New Year, New Role

 It was decided that because I have:

1 BT year 2

1 3rd Year Teacher

1 Teacher returning to New Zealand and

1 experienced Teacher new to New Zealand,

I will be walking for the first part of the year or until a new class needs to be opened. 

This first week my focus has been on welcoming the new teachers and assisting them with setting up their classrooms and the importance of building a good relationship with their students and wider school community. 

My second focus was the importance recognising our learners culture and the important role of the Treaty of Waitangi and why and how it must be used and adhered to in a classroom environment.

To help them become acquainted with life at Panmure Bridge I gave each new teacher  a welcome to the junior school document. LINK 

I also decided to keep a virtual diary to show how I spend my time during theses days. LINK

My second focus was getting them acquainted with Assessment protocols and procedures. I explained how all these would be accessible on our team minutes for them to see at anytime. LINK

Tapasa

Tapasa is a cultural competency framework for teachers of pacific children. Some important aspects that I have learnt through this PD run by Jeremy:

The Va - the sacred connection between people. Love, Service, family and spirituality.

Jeremy suggested we use this language with parents: The Va : I want to establish the va with you OR the purpose of this meeting is to establish the va. In Samoan can you also say Tauhi va.

Tapasa is all about:

* Cultural confidence

* Connections

* Culture

* Consistency

* Collaboration / collabor action.

My goal is to use this language more with Pacific Island families. 

 

DFI session 6

Todays session was facilitated by Dorothy and focussed on Enabling Access and being Connected.

Connected: To be digitally connected means we need to have open and visible teaching and learning. While we love connecting with others in the cluster as well as other teachers face to face, this is not always possible. Being from a community who shares ideas and knowledge frequently, time constariants can be overcome when we use the affordances of technology. We are able to use our sites and drive to share ideas and our teaching with learners, parents and colleagues.
To successfully implement our kaupapa we must be visible.

Today I learnt about Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu. This simply means write to me, write to others. I want to explore this more in following weeks as my learners are growing in confidence in sharing their learning on their blogs. How amazing would it be for our learners to connect with other learners across the country.

Enabling Access:
Leading on from being connected, we had the opportunity to explore various sites within cluster. It was interesting to see the difference and to note how we could improve on our own sites. Dorothy took this a step further by having us share our site and provide feedback for others. It was a valuable experience as we were able to see some simple errors such as broken links, work not visible or how we have far to much information on our pages.
While I love my site and have found that it is easy for New Entrants to navigate, there were some issues with broken links. We then had the time to fix, change or include information on our sites that we deemed important or had missed doing before.

This is the landing/ home page of my site.

Having my colleagues give feedback helped me realise how I can improve on my slide decks as well as the importance of having the lens of a parent and what a parent might like to see on our class sites.
For the learners I believe my sight is appealing and allows me to respond to the diverse needs, urges and experiences I have within my class thus engaging all learners.

Learning/ AHA moments
* Remember that learners, parents and colleagues view the site.

Ramblings / Rumblings
* How can I make my set more multimodal?
* When making a site and adding to slide decks I should keep these in mind:

Teacher as Inquirer

My Inquiry Focus for this year is based on the School Entry Assessment Data. Below I have analysed the data and have noticed the lack of skills that will be required to achieve and make shift in learning across all curriculum areas. It is evident that there is a lack of basic alphabet, word and phonemic knowledge.

I have thus decided to use this information to help form my inquiry question:

If explicit strategies are explored and taught for phonics and oral language, will accelerated shift occur in other learning areas?

My initial thoughts are that if I use phonics and alphabet knowledge as a basis, could I get learners to respond to text more?

How can I transfer the social skills learnt through learning through play into thinking and sharing when explicitly teaching?

How can I interweave the gifting of language that occurs at Flying Fives more into phonics, reading and writing? 

Looking at these questions they seem more like seperate inquiry questions. I am willing and eager to track the progress of my changed practice and how they affect and help learners achieve accelerated learning. 

Alignment with the Manaiakalani Achievement Challenge:  

I am also interested in seeing if the focus on oral language helps learners share their thinking and ideas in Writing and Maths.