Locked down and mind overwhelmed

Thought I'd just jump on here briefly before signing off for the night.

We are week 3 in the COVID 19 lockdown in NZ. I was contented to have the first 2 weeks a home. Finally a school holidays for me - the first since September 2019. To Stop and refuel my body with down time was great.

Once it was officially week 2 of lockdown I started to switch back into work mode and with that came the screaming urge to soak in all I can about my new lifestyle choice in ECE. Fuelled with the endless opportunities to engage in free webinars (thanks to all the providers offering these) I haven't stopped absorbing information for about 7 day now at my computer for about 8 hours a day - my mind is spinning.

• Reading about leadership styles and motivating people in an ebook
• hitting a few webinars at the Conscious Collective
• signing up to transforming behaviour online conference
• watching facebook live play based learning at home with Little Kiwis Nature Play
• researching insurance claims and how to work out eligibility for wage subsidies
• A great little quick read article on teachers intervening in play - will write more on this as follow up to last post.
• Educa seminars on anything from Rituals to Learning stories and plenty more of interest
• Researching philosophy and how to design one.

The list goes on - no wonder my head is overwhelmed. 

It is time to sit down and pick a focus, to stop trying to know everything right now and let some knowledge unfold at a later date. To believe and to trust that my team have knowledge, I don't have to hold the knowledge of everything.

So where will my focus be... 

What is important in the next week the next month, the aprez lockdown....

Leading With Heart and Soul.

A relaxing Wednesday morning - first day of the new year - learning a little something from Toni Christie. Some great ideas around simplifying leadership in the sense of humanness rather than compliance. Through Courage, Honesty, Grace, Joy, Dream Big, Gratitude and Respect.

Some great tips here for working with your staff in a leadership perspective. A lot of challenging ideas too that give me anxiety as I know the courage to implement some of these ideas is difficult for me.
Can I pick a single value that is easier and implement that first. Perhaps I could look at an action plan for implementing some of these leadership ideas.

https://vimeo.com/330636844

The Place of the New (old) NZC

This week I was introduced to a rather long but relevant study by Wayne Freeth around the Reconceptualising of Leadership through the Revised NZ Curriculum.

Now the new curriculum has been in place a few years now, I personally have worked with this new curriculum for twice as long as I worked under the last one. But in reading this study I was once again reminded of the forward thinking that went into its concept. Thinking that has been somewhat forgetten.

Years ago when the NZC came back our school ran with it. We embraced change and looked at a new curriculum map for our school. We accepted the future focused themes, added our own communities values, and embraced the key competencies as important... And then got on with teaching units based on themes just like always. We simply headed the themes with the FF headings and tagged terms with a values and KC, like they are taught once a year and thats it.

Looking back, and looking at how our schools adoption of the NZC has developed since then, it seems we stopped thinking about the possibilities that had been opened up to us.

Reading this document reminded me of the importance of the few pages at the front of the NZC, the pages that seperate the skills learning from the competenices for life.
It is time to get back to looking at what the students need in skills AND competencies and working from them up towards the NZC objectives, rather than leadership picking topics they want our kids to do...

Its time to focus on knowledge as the verb... rather than knowledge as disconnected fragments of nouns.

What is our shared understanding of what a student in our school should be when they leave...

Is it only what they have attained academically that is valued - what about what they have become as  a human...

What is knowledge?

Epistemology, ontology, axiology, rationalism and empiricism...
Boy, have I been obtaining knowledge this week, including practising all my reading skills to infer meaning of new words from the sentences around them. It has been a while since I last read academic articles.
Mindlab Rotorua has begun with the small topic of

What is Knowledge? 

and

What is the purpose of education?

Not such easy questions to answer but great questions to discuss with the open-minded forward thinking participants of Mindlab.

So what did we discover?  

Video by Neil, Kath, Bevan, Anne and Kirsty.
  Our flowing river is representative of how knowledge is created and evolves over time. Our knowledge is always expanding, it can head in certain directions, change direction, bend and curve. Knowledge can become unused and drift into the small  distributaries that break off the river. Along the rivers journey are the things that influence our knowledge and that our knowledge influences. Our knowledge is influenced by our time and place, by our beliefs and values, by our environment (our place in the world). Our knowledge collects facts, ideas and skills, as it flows. Some are caught up in the flow, others swept to the sides of the river. As our river of knowledge grows it can be used and applied to create more in the world, just as the river helps create the forests growing along its sides.

Knowledge flows and grows!

 

 

So what is the purpose of education then, if not to impart knowledge? Knowledge is so much more than school. Education happens regardless of time or place, but (we discussed) that its purpose is influenced by time and place. The purpose of formal education in western society, many years past, was elitist, it was only for 'certain' people, to keep them in power. Then it was to produce mass workers who knew enough to follow instructions and do as they were told to man the many factories. Now we want to create active members of society, contributers, innovators, citizens. And whats more - we are unsure what the society that they will be members of is even going to be like...

 

 How do I see this 'new' purpose of education in my class...

 

I attempt to create a community of learning. A place where we all can make decisions about  where we work and who we work with. Where everyone can be considered a holder of knowledge, and I promote children to seek knowledge from each other. Where we celebrate together, have opportunities to collaborate together, and time to share our strengths and passions with the group. I challenge children to take responsibility, to debate, to agree and disagree, and to feel they each have an important part to play in our learning journeys. School is no longer about sitting in one spot, producing the same work as the person next to you, listening without responding, accepting without questioning, doing without thinking ... Transformation is required.

The Informational Divide

Time to upgrade?

We live in the information era. With the advent of multiple devises of Internet connectivity, and the saturation of social media, we are in a time where nobody can be a dummy any more. The answers, ideas, or information required is often just a few taps away. I feel this is becoming very evident in education.

