New Term-New Beginning

Term 3 started with our official opening. 150 official guests, weeks of planning, the Minister for Education Bronwyn Pike and a bit of a circus really! We had to change our normal timetable to fit around the minister's schedule and the kids had a weird 'third-of-a-period' where they acted like they were doing something so that when the minister came through she could check out the sort of work we do at our school. Very surreal but an affirmation that we are an 'official' school and that everything we have worked hard for is coming together. Many special guest speakers and much food later, the kids finished off their period one classes and the hard work was done!
I feel like this term things are really coming together. I came down with the 'Man-Flu' (given to me by the special man in my life) in the last week of the holidays and I still have a bit of a mannish voice and 'snotty' nose a week and a half later, and it kind of put me behind schedule. Forced me to relax a bit though I guess!

So far this term (and by this term I mean in the last three days) I feel like I have really taken steps towards organising my time at work more efficiently. There is so much to do in a day and I felt a bit like I was playing catch up during first semester rather than taking the bull by the horns and being proactive. I think given the fact that we are in a new school and starting from scratch it has been easy to let some things fall by the wayside and my house leader duties certainly took a back seat to the more pressing issue of curriculum development. Some things that happened at the end of last term really bought the student management procedures to our attention so over the holidays the house leader team had a meeting where we came up with an abridged policies and procedures document for house leaders and classroom teachers to ensure that everyone knows what their responsibilities are in terms of student management and wellbeing. This way we know we have procedures in place so that kids won't slip through the cracks. We are now tracking, reporting, and pre-empting student issues with more rigour and a tighter process.

What I really love about this school is the way that the responsibility for student health and wellbeing is shared amongst our staff equally. Rather than having a top heavy process or one where two people are responsible for 200 kids, every staff member is a tutor who is responsible for the welfare of 10-13 kids and they are the first port-of-call for any issues. Escalated issues are then referred to the house leaders. I have scheduled time in my week where I do admin activities - following up student work and doing my attendance reports and chasing kids and this makes me feel more organised and also makes me use my time for efficiently. Instead of sitting around looking at an overwhelming pile of work and not knowing where to start, I now have a super detailed timetable and schedule and the time that isn't devoted to house stuff and meetings is devoted to curriculum development. I think this way I will be more efficient.

I have also put in to place some extra elements of the curriculum this term that will make it easier for me to track my students. Due to the fact that we have a one to one computer program, all of our curriculum documents are online and the students can access all their work from home or school. They have a Personal Learning Site of their own and they post all of their class work online. This stops us from having to collect and mark workbooks and we can access the work from home or school to check it. I have also added an extra column to the lesson plans titled "What should I be able to explain by the end of the lesson." The students are given 10mins at the end of each lesson to put up a blog post online that reflects on what they learnt in the lesson and explains the dot points under the "what should I be able to explain" column. I think it is a nice way for the students and staff to measure the student's level of understanding of the themes and ideas of the class. It will help us determine which areas of the content are problem areas for students and how we can cater our extra support sessions in class. In order to systematically track the kids I have timetabled in an extra period as part of our English meeting time where we can sit together and look at our students work and plan and chat about their progress.
I am excited by the curriculum we are creating and I guess it is all a bit of an experiment at this stage because it is something that I have not tried before. It is all about trying to get the balance of the classroom right when the classroom is an open space full of students. The aim is that with the digital resources online, teachers will be more free to run "just in time" workshops with students and extra support sessions in areas of need. That is the next layer I need to embed into the curriculum. Right now I should probably get off the computer and get back to finishing off these digital resources.

Yong Zhao - 21st Century Learning Skills Workshop

One of the other leading teachers and I went to a workshop in the city yesterday run through the innovations and excellence branch with renowned academic and educator Yong Zhao. I think that the point of the day was for this particular branch to work out what their next project would be and we were there to help them workshop ideas. Yong Zhao had some interesting things to say. I have been to plenty of sessions on 21st century learning in the last 5 or so years but some of the things he was saying were a little more left of centre. He was asking us to think about what knowledge we think is of most worth in this age of technology and information and suggesting that now that we are in a globalised world, and distance no longer defines us, what determines how well an adult will succeed in this global market is what you can give them that makes them worth more than the others who would cost less to pay. Companies will hire people from any where in the world if their labour is cheaper than somewhere else so it is not necessarily about qualifications any more but about what students have to offer.
Zhao believes that what matters in this global economy is
- diversity of talents
- creativity - not skills
- entrepreneurship
- passion
He believes we can encourage this in students through personalised learning - and by that I mean not the watered-down version that we have been attempting to do here for the last 10 years, but actual, personalised learning based on developing the students strengths and helping them reach their own personal life and career goals through resources and learning styles. No standardised, national curriculum with tests to check whether students have met pre-determined benchmark levels.
Interesting stuff that is so far removed from the current moves of education towards standardised, centralised testing and reporting.
This certainly raises questions and also provoked some ideas for me. I have been working these holidays on creating electronic "video" documents that work through the steps of language analysis in a way that covers the sorts of information I would normally chalk and talk. I will be providing students with these sorts of resources, and paper based resources and the learning from these documents can occur whenever and whereever they see fit. This means that during class-times I can run work-shops on the things that the students are struggling with and spent time with individual students working on their own particular concerns.
I am hoping that as the year progresses the english curriculum becomes more and more interactive and student focussed and self-paced like I always hoped it could be.
I will leave this post with a couple of questions posed by Yong Zhao:
What knowledge is of most worth? _Herbert Spencer 1859
Which human jobs should be replaced in schools?
What matters?
What strength does our school have that makes us different or unique?
How to we spread innovation?
What is the cost of high test scores? What do you lose?
How often do we trust out students?