PaCT Tool PD - Cath Runga

Today we had an introduction to the PaCT. I can see this becoming a really useful tool for confirming and checking where we place students in regards to achievement in reading, writing and maths. The challenge for me (and probably others) is ensuring I "gather" enough evidence to prove that my judgements are correct. The PaCT illustrations give some great examples of what that evidence might look like. I need to ensure I am recording enough anecdotal notes about what kids are doing in class, taking photos of work and asking them to do more in the way of responses to books in their books for for the walls. Today's session was on reading and I think this is an area that I definitely need to improve on in regards to the way I track progress throughout the year. We have writing goals in the kids books (and writing is easy to "see" what they are doing) and we have the same in maths. I also need to ensure I am tracking how kids participate in other curriculum areas better.

- Literacy Learning progressions describes the skills the reader is doing to show what is in the progression framework.
- Still relevant and important document.
- Use PaCT illustrations for ideas of types of learning experiences we can be doing to see what students can do.

14/11/17

This term has been fairly chaotic. Data being due Week 4 meant that we have pretty much spent half the term testing. I feel that our kids really haven't had much "teaching" this term and can't see it getting a lot better as end of year things will begin to creep in very soon.

Athletics was great and our kids did really well. All of them participated enthusiastically.

Our new students have slotted in pretty well and splitting our class for literacy times seems to be working well. We are able to cater better to their individual needs this way and it cuts down the noise level by having them split too. They also get more teacher time this way.

I'm really happy with the way my literacy programme is working with my students. Particularly the addition of a focus on sight words and creating little books with the students seems to have been really successful.

PE resources

While looking at resources for teaching athletic skills I found heaps on the Sport NZ website.

http://www.sportnz.org.nz/managing-sport/search-for-a-resource/guides/kiwidex-manual
http://www.sportnz.org.nz/managing-sport/search-for-a-resource/tools-and-resources/teaching-resources
http://www.sportnz.org.nz/managing-sport/search-for-a-resource/guides/fundamental-movement-skills

Writing PLD - Cath Runga, 13th Oct

Peer Sharing

Evelyn and Debbie - Supporting students whom we have identified as having a specific writing challenge using digital technologies

Using voice typing on google docs

http://www.telescopictext.com/  - extends stories


Peggy and Emma
Pick a path stories using google slides

Using links between slides for each choice. e.g. Should he go to the park or the pools?  The reader then chooses which one to follow. Writer tends to diverge on each slide. Would take quite a bit of work to figure out how to get it back to the same ending, or join up in a few places.


Our presentation
We shared with the group our writing about bird feeder. We talked about the language experience was really important and that the sequencing and picture plans were so important in being able to say and write all the steps.
We had some good discussion about how the picture plans are important. Cath talked about some research from Australia that showed that more focus on the drawing in the first 6 months was important. Adding detail into the pictures and only putting in what they are going to write about. e.g if they're not writing about the sun don't put it in the picture.


Pam - Oral Language

Oral language achievement expectations - from Learning through talk
At school entry
- Use pronouns accurately but may have difficulty in tracking pronouns in extended talk e.e. when retelling a story
- Can retell a story they have heard read aloud, using the pictures to help them
- Use grammatically correct sentences to talk about things happening now, in the past, and in the future
End of Year 1
- Can negotiate across a range of contexts, for example, can co-construct rules for a playground game or ask for permission to borrow an item
- Can remember and follow instructions asking for more than three actions
- Enjoys discovering new words and attempts to include these in their speech and writing
End of Year 3
- Can summarise the main points of a discussion
- Appreciates humour and wordplay and may tell jokes
End of Year 4
- Is confident in giving and receiving peer feedback
- Uses oral language structures and text features for impact, for example, humour, expression, tone and gesture
- Shows awareness of audience and purpose through choice of content, language and delivery
- Draws on understanding of morphology when speaking or writing e.g. uses prefixes or suffices to generate new forms of familiar words
End of Year 8
- Expresses disagreement in appropriate ways
- Is confident and competent in asking questions with familiar or unfamiliar people

Books to look at
Learning through talk
Much more than words  - Downloaded from MOE site

Essential oral language toolkit

"Start with a true story and then tell lies"
"Girls draw nouns and boys with draw verbs"

Cath
Teaching reading, writing and maths within inquiry, science, art etc - contexts.

http://leading-learning.blogspot.co.nz/

Diagram of a PCT programme model

Diagram of a PCT programme model

Phases of a 1st year teacher

This was an interesting article that I read as part of my Online Mentoring PD. It talks about the phases that teachers go through in their first year of teaching. Although it is American, it still translates pretty well into what I think most teachers on fact cycle through each year.

