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Week 32 - Activity 8 - Key Changes in my Practise

Week 32 - Activity 8 - Key Changes in my Practise A reflective practitioner assumes a dual stance - on the one hand, the actor in a drama and the other hand the critic who sits in the audience watching and critiquing the entire performance. (Osterman et al 2015) Schon (1983) explained, professional knowledge is grounded in professional experience: “Competent practitioners usually know more than they can say. They exhibit a kind of knowing-in-practice, most of which Is tacit” I have identified these two great extracts from the class notes that resonate with me at the end of my Mindlab journey and the continuation of my professional learning journey. Using Rolfe et al Reflective Model (2001) I will examine one of the criteria for Standards for the Teaching Profession from the Ministry of Education. (amongst other things no doubt) Learning-focused culture - Develop a culture that is focused on learning, and is characterised by respect, inclusion, empathy, collaboration and safety. T...
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Trends Influencing NZ and Internationally - Week 30

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The responses to this have been among the more interesting reading. I have read a lot of frustration, intrepidation and anticipation from the “Mindlabbers” over this Trends in Education topic. What is a trend? A pattern of gradual change in a condition, output, or process, or an average or general tendency of a series of data points to move in a certain direction over time, represented by a line or curve on a graph.  http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/trend.html Or a good old Google search reveals The New Media Consortium short video from the class notes spouted a lot of the buzz words around 21st Century Learning and highlighted many key points about the changing face of learning worldwide. These stood out for me. Identify successful, sustainable new models of learning Students are identifying and designing solutions to real world problems Makerspaces, modern active learning spaces that include computational thinking challenges, coding and robotics are prov...
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SOCIAL MEDIA USE IN TEACHING AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

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SOCIAL MEDIA USE IN TEACHING AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Reflection using: Descriptive: NZ Education Council’s (n.d.) definition is “social media embraces web-based and mobile-based technologies to facilitate interactive communication between organisations, communities and individuals”. Not everything I use on the internet for my teaching practice I would define as social media. Youtube, I don’t consider social media in my context. I’m a viewer not a creator, I rarely engage in commenting. I do however use Youtube as a major resource in my own upskilling of particular knowledge and practises but again, I don’t consider it a true social media tool for me. While I utilise a number of online training sites and they form a large part of my professional activity, I don’t consider them social media. I consider them essential tools to stay up to date as a learner. Social Media for me are the tools that enable all participants to be active equally, contribute content equally, ask questions...
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Legal and ethical contexts in my digital practice

Legal and ethical contexts in my digital practice I’ve been very lucky not to have been aware of many serious breaches of ethical behaviour linked to digital or online behaviour. One that did make me ponder on what to do and then how to do it occured about ten years ago and reflecting back makes me realise that I set a good tone for future professional behaviour. Following Rolfe et al.’s (2001) reflective model WHAT? When the web first starting getting “fast”, Peer to Peer file sharing started to become a thing. Napster, Limewire etc allowed the more savvy (naughty) to have anything they wanted off the net for free. The lure of this enticed many, myself included. It was easy to search a song, album, movie, application and have it on your computer within an hour or two. I had a teaching colleague who was hooked. Where things got tricky was that it became apparent that he was sharing and swapping these downloaded files with a number of his students. They would bring in what t...
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Activity 3: Contribution of Teacher Inquiry Topics to my Communities of Practice

Hi there Very late reflection entry for the course - apologies for that. Community of Practise (CoP) isn't rocket science is it! All of us that choose to be involved in a learning opportunity, be it short or longer term, do so because we want to receive some benefit or value from it. This might be an immediate gain in knowledge, a clarification or further understanding. For people to properly commit to a long term group there has to be clear shared goals and to receive valuable participation from the group there needs to be a common belief that as individuals we will gain something and that the group will become stronger and more valuable as time progresses. I like the growing the garden analogy as a simple explanation and the true realisation that no matter how accepting the group might be to each other and their contributions there will be a variance in the types of participation from the individuals and that facilitators of PD in particular need to expect, allow and accep...
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Reflective Practises

Musing on this again... "it is important that reflective practice be cultivated and fostered to become effective. It can then be a “powerful tool to examine and transform practice” (Finlay, 2008, p.10) Not the only part of the reading to strike a chord, but does alert me to the fact that I am not reflecting enough or in a way that is even remotely useful to make any meaningful change. If I am going to make an effort to be critically reflective then I need to make it regular, documented and purposeful. I would say that I have certainly thought about my current practice and the things I do in my classroom as a direct result of the Mindlab sessions and in discussing what occurs in my school, my classrooms and experiences of others on the course. Little things like dropping back the amount of instructions I may give the group to allow for more self discovery, allowing for the kids to trial, error and fail as an accepted part of the learning process instead of where I may h...
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Week 17 reflective practice

Well I'm half a week late. What does that tell you about my reflective practice. Can't even organise myself to keep up with the first week out on our own. I guess looking back I need to develop a study strategy for the many weeks ahead or I'm going to fail miserably in the second half of the course which has been so interesting so far. With so much crazy going on at school at the moment you'd think this would be the perfect time to look at myself and what I've been doing with my kids under each one of the 5 reflection headings.  Instead I find myself going home more tired than ever wondering how our school organisation got to be so fragmented at the moment. Tomorrow the entire Yr10 go on camp for 4 days and the entire Year 9 cohort head into the big smoke of Invercargill for sport and activity "Have A Go Day" fun. I have found my mind wandering to whether a complete redesign of my Year9 option taster class activities is needed. 5 weeks of time to convinc...
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