I really want to go deeper in to the issues around cyber safety and keeping oneself safe, for me I need to build trust in processes around "Facebook" again and think that journey could be the start of a new blog as my personal research and delving in to the answers I need and solutions required may well help others on a sometimes intrepid journey, so this is not the end, it is simply the starting point of a few branches that need further development.
And now its back to the core task of writing report.....happy holidays everyone. Thanks for the input.
References
Ministry of Education (nd). Practising teacher Criteria and e-learning . Retrieved from http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Professional-learning/
Osterman, K. & Kottkamp, R.(1993). Reflective Practice for Educators. California: Cornwin Press, Inc. Retrieved on 7th May, 2015 from http://www.itslifejimbutnotasweknowit.org.uk/files.
Zeichner and Liston’s Five levels of Reflection retrieved from:
I am glad to see the title of your blog. I am in the process of drafting a book with exemplars on this topic
ReplyDeleteT3: Teachers Teaching Teachers
Teachers with the desire to bring about change need to have like minded people around them and schools need to provide necessary resources ( capacity building ) for the 21st Century learning to take place.
unfortunately, we are still doing the last century teaching and using the 19th-century assessments.
A spearhead group of innovative teachers can make the difference with a steady speed. Govt initiatives often meet resistance from all quarters due to a top-down approach. A horizontal, subtle and low-profile leadership is the way forward.
Formation of Interschool cluster groups of like-minded teachers is the best forum for this change of mindset followed by actions.