Link to Article

Phonological Awareness

Why I want to have a much bigger focus on phonological awareness....

What if... we could prevent dyslexia? - Gail Gillon lecture

http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/media/documents/education-and-health/gail-gillon---phonological-awareness-resources/literature/Gillon-2000.pdf


http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/media/documents/education-and-health/gail-gillon---phonological-awareness-resources/literature/Carson-Gillon-and-Boustead.pdf

28/9/17

This term has flown by. We have had some hard behaviours to deal with and I have had a lot of extra work and stress from outside work or additional learning that I have been doing. I'm glad that I am now experienced enough to go with the flow and not stress about having to change tact. I can prioritise what I need to do and ensure that my students are still getting the attention they need.

The term has disappeared and it's easy to feel like we haven't moved students on enough. But looking at their results it seems that we are making some good progress for most of them. Our new ones need some more targeted learning around the initial skills for literacy and numeracy and I am planning ways to ensure this happens next term.

Looking ahead to next term we have some challenges to work through. We have a new student arriving who is high behaviour needs and will have full time teacher aide support. This is going to mean we need to look very carefully how to structure our day, room and lessons.

Elklan debrief

This term I've had the great opportunity to attend the Elklan Language Builders course. Tonight was the last session and I have taken a lot away from it. I've found that most of it was stuff I already knew was important but it has been reiterated with really practical ideas to implement it. I've got new strategies to try to develop language at all levels. I've got some baselines for what students should be doing with their language at different ages and therefore when you should be looking at an intervention.

The biggest thing that has been reiterated is just how important these base skills are before students can be expected to read and write successfully. As a consequence of this I'd really like to complete some teacher inquiry around this area. I plan to start with a group next term where I have a much larger focus on learning phonological awareness, building oral language, reading to, handwriting, story telling/sequencing, letter-sound knowledge rather than actual reading and writing texts.
I am thinking of creating shared stories about experiences that they've had or repeated reading of simple books for them to take home.

Next year I would like to start my class off with only phonological, oral language, reading to, handwriting, storytelling/sequencing and letter-sound knowledge with no readers or written text for possibly the first term. I think it will be extremely interesting to see how these students track compared to this year's cohort after 1 year at school.
Challenges I think I will face in convincing parents that it's ok for their students not to be bringing home readers every day. Also our term 1 data would look poor as students will not be achieving running records or writing sample results. I also wonder at what point to I move children on. If they have very good phonological awareness and oral language do I put them into more formal reading and writing more quickly. Do I need an assessment that determines when they move into the more formal work or do I go off a gut feeling and then how do I manage it?

Currently I am trying to do everything  - and I can't fit it all in. So I think this will be much better.

I've now also got a few students that I would like to refer to SLT as I know recognise that they may need some specialised help. The challenge is that we currently don't have a full time SLT and often they give us more to do and it's very hard to fit it all in.

Target Student Feedback

Austin

Difficulties
Remembering his story
Hearing the end sounds in words
Recognising sight words

What has worked
Phonological focus
Daily letter sound spelling work
Repeating sentence in writing over and over before writing
Instruction writing was really successful
Has pretty much got spacing sorted now. Not really sure what has helped that to click except that his reading has really improved.


Suggestions
Memory games
- touch the ....., ......, .......
- three objects and cover them up what were they

Cath Runga - Writing PD 24/8/17

I attended the making OTJ section of this workshop and felt that it really affirmed that I know what I am doing in making OTJs for writing. I feel confident that I can use the standards, progressions and curriculum to make accurate OTJs.

Code of Professional Responsibilty - Labels

The Code of Professional Responsibility has 4 overarching statements but has many aspects. These are broken down in the CPR pages above. 

Labels will be:

CPR1 - Commitment to Profession

CPR2 - Commitment to Learners

CPR3 - Commitment to Whānau

CPR4 - Commitment to Society

Our Code, Our Standards

There is a new document from the Education Council which contains the new Values, Code and Standards for teaching. I have broken these down into new pages and created new labels to use from now on.
These are the Standards for the Teaching Profession labels:
STP1 - Tiriti o Waitangi, STP2 - Professional Learning, STP3 - Relationships, STP4 - Learning-focused, STP5 - Design for Learning, STP6 - Teaching.