Teaching is changing. Staff rooms resound with talk of 21st century learning ( or blended learning, or personalised learning, or e-learning, or digital learning, or passion projects, etc). Even the language of education is changing. How does everyone keep up?

You have to be connected!

It's becoming quite simply a must do. Teachers who want to be in the know, who want to keep moving and developing, need to be in the know. And the easiest way to get in the know - get connected.

Whether your knowledge funnel is twitter, Facebook, the VLN, your schools Ning, Pinterest, Tumblr, or any of the other masses of feeds where people are talking - educators need to think seriously about connecting to one. Pick the education topics that interest you, and follow. It may mean a few extra emails a week - but for the extra 10 minutes it takes to flick through them, and follow up or discard, you will always find a gem. A little snippet of information, an idea, a comment that lights something inside for you, or helps you to understand what Mr S was talking about in the staff room.

We have spoken for years about the digital divide between the digital natives and the digital dinosaurs, but now it's more than that. The divide used to be about use of devices and confidence with them, now it's becoming a divide in knowledge around how education is changing with the devices.

How do we support those teachers who are starting to feel like they don't speak the language of education anymore? Who are feeling overwhelmed with expectations beyond their knowledge. 

Everyone around them is moving faster and faster... We need to try and get them on board... Get them connected.

I'd love to know if anyone has any ideas around a great feed, that would work for this. Like a beginners  forum in the VLN. 

Professional development

Professional development is a big part of a teachers responsibilities. It is explicitly one of the registered teacher criteria. Schools like to provide their teachers with opportunities, often involving bring in guests for staff meetings and teacher only days.Principals think hard, and can spend big bucks trying to bring us great minds, to motivate and empower us, or utilise talented staff to lead our growth. This is all good, and I understand the concept that it has to be a best fit for the majority, but what I start to become more frustrated with, is the feeling when one walks away, without a single morsel to take themselves forward. 

I had the great opportunity to participate in a teacher only day recently - even to present.

It was based around ICT and creativity. Awesome. I was ready to be inspired, to see some creativity... Unfortunately for me I spent 6 1/2 hours and came away fairly empty handed. So was left feeling a little disappointed. 

Now this is not to say that other teachers weren't inspired, and had many takeaways. The presenters did share some great things. My problem was a very personal one - being a lead ICT teacher and more prolific online I had seen and heard most of it before, and found myself unchallenged. And I do seem to be one of those children who when unchallenged I am quickly bored.

Next time perhaps I need to negotiate my PD with my principal more. I could easily have spend the day working on the google apps for education online course, or surfing my favourite teacher bloggers, googling daily 5 and other personal goals I am working on this year. I could have led my own learning and come away motivated and moving forward. Shouldn't I be able to drive my own learning as an adult?

If I link this back to my classroom, I have to also keep this in mind. Do I offer this ability to my students. Are they able to negotiate and extend themselves when the classes learning is something they've seen before? How do I build that into the culture of my classroom, so children feel it is OK to request independent  learning?

I will ponder this moving forward. How are my learners having a say in what they are learning?

Supporting the profession

Having a student teacher in the classroom teaches you so much about yourself. Being a role model, everyday, for 8 weeks at a time can sometimes be harder then we think. The pressure to be at the top of your game every day so that you can help them to be the best they can be is tough.

I have the privilege of helping to nurture a student teacher this term, yet at the same time I am still constantly challenging myself to become a better teacher. Trying to balance the two things can be difficult. 

I am wanting to make some changes to class routines, but my student needs to learn the routines so he can take on full control. I am learning to integrate ICT's in an e learning class, but as I'm the learner this is in bits and pieces at the moments, so the structures for my student teacher to follow are not in place yet. I am redefining daily 5 for my classroom, and switching to online planning, so the systems around these two things are not perfect ....yet.

There are so many changes that I am going through I sometimes think my student would be better off in someone else's classroom. Or is there some redemption in the fact that the student teacher can see how change happens in a classroom, and how as the teacher you are the driver of that change which is needed to suit your learners and the world they will be living in?

Online Planning

Planning is my self confessed weakness - along with organisation, but that's another story.

Image thanks to cybrarian77 

Planning takes up time, too much time in my week. For 9 years I have tried template after template, planned in lists, in grids, tried it after school, day by day, month by month. Anyway I have seen or can think of trying to create efficient and effective teaching plans. But still hours of my week disappear in planning that never quite feels right.

This term I am trying digital planning in a shared forum - Google sites. My decision around this is because I have stopped printing all my word processed planning - as it seemed a waste of time printing, and organising into folders, bits of paper, just for my senior teacher to view for attestation. Not good time management.
So on-line I go - into a place others can view in real time with me if necessary - senior teachers, student teachers and relievers... hopefully!
Thanks to the VLN, and TaraTJ's advice and sharing of her trials, it gave me confidence to try Google sites too.

Now my task is to organise this document and transfer last terms planning over in bulk to meet expectations for attestation so far, and to then create a working document for moving forward. Thanks to Tara I have a simple way to get started and will build this from there. Keeping the ultimate goal in mind, which is saving time...  I have some trepidations. But will bravely move forward...

I have high expectations that this form of planning will help me to make some changes in my planning - like moving the time focus to planning each lesson, rather then the scheduling of the lessons. I will be looking at the sequence of lessons over a term for groups rather than week to week or day to day. Then these lessons just fit in as time allows. secondly I want to add a reflective column, with a guiding question to think about. This question will be related to the lesson and the children's attainment/self reflection. This may mean adding to this in the moment...a real challenge for me. But something I know I need to work on, getting this reflection out of my head and onto paper (still don't quite understand why this is, but will try it).

Once this is up and running I may add a link here. Wish me luck.