I was really proud of my writing lesson today! I hope I made lots of connections with "What you do, when you review?" I modeled scrupulously what I would do to re-craft one paragraph. It was amazing when we re-read the edited paragraph and I asked "What's the overall feeling of this paragraph?" I heard Baily utter to someone next to him "He's so cute..." It was such the perfect 'teachable moment' about how sentences within paragraphs all work together to create a mental image about the author's idea. So we added "He is so cute" to end off the paragraph.
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The following is a half-way survey on my progress towards meeting our charter goals for the school. Unfortuneately, it was made with Flash and it no longer comes up...
I feel pretty proud that I am on track at meeting these goals. Does it make me a better teacher? I don't know some days... I think about about when I first started teaching. You come out of Uni thinking "Yeah, I can do this". However, teaching and learning only takes up a certain amount of an educators time; behaviour management, assessment, portfolios, eportfolios, elearning, productions, school assemblies, school discos, staff meetings, team meetings... The list goes on and on. So you just get swept away in the river of school. 3 years later, I Have a bit more experience at RSS, it's kind of like learning to kayak. To a novice, the velocity of the current sends you down the river of school, full of rapids and turbulent whitewater, it thrusts you around like a rag doll. But as a practitioner, you learn to use your paddle correctly and adjust with the current; you learn to recognise the lines and angles of the river and change your stroke. You predict what is coming around the corner so you can position your body, paddle and mind to slide through with ease. Criteria 4:
Reflective Question: How do I continue to advance my professional learning as a teacher? I think because I missed out on so much learning time during high school, I am trying to catch up! I find learning very rewarding. Deep down, I am a huge geek. I love the process of identifying something I need to get better at, setting myself a goal and then working hard to achieve it. I love to learn with others, so I find the JK sessions rewarding. The teachers at our school are amazing and I learn so much form them. And, I'm not just saying that; I am really challenged by my colleagues. Also, I enjoy reflecting on my learning publicly through a blog. I like to tie it all together with a metaphor , a picture or just a rant. I go back my reflections and reflect on my old reflections. It's cool to watch my growth. I am looking forward to attending ULEARN13 because I feel with the increase of ipads in our school that there is going to be ipad classrooms in the near future. I want to be prepared for this. Criteria 11: Reflective Question : How do I gather and use assessment information in ways that advance the learning of my akonga? It all depends on what subject I suppose. Reading: I use 3 main methods of assessment - STAR and PAT tests, PROBE assessments and daily anecdotes of group instructional reading. It is sometimes hard to complete PROBE tests because sometimes they take up to 25 minutes to complete - that's a long time if your've got 34 kids! So I use my inclinations of how well kids are getting on in my instructional groups to see who I should PROBE. (Terrible word really!) So if a child is finding the text too easy or too hard within a level I will test them to see if I was right? If so, I can adjust them into a different group. Actually, this is the same with Maths/Numeracy. I use the following assessment data: PAT, Studyladder, GLOSS, IKAN, and daily anecdotes of group instruction of maths. Writing is different. I am am still developing good assessment techniques within this strand. Now we have the RSS writing matrix, I am finding my feet. It takes a long time to assess a child in writing, though! You need to look at probably about 20 plus criteria across a few writing samples times 34 kids! It would be great if there was an outside assessment like we have for reading and maths to do some filtering. |
Teacher Blog ArchiveKia Ora, this is my teacher blog during 2008 and 2019. Archives
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