Follow this link for the details of the standards

Elklan Course - Session 2

Today's sessions were all about Memory and Information Carrying Words.
Here are a few of my notes:

Short term memory – likened to a reception area – all information coming through and gets sorted by “receptionist”

Working memory – like the desk with all the intrays of all the important information

Long term memory –  Filing system - things will not get to long term memory without doing something.

In the first half of primary school we need to expose students to a range of strategies for remembering. In the second half of primary school we need to name the strategies and help them to find which strategy is right for them.

Mind maps – for organising ideas and vocab – the children who will benefit most, are those who find it the hardest.

Memory is helped by linking things together. Mind maps help the eyes to see how the information is connected.

Brainstorm – throwing all ideas out there – not linked

-       those that need support will need videos, pictures, stories, real-life experiences

-       Can give picture prompts including for those that don’t fit

After brainstorming – draw different coloured circles around each word to group like ideas.

Create a key at the bottom – labeling the groups

Each category becomes a branch – 1 colour per branch, thick and in colour. Each branch has a name. p. 67

Information Carrying Words

Often what we say does not actually require the students to understand the words – they can use inferencing and context to figure out what is required.

We can complete some play tasks to support the development of ICW where students have to make choices. It is important that the students know all the names and actions first. Do not use NVC. Pair with “How to listen” poster. Always replace the objects back to the starting position. p. 28-29

Level 1 (1 ICW) – choose 1 from 2 objects - names

Level 2 (2 ICW) – objects - names, verbs, part and positions

Level 3 (3 ICW) – objects, position, colour, location, possession, size

Level 4 (4 ICW) – extra location – to the ….  or 2 instructions  … in the …  and the  … in the …

Allow it to become a turn taking game – Get the students to give the instructions.

e.g.

1) Give the teddy/car to Grandpa                          Put the teddy/car in the toybox

2) Give the teddy/car to Grandma/Grandpa      Put the old/new car/teddy in the toybox

3) Give the new/old teddy/bicycle to Grandma/Grandpa   

4) Put the teddy/car/bicycle in the chest/toybox and put the teddy/car/bicycle in the chest/toybox     Find the old/new teddy/car and the old/new soldier/bicycle

After they can master 4 ICW go onto Auditory Memory Activities for 4-7 years p.32

Elklan Speech and Language Session 1

The first session was all about the general overviews of communication. I have many students with some speech-language and communication issues however one is particularly standing out for me. Logan has real issues with communicating particularly with his peers. 

Here are some of the tasks I need to do before the next session. I am going to keep Logan as my focus.

Choose an everyday class activity. Talk and use non-verbal communication as normal. 

Then for a couple of minutes do not point with your fingers or eyes and do not stress important words. Describe what the child did (i) when you used NVC and (ii) when you did not use so much NVC.

Consider supporting a child with his/her listening and attention. Describe an activity. What did the child have to do and what were you asked to do or what was your role?

What specific strategy did you use during the activity (3.1a) to improve the listening and attention skills of one child or a small group of children? (Look at Language Builders (L.B.) or state a strategy from a different source.) Try and use a strategy you have not used before.

How did you use the strategy (3.1a) and how did the child’s listening and attention change as a result of applying the strategy?

8/8/17 General Reflections

This has been a hard week. We have had some major behaviour issues which is taking away from our ability to teach. Most of the students are working well and are continuing to make good progress however, some of our students' behaviour is escalating. Logan has improved somewhat with completing most tasks and sitting on the mat. He is learning the routines and is able to stay focused for increasing periods of time. He is still hard work and takes a lot of teacher time for prompting, reminding and redirecting. Harleigh has had a better week this week after a Time-out last week for tantrumming. Riley U has had two Time-Outs in two days due to his tantrums of swearing, throwing and hitting. Tayla-Rose is my biggest concern at the moment. Her behaviour has been defiance and disruption. Running around screaming, climbing on stacks of chairs, refusing to do her work, playing with toys at inappropriate times and refusing to do work. We can't really pinpoint why her behaviour has escalated so much. We think it's possibly due to competition for adult attention with some of the other behaviour students.

