Activity 5

Activity 5: Professional connection map...

Professional connections: an evaluation of the impactof these on my practice and professional community.

1.  CGTA and Social Sciences Department...
The Canterbury Geography Teachers Association and the relationships I have with the people involved in this association contribute 100% to my off-line subject PD.  Without this group I would not have access to most of the connections/information needed to effectively support my curriculum delivery.  Acces to research, academic experts and overseas connections have all been made through the CGTA.    As HOD, this learning is fed back into my Social Sciences department; Best Practice Workshops, University Days (links with tertiary providers such as UC and Lincoln University), subject advisory days and subject conferences. 

Geography Teachers' Day at Lincoln University 2015

Farm Day for students at Lincoln University 2015

As part of this group, confidence in the "delivery" of subject content to senior students has increased. University lecturers can be called on to share relevant subject based presentations to senior students, because I now know them!   CGTA is an organisation which has a long history of supporting and advocating for teachers with links to other subject associations e.g. AGTA and the National body (NZ Board of Geography Teachers). A weakness of this connection is that my own personal growth tends to occur only when we are able to meet face to face (up to 10 times per year for CGTA and once a year for BOGT).  The meeting times we do have are very much valued and professionally important, however due to the frequency of their occurences, other forms of PD are in the running to overtake this style of connection.

2.  Social Media (Twitter @smurphlee) and eLEARNING...
The best 'til last!  I would never have believed that seven years ago, when I joined Twitter, how much of an impact "social" media would have on my teaching practice!  I've been teaching since (ahem) 1987, but in all those years I have never connected with people or associations in this way.  The instant, global, nature of feedback and conversation is mindblowing to me.  I remember one day commenting on a post by an educator in USA, when she tweeted that the graphic I had commented on was originally from a teacher in Australia and she copied his twitter address into the conversation.  He tweeted instantly back saying "glad you liked my diagram" - this was all in less than 5 minutes and the conversation went half way around the world - twice!  Eh?  This was during my lunch hour, when I was on gate duty!  Unbelievably awesome!  
I love the connection with such a huge range of professional bodies.   The Ministry of Education, the Irish Summer Reading "Buzz", UN Human Rights, TEDLearn are a small selection of the 100 twitter accounts I follow; they all add another dimension to my practice, whether it's a cool youtube clip, an evolving disaster or a recently released book review, I love being able to share these with my students.  This is the world that my students exist in and becoming aware of the possibilities for application inside the classroom (such as global connection) is very exciting for a Social Science Teacher!  Opening students' eyes to the world outside Aranui has been a passion, so many of the clips shown have been random, with students commenting - "where'd ya get that from, Miss?"  
Educational tweeters such as Sam Gibson, Kevin Honeycutt and Tom Adams have supported my eLearning journey with their 'spot-on' recommendations, video clips and observations about all things technological.  The fact that these educators are telling their stories from the chalk-face is inpirational, authentic and relevant to my context.
The dark side of this media?  The bias in what I see.  Information "self-delivered" or censored?.  Like going through a newspaper with a pair of scissors and a highlighter before I hand it over to my husband to read.  On reflection, most of what I traditionally teach is 'censored' by me to a certain extent, in that I choose the resources or activities that my students are exposed to on a day to day basis - so why should Twitter be any different?
I'm very happy to report that there are sent tweets in my account as well!  My tweets include proud acclamations of success at school along with advertisements for events about to happen of relevance to the twitter followers.  Twitter has become a roadmap of my professional online learning and I'm the cartographer!  

@smurphlee

Activity 4

Activity 4

My professional community

The domain of my community of practice is the hard work my colleagues and I do for our students in order for them to be achieve academically in 2016 and at the same time transition successfully from Aranui High School into their new school, Haeata, in 2017.

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

― Haruki Murakami.

The practice is my colleagues in all four closing schools discussing, learning and implementing to the best of our ability, a taste of 21st century learning pedagogy to ensure that all students, staff and families are not left behind when the the transition is complete.  We have learned that you don't have to have a Modern Learning Environment to implement modern learning practice!

