Week 32:      Changes in my Practice

It’s hard to believe I’m at the end and ready to cross the finish line of the roller coaster journey with mindlab.  I remember being asked by one of the Nga Pu Manuwa e Waru facilitators what I thought of the Mindlab course and after some thought I answered by saying I have a lot more empathy for my struggling learners and I find myself taking the time to show them how much learning they have done and celebrate their successes no matter how small.  The technology was a challenge for me along with my mindset.  Once I changed my mindset I was able to accept the challenges and ride the waves so to speak. 

Criterion 4: Ongoing professional learning and development of personal practice.

Practising Teacher criteria: Demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of professional personal practice.  

Throughout my career professional development has been an integral part of my teaching and our school staff recently completed the “Incredible Years for Teachers” course.  It was valuable for our whole staff to complete this course together and I believe I have grown in my teaching practice because of this.

Mindlab challenged my thinking and my teaching practice and for that I’m grateful.  With the support of my team leader and teaching partner in our open plan school, I have been able to share my learning and experiment with innovative teaching practices.  Like my learning I have found making changes in my teaching or facilitating has been challenging but I have persevered and now the students are successfully learning through teacher- learner, learner - teacher situations (tuakana, teina) and working positively in groups offering their thoughts, opinions and prior knowledge freely.  It has been a huge learning curve for me to relinquish total responsibility for students learning and provide situations where they are learning from each other and with each other.  It’s been so refreshing to make these changes and see them working successfully.  I will definitely continue to discuss and make changes to support the learning and achievement of the students in our classes in the future.

Criterion 7: Promote a collaborative inclusive and supportive learning environment.

This year began with a new teacher opposite me in the open plan teaching space.  From the beginning of term one, we decided to cross group our students for reading and maths.  We both work collaboratively to create a safe and supportive environment for our students to learn in. Our open plan area lends itself to team teaching and this has been very successful throughout the year.  The work load is halved because we work collaboratively sharing ideas and checking new innovations are working to raise achievement and encourage successful learning situations for all students.  Challenging behaviour is also dealt with collaboratively and situations are dealt with effectively with both teachers being supportive of each other. Our students see a positive working relationship between us and this adds to the safe supported learning environment.   Our goal for next year is to include blended learning sites, class blogs, and for me the introduction to social media teachers sites.

I wish to thank Mindlab for the opportunity to work alongside like-minded colleagues and for the positive support provided throughout the course.  If I wasn’t before I’m proud to say I am now a life-long learner who is determined to research and make changes to support our 21^st century learners and lead others to do the same.

References

http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Professional-learning/Practising-Teacher-Criteria-and-e-learning