25/7/27 General Reflection

This term has started really well. Over the holidays we created a behaviour plan for Logan which we haven't even really had to use yet. He had an "off" morning this morning but came right with some consequences for being out of class and had a really good rest of the day. We have split the class a lot more this term and it seems to be working quite well. I think it is a bit easier for Sarah too as she is able to plan and take control of the same group of kids each day. I would still really like to get back to changing groups a bit but for now this provides a bit more structure for Sarah as she finds her style.

We have come up with some good ideas for Cody this term to develop his Oral Language as we don't think continuing to push along his reading is really going to help because he cannot articulate the sounds clearly and we don't know how much of it he actually understands. So, we are reading one book over two days, with the first day focusing on the pictures and identifying nouns. I am looking forward to my Oral Language course I have coming up and I'm hoping this will also help with some more ideas. In the staffroom today, I overheard a conversation about some ESOL resources and thought I might look into them too.

We are using Sue a bit differently this term with her working with target groups and Cody during our literacy time to support them with their reading and writing skills such as letter sounds, HF words and oral language.

We had some interesting feedback from Nat and Rose at staff meeting yesterday about attachment issues in students. This really made a lot of sense and reaffirmed my beliefs around the importance of relationships with our students. How we need to be nurturing like mothers but also firm and fair in our boundaries and consequences. The students need to feel safe and valued. These are all things I hold very highly in my practise and that I have seen strong evidence for within my own classroom experiences - even when it has been really hard to do.

Student Wellbeing

In Term 2 we have had a couple of challenging students begin in our class. Both have come from other schools but are year 1s and hadn't been at school very long. These students have had difficult home lives and need some extra care in class to ensure they feel safe and can therefore begin to learn. Tayla-Rose has settled very well into her new environment and we haven't seen any of the aggressive behaviour that she was apparently displaying at her previous school. We allow her to have a toy with her for comfort, provided it is not distracting her or others. We keep in regular contact with her grandparents to ensure we are aware of any other issues from home.

Logan has also started late in the term. He needs a lot of extra behaviour support as he is not really "ready for school" and we have talked to his parents a lot about how his programme is differentiated. We have been having some success with sticker charts for getting him to follow instructions and complete tasks. His mum took one home to use over the holidays too. He spends a lot of his day playing with the toys but now usually completes his work that he does with the teacher. He struggles to complete any independent activities or to make friends. He also needs a lot of support to develop social skills. He can be aggressive, confrontational and has difficulty sharing resources or activities. He has already come a long way and no longer leaves the classroom anywhere as often. We have developed a behaviour plan for him to start this term with to help support him to complete more of the class programme.

Reflecting on goals

As we are halfway through the year it's a good time to reflect on how my goals are going. 

• Use clear, explicit, child friendly learning goals that students understand and can reflect on.

So far I have made big progress on the student learning goals. The students now have learning goal sheets for reading, writing, maths, handwriting and spelling. These have been working really well, particularly in writing and maths. The students have some choice about what their next goal is and enjoy seeing the progress they are making. They get an AROHA for every goal achieved. The students are then grouped by similar goals. The groups are incredibly flexible and often change weekly. Some of the challenges are making sure to allow time to tick off achieved goals, particularly maths as we get the students to  prove they can achieve the goal individually. We try to timetable this in to our week but when students are away it can mean they miss out. Writing, handwriting and spelling goals get ticked off as they go. The reading goals haven't been being kept on top of as well as they are in the students reading diaries and if they have left them at home/lost them then things get out of date quickly. 

One of the other challenges with the goal sheets is having different teachers in and out of them room.

• Increase the use of Te Reo and Tikanga within the classroom.

I am becoming more and more confident with my knowledge of Te Reo and Tikanga with my he papa tikanga paper and my increased dedication to using Te Reo. One of the big things I have been trying is to do more waiata with the students. I have found youtube videos of many of the waiata the kids sing at kapahaka. I think this will encourage more of our students to get involved in kapahaka next year as they will already know some of the waiata. It also supports those who are in kapahaka by giving them extra practise. I am using Te Reo in the classroom daily for many simple instructions and am continuing to develop this. In the most recent module of He Papa Tikanga I have learnt a lot about powhiri and the reasons being the protocols. It has helped me to also understand more about the culture in general. 

Mentoring PD - Listening

Interesting notes, diagrams etc from the latest Mau ki te module -Mentoring Skills - Active Listening

The 3 Rs for Coaching Learning Relationships

Fluency Video

New Code of Professional Responsibility and Standards

Download the Code and Standards Download the Code Examples in Practice

Extending writing.

