Professional Goals for the Year

It's that time of year again where I think about the direction I want to take as a professional, where I look at areas to develop what I want to focus on.

Last year my goals were to "Develop a deeper understanding of the IB Primary Years Program" and "Use digital technologies to explore the notion of 'international mindedness'". I reflected on this recently and hope to continue with the educational technologies piece this year.

We are a month into the new academic year here at TKS, over the summer break (well winter break as my family and I headed back to NZ) I pondered on the possibilities. Here are my goals for the 2014-2015 academic year.

Professional Goal Number One:

* Explore and engage in research based literacy practices.

Rationale: In my years of experience I have seen many teachers (including myself) default to their own experiences of education or their own 'it looks like good practice' practices in teaching. I want to know what the research says when it comes to literacy education and I want be abreast of the latest research.

Possible Actions

* I've enrolled in a Post Graduate Diploma of Literacy Education with Massey University. I'm excited about studying and am looking forward to the papers on offer (Foundations of Literacy Education, Teaching Writing in the Classroom and The Nature, Prevention and Remediation of Literacy Learning Difficulties).

* Read more texts around Literacy Education (or just read more texts in general).

Professional Goal Number Two:

* Support my K2 team with educational technologies

Rationale: We are a school attached to a Science and Technology University. In all my years as an ICT Facilitator I dreamed of the resources we currently have. I am looking forward to exploring ways that these can be used in meaningful ways in my classroom and beyond.

Possible Actions

* Naketa's Tech Times (dedicate time once a week for Tech Times), drop in session, a just in time learning model.

* Role model and share ICT being used to enhance learning.

* Work with other teachers in K2 then encourage these teachers to support others (ripple effect of learning).

Post-It Plus in the Early Years.

I've been on Twitter again, I love this place...I don't visit as often as I like but I always, always come away with a gem. Here is this week's gem

Post-it Plus

With this free app installed on your iPad you can snap a picture of a collection of physical sticky notes and have them quickly digitized. Once your notes are digitized you can re-arrange them, share them with collaborators, or send them to another application like Dropbox. If you have multiple sets of notes you can combine the best notes into one board through the Post-it Plus iPad app.

If you have read my post with my Reflection on Assessment in the Early Years workshop  you will have seen that I use post-its a lot for capturing children's stories. You can capture the Post-its in digital form and have these converted into an excel sheet. How cool is that?

Here's what I tried today, I captured the Post-It's using Post-it Plus, then I exported it to an excel using Dropbox - all of my notes are now in a digital format...

Looking forward to seeing how this can be used further in the classroom.

I am NOT an advocate for technology...

I am NOT an advocate for technology! I've done the research, I've read the case studies and opinion pieces. I am not an advocate for technology. I AM AN ADVOCATE FOR LEARNING...

It's the new academic year at TKS and I have taken it upon myself to support my team with technology. I have been an avid technology user in my personal life for years, an ICT facilitator in a previous job, a teacher who embraces technology in the classroom... but I am not a technology advocate.

I've had my fair share of giving the pro-technology speeches:

* Digital natives vs. Digital Immigrants
* Technology is the cultural tool of today - do not deny the cultural tools of our 21st century learners.
* Technology can transform learning
* Access to information, anytime, anywhere
* Children can self-regulate their learning.
* You can make learning visible for students. parents and families.

I believe all of this...but I am not a technology advocate.

Before coming to TKS I worked in a centre that were leading the way with Nature Kindergartens in NZ. The Director sent several teachers to Forest Schools in England to become certified Forest School educators. Several of my nieces and nephews still attend this early childhood centre, and the photo below shows the types of experiences my niece is engaged in during a typical week. I've read the research and the case studies, nature is vital for physical well-being, growth and creativity. I've given the pro-nature speeches and I believe and value everything about Nature Kindergarten.

I am not a technology advocate - I AM AN ADVOCATE FOR LEARNING!

I know technology can and will make a difference to learning. While I am a technology user I am not a fan of using technology for the sake of using technology. 

*I want to see technology being used to enhance learning, not to entertain children. I want to see technology transform learning and offer experiences that no other tool can offer, here are some examples of how technology is being used in my classroom to transform learning:

* Skype - Last year we Skyped classrooms from all over the world, we peeked inside classrooms and houses in NZ, Korea, Switzerland, Australia, Saudi Arabia, China, USA.

* I used QR codes and Aurasma to bring wall displays to life.

* We used Twitter to learn about a school in Calgary, Canada - they spoke French (Kindergarten around the world project).

* We created our very own Frozen movie (green screen and all)- children designed costumes and performances.

* QR codes are bringing learning stories to life.

* Children are taking their own photos and blogging straight from iPads

I am not an advocate for technology, I am an advocate for learning...in fact you'll see me with a pen and paper, in the mud kitchen or playing soccer most days of the week.

Documentation - Transforming our Perspective

Following on from my post yesterday here is a video entitled "Documentation: Transforming our Perspective".