The community is the way that we interact.  Depending on the group of teachers interacting this could be through classroom observations or collaborative teaching opportunities. Collaboration will also occur across the 4 closing schools as students and newly appointed Haeata teachers begin to share similar experiences from the start of term three. 

CURRENT ISSUES IN MY COMMUNITY?  

The biggest issue in the community right now is the transition.  The transition is most visible in the new buildings and facilities that are being built.  Initially vibrations, noise and dust were an issue for staff and students alike, so I organised a group of staff across the school to be the depository for "transition issues" raised by staff members.  Any staff member could submit an issue to the group, who met once a fortnight to discuss action or outcomes. The outcomes were shared across the school to management, BOT and PPTA, creating a climate open communication about the issue.  In the first week the outcome was to shift the contractor's ground vibrations to before 9am and after 3pm - a great solution for our community.  The transition of students is not as visible because they are all still operating on the 4 closing schools, which means that interaction between groups of students have to be "engineered".  Design Thinking opportunities and sports days have been held with mixed groups of students which is to be ongoing until the end of the year.

THE CORE VALUES THAT UNDERPIN MY PROFESSION ARE RESPECT, AKO AND SERVICE.

I would not be a successful practitioner without respect for my students and colleagues. This means that I "walk the talk" when it comes to statements such as "if you haven't got anything nice to say, don't say it!"  Recognising the point at which people are at in their learning journeys; whether that be as a student, a new teacher or a teacher at the end of their career, underpins the relationships I have and the level of care and attention I give to each person in that relationship.  

Ako refers to me as a learner and without my community I could not continue to learn. Commencing post-graduate study has been a real privilege as I was able to meet with and interact with primary school, like-minded, teachers who invigorated and sustained my thirst for learning.  Staff at school are also supporting my learning as I take on a new role in the school, especially those whose roles I am picking up.  Being on the other end of the relief phone for the first time in my professional life has been an education!

Service for the school has been a huge part of my recent life at school and the enduring community supporting this value has been the gardening group.  Slow to start, however an awesome bunch of hardworking people who have just stuck with the kaupapa to create a beautiful school garden which we are now able to enjoy in our ultimate year. The community has evolved itself from a group of students who were shoulder tapped, to include the Service Academy students (they who must be supervised - note to self), students doing community service for a mild misdemeanor and self-selected student "nerds" who like the space and wanted to help enhance it. 

Aranui High School Community Garden  - the workers!

Teachers in the community have likewise evolved into a core group who love to talk gardening and plan big things to come... For Matariki the group has been planning to serve up a feast from the garden and for the creche the group has been asked to show them how to plant seedlings.  

CHANGES OCCURRING IN THE CONTEXT OF MY PROFESSION:  The single biggest change has been a huge shift towards Innovative Learning Practice.  School buildings are physically changing to suit the needs of the new pedagogy and staff and students will follow by the end of this year.  My community of practice are practical and alongside grief associated with our own school closure has been an urgency to prepare for employment in the new school.  The community has been supported in this need, on-site, by service providers such as Core Education who are adept in upskilling teachers in the finer points of google docs, forms, sites, hapara, you tube etc.  Our students, for the last two years have been our 'guinea pigs' with a community of practice focus on new ways of learning whilst keeping sane.  A great example of how this all rolls, was a whole school collaborative learning day led by the English Department, across all subjects and levels.  Students viewed a movie then interacted with students (not known to them prior to the day) on collaborative learning tasks which were creative and designed to be goal specific. Students appreciated the opportunity to work across levels and due to the structure of the day (a 'pop-up' lesson?) some students didn't believe that they had just participated in a formal lesson at all.   My community of practice is awesome because despite all the issues we have had to face they still choose to initiate and engage in risk-taking (moving out of their comfort zone) to address this latest change to practice in the landscape of school closure.  

Activity 3

Activity 3:  My response to Linda Finlay's (2008) article...

"Reflecting on reflective practice" by Linda Finlay

The first key point I can relate to my own teaching practice appears in "Defining Reflective Practice" and that is the process of Schon's (1983) 'Reflection in action' (as cited in Finlay, 2008, p. 3). . Despite the criticism of Schon that follows i.e. that it is not possible to distance oneself enough from live situations to be able to reflect on practice, my own experience fully confirms that this is indeed what occurs in almost every lesson that I teach.  