Possible template for top writers. As a model lesson for Sarah use the Stephen Graham model. Describe an object. Choose something they can touch/feel - bear from the toy box.

Use 3 different sentences  - colour, shape, feel, position, number, size, action

e.g.
The bear is brown. It has soft fur. It is sitting on the chair.

Practise with the students saying each sentence about a different toy from the toy box. Articulate capital letter and fullstop. - 1 student being the capital letter, 1 the sentence, 1 the fullstop.


Video to watch later about Jeff Anderson about writing

Maths

Today was the first time I have led maths in a long time as Tara had been doing this before she left. We have a large group of students working on their knowledge of number order to 100. I set up a hundreds board on the smart board and allowed them to work together to try and fill it in. The students enjoyed this task and it was easy to see which could quickly fill some in and which needed more support. The really cool thing was that most of the support came from their peers rather than me. They were up and moving around and I think this was really good for them too. They were peer checking and working together.

Reading Recovery Session 21/6/17

Yesterday I took Jade to Te Kuiti for our Reading Recovery inservice. Her lesson went really well. She tried hard but also showed the things she has been doing in her lessons at school so I was able to get some good feedback. The other teachers thought that I had good strategies for dealing with her delaying tactics. They had a couple of suggestions for improving Jade's sentence structure. They suggested that I provide sentence starters for her and use more direct questioning in the sentence building phase of the writing in order to help her to create a correct sentence pattern.

For Sarah and I to go through and highlight priorities

Thing Link

I came across this today. It looks like a very interesting tool for teaching and learning. https://www.thinglink.com/edu#
I think you could spend a lot of time playing with it and it may be more useful in the senior school but I thought it looked pretty awesome.

Term 2 reflections

2/5/17

Term 2 has started really well. We have jumped straight into our classroom programme with full reading, writing and maths rotations. The students have been great at coping with the changes in the programme to accommodate for our increased numbers and reading recovery timetabling changes. We are adapting to having Sue R in our class and so far this has been going really well. We are trying hard to include her as a Teacher not a TA so have asked her to take control of the Handwriting and PE programmes. We are still trying to rotate ourselves around the groups and curriculum areas so that we get to see all students at all levels. We have had 2 new students start and they have settled in well. Preet is doing well at following the other students but is very quiet and I think developing his confidence to share his ideas is going to be a big step for him. For writing we will get him to work saying a sentence about a picture e.g. The car is red. As he is not yet able to draw a picture and/or tell us about it. Curtis clearly has some good fine motor skills judging by his picture today although he had trouble telling me about his picture. I showed him what I meant and wrote a story for him. I think he will pick it up quickly. Reading recovery is going well and I now have 3 students to work with each morning. Jade is gaining a lot of confidence and I think she will begin to move quite quickly in the 1-1 environment. Tangaroa is really moving with the PM type books but then really struggles on the Ready to Reads. He is picking up spelling patterns quickly. My  relationship with Tara is just so positive and really makes life so much easier. It is so good to work with someone who is totally on the same page. We bounce ideas off each other and I think are making some real progress in our teaching practice and therefore our kids progress.

16/5/17

Cannot believe we are so far into May already. We have had 5 new students start this term. 3 new to school and 2 who have moved to our school from out of town. The latter two have just started this week and have settled in well already. We were warned about the behaviour of one who has been exposed to violence at home but so far she has been perfectly well behaved. She knows quite a bit and seems to have settled in very quickly. We have some concerns about Achilles’ speech. He is not easy to understand and we feel that we should ask the Speech Language Therapist to come in and have a look/listen. Our programmes have changed a bit already this term. Getting through writing is really hard. With so many needy writers it is tricky to see them all everyday. This week I am trying to start with the most independent group. Get them set up and started with a big focus on the planning of their writing to help add detail. They then complete their writing on their own. This is ok while the LI is around planning. However, it’s not going to work so well when the guidance is needed for different parts of the writing. I’m not getting to do reading teaching at the moment as it’s when I’m at Reading Recovery during reading time. I’m really happy with the way we are teaching Inquiry and PE at the moment. Wednesday we have a good hour of Inquiry time and Friday the same for PE. This is much better than what we have been doing previously in these areas. The kids are really motivated about the Inquiry topic at the moment. Loving learning about the Battle of the Mountains myth. We are doing some collaborative art around this to add to our mural. Tomorrow, we will also start some drama about the mountains.

