Where to next?

31st May 2016 - Mindlab Graduation Celebration

Winter will be here tomorrow so this is a good checkpoint to stop and reflect. I'm celebrating the fact that I'm not studying at the moment and that I've thus had more time with my class and to concentrate on the kids' learning.  I'm really enjoying the work I'm doing with my focus group kids at the moment, particularly in maths, as the kids are responding so well.

It was exciting to finish MindLab, having developed a different perspective, and be moving into yet another phase of our great profession.  Learning and teaching is a challenging business to be in and I'm always growing as a result.  Learning alongside some great teachers over the past year has given me different experiences and I feel grateful for all my learning.

Looking back on times like these I wonder where I'd like to head next.

I particularly enjoyed studying and stretching myself into new learning territory.  I'm still interested in taking on a TeachNZ study award to try to go further with my learning.  I'm really interested in Leadership and in Change Initiatives in particular.  I had some interesting conversations with my ex-Principal, Nik House last week, when I visited him, and would love to continue to learn from him and his experiences.  He had a lot of important information to share and I would be interested in how I could best utilise this knowledge over the course of our change toward modern learning environments at GisInt in the future.  Collaborative teaching could be a great move for many of us.... AND will need significant scaffolding, support and inquiry learning processes to be in place in order for us to be successful.

He mentioned Michael Fullan, who writes on change leadership, so that will be an interesting next step.

Flexible Learning Spaces and Learning Design

I've been continuing to look at Learner Agency as I'm evolving throughout this year. It's exciting being able to work with a great group of enthusiastic learners this year but I'm still struggling to nail down the "how" of undertaking the Learner Agency learning in our environment and to be honest I'm struggling particularly this how to be progressive when we are continually pulled back and reigned in by all the necessary deliberate acts of teaching and assessment that comes with a classroom.  At least unpacking our assessments (where possible) help to increase the agency in the classroom.

I've just been watching some amazing Core education Enabling e-Learning clips that have got me thinking and enthusiastic again, though still not sure if the "how" of Innovative Learning Environments is made explicit.

There's potential for us to move towards ILE's next year and this will be an interesting challenge for many of us.  I wonder what kind of learning we might need to do in order to be ready to move towards this with confidence.  I have the benefit of working closely with two of our ILE teachers and I know for them, there have been countless facets that have challenged them beyond what they thought the roles would bring.  Not insurmountable challenges, but challenges just the same.  There is also a lot of groundwork necessary in terms of the leadership throughout these change initiatives in order to teachers engaging in this huge Inquiry learning process to be adequately supported to do what Inquiry Learning requires by design - to fail.  We must feel safe to fail and to fail miserably.  To be trusted with the responsibility of identifying our most pressing need and the necessary future progressions in this process and to be able to fall over, reflect, stand up, re-plan, practice, trial and fail again.  Our success comes in what we learn.  It is not success to check all the boxes of a traditional classroom as that is not the future model in an ILE.  The measure of success in these situations, I feel, is to begin to develop learners who are conscious of their role in the learning, developing the capacity to monitor and manage their own learning and to fail in the process so as to learn.  For if we are not letting out teachers fail and model failure and the resilience to continue, how are they able to demonstrate this, practice and perfect it with their learners?