Documentation: Transforming Our Perspective from Melissa Rivard on Vimeo.

My takeaways from this video are:

* Share, review, exhibit documentation.
* It's always a work in progress
* Documentation is complex.
* Good documentation should modify your image of the child.
* Documentation should be co-created with families.
* Documentation is not just important at the end of the process, rather during the process.
* Challenge the theory and reconceptualise practice.
* Compare ideas and exchange perspectives.

IB PYP - Reflection on Assessment in the Early Years workshop.

TKS is an IB School. The program we deliver is the Primary Years Program. This year I was determined to get my head around the IB PYP curriculum and become more familiar with the jargon, systems, assessments and ways of doing. I completed three workshops this year and as always had a few takeaways that I could take back to my classroom. I must say though, I feel absolutely privileged to have started my teaching career and study in NZ. We are pretty awesome when it comes to Education on a Global scale. I have found, due to the strong grounding in Te Whariki and the easy access to high quality PD I am confident when it comes to transferring these skills internationally.

The first workshop I participated in online was the "Assessment in the Early Years". This was interesting and vital for me to get an idea of the framework of PYP, get my head around the jargon and become familiar with the systems, planning and assessment.

Here are my takeaways:

* Use video and audio to help with assessments.

* Check in with Sample Planners like the exemplar here to give you ideas for bubble planner, especially if you are new to PYP.

* What is the purpose of assessment? - get this right as a school/class/teacher so there is a clear goal in mind.

* Unpack what is useful to know, in this case I was inspired to assess/document children displaying the Learner Profile and the PYP attitudes.
* Listen to children/be fully present.
* I introduced the "Notice, Recognise, Respond" concept to the group, a strategy that I learned in NZ from workshops on learning stories. Use stickies to document what you 'notice' about children's learning, recognise the threads of interest and learning and respond to these.
* Each week my teaching team (Teaching assistant and Student teacher) would sit and reflect on every child in our classroom, we would think about how they were for the week, things that we noticed or needed to work on. We would then use this information to plan for the coming weeks.

I got some very positive feedback from participants, this one though was very affirming:

15 Books that make you a better teacher...

Perhaps the most common factor for all "amazing" teachers is that they never, ever stop learning. Great teachers are addicted to learning, they love learning new things and sharpening their craft.

I recently stumbled on Antwuan Sargent's list "15 Books that make you a better teacher...". There are a couple that I have read before but so many I haven't. I'm a teacher addicted to learning so am looking forward to getting my head into these over the summer vacation. Keep an eye out for reviews. Are there books you know of that are not in this list?

Children reflecting on their learning...

Early in the year I decided to create a book that documented learning for children in my classroom. Each week we would print photos of learning experiences that we participated in and glue them in to our book. I would write a little piece about what we were doing or ask children to describe what they were doing in the pictures. As the year went on I encouraged children to take leadership of this process - choosing the pictures, pasting and in some cases the writing. At the end of each week I would ask the students "What their favorite learning was?" or "What did you enjoy learning this week?" With over half of my class learning the English Language these were generally rephrased in a variety of ways.

There have been times at the end of the week where time was not on our side, so I simply asked them the following week and used images to provoke their thinking. I would usually sit with students when they were eating their snack so the questioning felt more like a conversation rather than an inquisition.

Things I learned from this process:

* What you think is significant learning may not be significant for your learners. Like visiting an awesome Visualisation Lab where you flew over the local mosque and looked at archaeological sites in Egypt in 3D - we actually did this!). That same week we introduced new baby dolls into the role play area. And guess which topped the list of reflections - not the Visualisation Lab! 

* Reflecting on your week of learning can be time consuming but it is so rewarding. The mismatch in our understanding of what children identified as learning and what was actually happening for them really did impact on our planning and our own reflections as teachers. It didn't deter us from what we thought would be a good experience for them e.g. trip to the Garden Centre or the local mosque but really made us stop and listen to the threads of learning that students picked up.

* "We're all growed up now" - In the last week of school I sat with students and flicked through the pages of our reflection journal - we noticed that children had left and joined our classroom, we noticed teachers had also left and joined our classroom (including student teachers), we noticed our different hairstyles and that we were all "growed up now".

* The reflection journal is also a "record of your teaching".  I flicked through the pages of this book so many times through the year and asked myself questions like "What things have I offered children this week?" "Are there gaps in the curriculum? e.g. Science", "what was my purpose or intention behind this experience?", "What did I notice?" and "Was there genuine and authentic joy?" 

I'm keen to try this again next year and want to take the questioning a bit deeper - perhaps adding questions like "How do you know you learned this?". I also realised that by asking children at the end of the week I was opening myself up for children to recall what had happened that day - and while I know PE was a favourite subject for most of my students, the fact that they also had this on a Thursday (the last day of our working week here) meant that this subject popped up time and time again in their 'favourite learning'.

Do you have any ideas on how I can improve this process for next year's class? I would love to hear your thoughts.