30/05/17

This fortnight has seemed to be hard work. 26 little ones in class is tricky even with two teachers most of the time. Riley U starts in a couple of weeks too. We are continuing to grow independence in our kids and are expecting a lot more from our older children. Some are thriving on this expectation while others are finding it a bit tricky. I am feeling a bit run down at the moment and am not really sure why. I have forgotten a few things I was supposed to do recently and am conscious that I’m not as tolerant as I should be at times. I think it’s the wintery weather and lack of sunlight that is causing me to feel as though I am half hibernated. The majority of students seem to be continuing to progress fairly well. Some of our Year 1s are really taking off. Reading Recovery is also going well with Tangaroa ready to be tested off. I would like to contact Kylie from Rototuna again for some more advice around teaching oral language structure. I want some direction about what to focus on to build oral language and sentence structure. I am feeling anxious about what will happen once Tara has gone and really hope that the new teacher will be able to fit in well.

13/6/17

It's hard to believe we are in week 7 already. Things have been going pretty well with some good progress in all areas. We have now got reading, writing, handwriting and maths goal sheets running and these are working pretty well. They are particularly helpful with report writing and OTJs as we can easily see where kids are. The trickiest part is making sure we make the time to check in and assess goals and make new ones. I want to extend our students writing even further and am finding that really hard with so many. Even with two teachers it is near impossible to get around them all. It is going to be a totally new situation with Sarah starting and I will really have to re-think the way I'm doing things. I still have new spelling goal sheets to sort out. We haven't done as much inquiry stuff the last two weeks so we really need to get into that a bit further too. Our use of Te Reo is increasing a bit and I've been really enjoying the way Whaea Dini has been setting her lessons around the topics we have been doing in regards to te reo in our class. I went to kapahaka last week and I would love to have some access to the songs and videos they are learning in order to do some with our class to allow them to have some knowledge/experience to feel confident in the kapahaka group.

27/6/17
The term is flying. Our class is very full and some of our new students are quite tricky. We are dealing with some interesting behaviours but are making good progress with all of them. Sarah is now working along side me in the class. She has quickly cottoned on to the way we do things and isn't afraid to ask questions. She is fitting in well to the class and the students seem to like her. Some of the more challenging ones need to build more of a relationship with her yet, as they don't quite respect her enough at this point. I am finding I need to be more specific with my planning as I'm dealing with different teachers at different times. I will be collaborating with Sarah, Sue and Marie as well as Sariah and Sharee, so there's a lot of people working with these students and we all need to be on the same page. I am starting to think about what the programme for next term will look like. I will be out for 1.5hours with Reading Recovery and I need to decide when the best time for this is. I don't want to give up writing time and really feel that I no longer have a clue what is going on with the students in regards to writing. I've really enjoyed leading maths this week too. I'm wondering how I can possibly make it all work, because I don't want to give anything up! I'm wondering whether we can have a literacy time where reading and writing is running at the same time. Sarah would also like to fit R W M in before lunch.

Term 1 Reflections

28/2/17

Pretty positive start to the year. The children that can be challenges have had a good start. We have all main areas up and running fairly well. Swimming has been going well but definitely is squeezing up the other learning areas. The collaboration with Tara this term is different to last year - we are splitting/leading different areas rather than both sharing everything. This may well continue to change as our programmes develop. Reading is running well and having two teachers teaching at the same time is great. Tara is teaching maths when I am at reading recovery, so I don’t really know how that is going at the moment. Handwriting has shown drastic improvement already. Our writing programme is slowly developing but all students are writing most days. I am happy that our phonological awareness and spelling is being taught everyday. The students are picking up some of these concepts very quickly. Frustrations are around still not being clear about what data we need to be collecting when, so that we can plan ahead. Reading Recovery feels like it is slowly getting going. Roaming around the known is taking a long time especially with absences and interruptions.

14/3/17

We have found that as we meet the middle of the term we are getting tired, some things are not meeting our expectations and things have felt a bit like hard work at times. In saying that, all programmes are now running pretty smoothly. The students are following rotations well and we are getting through reading, writing and maths, as well as some Art and Social Science Inquiry stuff. Finishing swimming is really helping us get through all our work each day. We have been flexible in our timetabling and have changed things to different times of the day to make them fit. Constant conversations with Tara about what is working and what isn’t, is really helpful. I have taken a lead in getting writing running better as Tara was away for a few days and I feel like we are making some real progress. Our early writers are picking things up very quickly. Our more developed writers are beginning to extend their ideas, just through practising using different sentence structures on the mat together before writing. One of the challenges for our early writers is them having more ideas than they have the skills to write, and they don’t want to stop.