As a teacher of students with a wide range of abilities and/or high behavioural needs, I have an expectation that activities, approaches or student engagement may need to be amended and decisions about what should be happening in the classroom have to be made on the job.  Colloqually known as "tweaking" the lesson, students understand that while the learning outcome(s) of lessons remain the same, the path to those outcomes for each student may be slightly varied.  A good example of this may be deciding that an instructional video with headphones and a "back" button may be better for certain students, than a teacher giving a set of instructions once, following their participation in a physically demanding lunch hour.  

The second key point I can relate to my own HOD practice appears in the section "Critiquing Reflective Practice" under the heading "Pedagogic Concerns".  As a Head of Department I was fully aware that a few in my department were, and remain antagonistic towards reflection and saw it as something that was only done to fulfill appraisal.  This usually meant that such reflections were minimalist and just enough writing to get "passed". One way that I have tried to balance this perception has been teacher conferencing and modelling as suggested in Finlay's article; discussing incidents as a group to promote more general reflection and my staff appreciated the incidents being raised by me, making the whole process less personal.  I have definitely been aware of the variance of reflection approaches by teachers at different stages of their careers i.e. the novice relying on more mechanical forms of reflection and the "expert" more reliant on the notion of Schon's (1983) 'professional artistry' (as cited in Finlay, 2008, p. 3).

Teaching as Inquiry Model

With Teaching as Inquiry having been the "flavour of the month" at our school for the last three years, the resulting reflections on practice have generally been either extremely useful (if teachers can share their reflections in a way that is not wholly tied to appraisal) or just as mechanical.
The first year we used the model it was fully supported by UC Plus advisors and it was run across three departments as a trial.  The end of year powerpoint presentations of each teacher's reflections were both informative and critical. At the start of the following year the whole school ditched our previous "appraisal booklet" on the basis of the success and effectiveness of the Inquiry Model.  During the second year the context and personnel changed.  There was less support from UC Plus, however current staff members stepped up to fill the "mentor" role to enable careful and consistent modelling of the reflective process.  I believe the second year was just as effective, if not more so than the first as it was a whole school roll out of the process.  Teacher reflections were celebrated in "public" presentations and these gave other teachers the opportunity to engage in reflective discussions.
At the end of our third cycle of using the Teaching as Inquiry model for appraisal(at the end of Term 1 2016), teachers will continue to reflect on their practice in their own ways until Aranui High School closes. This final cycle has highlighted areas for improvement including the need to keep the reflective conversations going throughout the cycle, rather than leaving them to the "presentation" at the end.  Time to model reflective practise by mentor teachers must be increased, especially for novice teachers.  This will help to reduce the possibility of emotional harm, suggested in Finlay's (2008) article, that comes with challenging assumptions when we truly reflect (p. 11).  
My own experience has been that the more teachers talk about teaching with other teachers, the more teachers realise that every situation is not new and there will be an "expert", usually on staff who has been there before, learned from it and can offer advice.  My mantra to teachers is always, "it's not the first time," and taking the time to reflect, then act on this can only serve to strengthen teachers' practice and ultimately, the teaching profession.

References:
Finlay, L., (2008). Reflecting on 'Reflective Practice'. (Article, Practice-based Professional Learning Centre, The Open University).

Ministry of Education. (n.d.). Teaching as Inquiry Model. Retrieved from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-stories/Case-studies/Teachers-as-learners-Inquiry/Teaching-as-inquiry

Activity 2

Activity 2:  Metacognitive reflection on learning and practice

Postgraduate Certificate of Applied Practice (Digital and Collaborative Learning)

Two Key Competencies - Critical Discussion on...

• Thinking
• Managing Self

The development of my key competency of "Thinking"

The New Zealand Curriculum includes the following statements about thinking:  "Thinking is about using creative, critical, and metacognitive processes to make sense of information, experiences, and ideas. These processes can be applied to purposes such as developing understanding, making decisions, shaping actions, or constructing knowledge. Intellectual curiosity is at the heart of this competency.