Reading is also progressing well with most students moving up a level or 2 (or 3) already. Our new students are gaining a lot of skills with their reading and I feel that some of the SEED Learning stuff from writing is coming across into their reading.

Tara is taking a lead in Maths and I have begun supporting the follow up activities. This is a great way to reinforce learning and to notice who can do the activity independently.

We have introduced goals in Reading, Handwriting and Maths but need to revisit these daily. So we can tick off what they can do. I have yet to complete making one for writing.

Reading Recovery is now going really well. T.N. is flying and ready to start being tested off. He could still work on his word writing a bit but is reading really well and can write a pretty good story with good spelling. T.C. has made heaps of progress already and I am sure he will continue to move very quickly. He is great at remembering what I told him and I don’t seem to need to repeat the same teaching over and over, just show him once or twice and move on!

Our new student is much lower than the other students and it is going to be hard to put her into a group, as even all our other newbies are quite a bit further ahead. But, she has settled in well and is trying hard, so may catch up quickly.

4/4/17

Our programme is now ticking along pretty well. We are still changing things pretty regularly in an attempt to give our students as much “teaching” time as possible and I love how flexible we can be in the way we work with out class. We have now made our middle block “literacy” time and have split the class in half. One teacher takes 4 reading groups, milk and big book while the other teacher takes the other half for writing. We then swap. This has allowed us to support our early writers much better while also extending out better writers as the group is smaller. It also means less students working on independent activities which has improved engagement and behaviour. The writing group is mixed ability and I think this is also helpful as it gives a range of models for the early writers and requires some independence from the more advanced writers.

We are now able to complete a full math rotation in the afternoon. The group’s follow up activities are supported by me after their initial lesson with Tara. This has been a great way to look at what they have mastered from the lesson. I am able to make some notes on the planning document as I work with students and make judgements about who has got the concept and still need more support. We are encouraging independence by sending the students who can do it on their own, off to finish by themselves. They can then show me and conference with me, without interrupting Tara’s next group. It is really exciting to see some quite complex concepts being understood by our students.

Mentoring online PD

Online modules to support mentors
https://maukiteako.brackenlearning.com/Live/

Traditional vs High quality mentoring

Characteristics of traditional and high quality induction and mentoring

Traditional Advice and Guidance

High Quality, Intensive Induction and Mentoring

Emotional Support §  pastoral care §  pep talks §  support, advice, guidance §  collective responsibility. Technical Support §  advice / handy tips §  focus on behaviour §  practical – mentor taking class so PRT can focus on small groups §  short-term fixes §  teaching focus §  surface issues §  hierarchical – mentor ’sorts out’ PRT issues §  mentor talks, PRT listens §  reactive §  big “whole deal” at once observation §  mini “me” scenario §  speak to the learner – teachers are ākonga. Mentor teachers §  chosen for convenience rather than skill or ‘best fit’ for the PRT §  not supported with professional learning for the role §  work in isolation with an individual teacher.

Links practice to a view of good teaching §  learning focus §  goal orientated – PRT and Mentor goal. Builds confidence by developing pedagogical expertise §  setting goals – own development §  underpinned by achievement of ākonga. Has a developmental (but not linear) view of learning to teach §  long term focus §  deeper exploration of practice and evidence of learning– and what lies behind the surface issues. Develops teacher autonomy and agency §  teacher voice §  determine next steps / take responsibility §  PRT agency involved in making decisions §  Examine / reflect on own practice §  Deeper (becoming self-regulated). Builds knowledge by using their teaching as a site of inquiry §  practice of effective pedagogy §  proactive – setting the PRT up – application of strategies. Provides planned, and takes advantage of incidental, learning opportunities §  focused and specific §  detailed observation - but selective §  mentor and PRT focused – purposeful, know what you’ll observe §  range of tools used in observation. Engages in serious professional conversations §  professional discussion – challenge pedagogy §  active listening §  explore deeper issues §  learning conversation process (partnership) §  more about mentor (listening) and their role. Bases feedback and assessment on evidence §  evidence based / interrogate data §  get PRT to think more and have evidence for what he/she is doing. School, kura or ECE service structure §  mentoring given value and importance.