Students who are competent thinkers and problem-solvers actively seek, use, and create knowledge. They reflect on their own learning, draw on personal knowledge and intuitions, ask questions, and challenge the basis of assumptions and perceptions".

When the Mind Lab course began in July, did I know what I was getting myself into?  I had been to a GAFE conference in April the previous year, dabbled with chromebooks for the first half of 2015, my own children even attended a school with self-directed learning as part of it's special character; however prior to the Mind Lab course, deep thinking about what this all meant, where it was all coming from and where it was all going had simply passed me by.  
It is difficult to put thinking time aside when full-time work and family fill every waking hour.   Once committed to the weekly course at Mind Lab HQ in a downtown warehouse and then squirrelled away at home in my upstairs "loft", the opportunity to develop deeper understanding and construct knowledge snowballed.  Every week at Mind Lab was a chance to reflect on new information, apply this to my practise and challenge my own underlying beliefs about teaching practice.  Some weeks were crazy!  Gaming was an eye-opener!  Robotics took me back to motherhood moments with Lego and Duplo, which was awesome!
This whole learning process eventually revealed itself as the mechanism for unpacking my own teaching practice and "philosophy" and reattaching the elements of this to current research in 21st century learning. 
From robotics to growth mindset and leadership theories, the range and amount of educational research introduced and investigated was utterly thought provoking and brain bending.  It challenged and celebrated my own teaching and consistently confirmed the importance of pedagogy in the classroom.  My thinking about learning evolved and cemented itself throughout the ML course into the "anywhere, any time, any how" camp. The capacity for technology to expand the boundaries of learning seems unlimited.

The development of my key competency of "Managing self"

The New Zealand Curriculum includes the following statements about "Managing Self": "This competency is associated with self-motivation, a “can-do” attitude, and with students seeing themselves as capable learners. It is integral to self-assessment.

Students who manage themselves are enterprising, resourceful, reliable, and resilient. They establish personal goals, make plans, manage projects, and set high standards. They have strategies for meeting challenges. They know when to lead, when to follow, and when and how to act independently."

Could I do it?  Could I complete the course once started?  Given the special circumstances at Aranui High School and my own tenuous employment status, there seemed to be many reasons not to take on further study and even more not to complete the course.  Why would I?  Professionalism, inquisitiveness and pure love of teaching actually kicked in at this point, and the road to managing my time began.
Since the assessment goals for the course were set in concrete and came regularly throughout the duration of the course the only hurdle I had to overcome was "the cycle of procrastination" (Burka & Yuen, 2007, pg.23).  It is pure irony to me that I teach students to hand work in on time, yet getting projects completed for the Mindlab course has been a struggle.  There was a mismatch between looking forward to all the new ideas about technology we were exposed to each week in the MindLab and the relentless beat of the assessment "drum".  It was a reality check for me but a great way to walk in the shoes of my students!

Key changes in my own practise have been...

Thinking - Research. reasearch, research!  I see huge benefits to my teaching practice in keeping up with research.  The opportunity to gather together ideas which either conflict or compliment my practice (or is somewhere in between) has definitely had an impact on my beliefs and understanding about teaching.  So many experts, with so many awesome studies completed in so many locations around the world and with totally agreeable or understandable conclusions. Amazing!  I am now far more open to research than I ever was and far more likely investigate to find out what others have written or completed research on a specific topic.

Managing self - Yes, well, this is a work in progress.  As I write this I am three weeks over the original due date of APC1 and finally getting my head into a blog.  But actually really enjoying it.  Despite this latest glitch, I have decreased the level of procrastination in my life and I have learned from mistakes made.  I have made it to this point though, which has been great and being proud of these efforts makes me think I can take on even bigger projects in the future.

References:
Ministry of Education (n.d.) New Zealand Curriculum Online.  Retrieved from
     http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum
Burka, J. B., & Yuen, L.M. (2007). Procrastination:  How you do it. What to do about it            now.  Boston, U.S.A: Da Capro Press.