Graduating from the MDTA

Last Thursday night the MDTA celebrated the end of our two year digital teaching and learning programme. Over the two years I have learnt a lot about myself, my practice and technology. I feel I am ahead of other beginning teachers, due to being included in the MDTA. I hope I never have to teach in a full paper school again!

I felt underprepared for technology in HPE after finishing my Bachelor of PE. We had a couple of courses including some e-learning tools, but I feel they only just scraped the surface. The MDTA increased my confidence with the integration of technology and I have developed skills which I believe will be useful for future classes I have. 

Our graduation was based in the Google Headquarters in the CBD, with wine flowing and a beautiful view. I enjoyed spending the time to thank my mentor, principal and the Manaiakalani Education Trust for my journey. Our cohort went out for dinner and watched the sunset as our final congrats and farewell to one another. Many are continuing in their current schools next year, some embarking on new journeys. I can't wait to see how we all further progress, and where we end up in the future.

Despite a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, I do think MDTA was effective for my development, and I am intrigued to follow future MDTA teachers! My blog is my pride, and without MDTA, I would not have my blog... so this is definitely what I am most thankful for!

Dissertation Done & Dusted!

Throughout this year, as previously posted about, I have been completing research to write a dissertation. Simplistically, I was investigating the potential for blogging within Year 11 PE. On Monday afternoon I handed in my 32 page dissertation and it felt amazing! The past two years have been intense teaching full time and studying part time, but I'm glad to get through. I learnt a lot about myself, my practice and technology within the classroom. If anyone would like to read it, you can access it here!

The staff at school were encouraged to reflect on the Manaiakalani cluster-wide pedagogy Learn, Create, Share, as well as the core of the cluster. I decided to write my reflections based on one of learners from my study, as this has been at the forefront of my mind. The study demonstrated the potential blogging has in education, particularly in specialised disciplines like PE. The students became more reflective, their literacy (traditional and digital) increased and there was more peer to peer teaching. When implementing blogging within my teaching and learning in the future, I need to provide a structure for students, ensure they understand the purpose of the blogging, and encourage students to provide further feedback and feedforward as comments on blogposts for their peers (evident from my research and literature).

Overall, it has been really difficult reading dozens of academic articles, writing late at night and including a pedagogical tool I only knew about from writing my own posts! But, my inquiry/dissertation has shown me how powerful writing blogs can be for learners, so I hope to include in future classes. In 2018, I am interested to explore literacy in Health and PE as my inquiry. I have noticed many of our NCEA assessments are evidence towards literacy credits, but some of the students struggle to write. Although their content may be correct, sometimes I struggle to read the students' assessments as they have poor spelling or grammar, or a lack of paragraphs. Therefore, although one hurdle and challenge is over, I am looking forward to more challenges next year!

Banter, Bonding & Basketball

One of my 2017 goals was to increase my involvement in extra-curricular activities. I completely threw myself in the deep end and decided to coach a Junior basketball team! Growing up I loved to play basketball socially, but was never involved in a competitive team and certainly had no coaching experience! So the season was a massive learning curve for me, but so much fun.

Our 7:15am Friday morning trainings were tough for some of the boys, but we always had a great time, and loved our Tuesday afternoon games. I loved strengthening relationships with students I already knew, and creating relationships with other students in the school. Unfortunately our success rate wasn't high, but the kids always left with high spirits. Our van rides back to school after our games, were always the highlight of my week as we left with our heads high and jammed to music! They even attempted to have rap battles, which were entertaining. 

Going through the season, I was grateful to have considerable support from our Sports Coordinator. He coached the other Junior boys team (see both teams and Sports Coordinator above), so always helped me out with ideas, gave me encouragement and regularly led the trainings with me supporting him. I felt I took away a few ideas, but still have a considerable way to go, to be an effective coach! I look forward to PD opportunities in the future to support this growth. 

To celebrate the end of season, I was invited to the school's Sports Prizegiving Dinner. We spent the evening celebrating the success of all of our students involved in Sport at Tamaki College. See alongside the recipients of Most Valuable Player, Player of the Year and Most Improved Player for my team. This was a great experience, and I loved seeing the students walk across the stage to receive their awards. For some of our students and their families, this was a huge success, which I felt blessed to be a part of. 

Overall, I am so grateful to be involved in this team because I throughly enjoyed myself, and more importantly, I think the kids did too!

The End Is Near

How is today the first day of Term 4 - this year is flying past?! I feel I have grown so much this year, not only as a teacher but also as a person. I have faced many challenges and been given many new opportunities, and now the end is near. I am most looking forward to spending tomorrow with my Year 11s at Snowplanet, a 2 day High Ropes course at the end of the year with my tutor class, and developing new relationships and building on relationships during the Jumpstart programme in a few weeks.

A quick reflection post Term 3 on my 2017 goals:

1. Schedule time for me:

Until these holidays, I am proud that I have not said no to any social event or activity that I have wanted to do. I have enjoyed having this two hours each day at the back of my mind and when there are busier times, I have been making up the hours I may have worked through. I had lots to juggle in Term 3, and trying to maintain a balanced Hāuora is incredibly important, not only for myself and my whānau, but also for the students. 

2. Read educational blogs:

Unfortunately I did not give one hour per week, but tried to give one hour fortnightly last term reading through blogs. I tried a different approach; rather than focusing on the same blogs I had been, I tried to read through all posts I saw on my Twitter feed. I regularly tweet links to my posts, so found this to be a great way to read different blogs, with an array of ideas and topics. I am so thankful I got introduced to blogging as part of MDTA, as this has been a reflective journey for myself, which I have been able to share with others!

3. Experiment with more digital tools

I was light on the inclusion of more digital tools this term, but used some Google Expeditions to revise the Skeletal System (see detailed description in previous reflection). Rather than using more digital tools, I was trying to build on my confidence of the inclusion of the GAFE community, and trying to use them in different ways such as hyperlinking to a variety of websites and encouraging students to use these websites to answer a series of questions or create a digital artefact. 

4. Attend more extra curricular activities

I made it through the basketball season! I will be writing a blogpost later this week, once the photos from our Sports Awards are released - such a cool night. I have also signed up to assist the one day Waka Ama tournament in November, as many of my students are involved. I am really looking forward to a day in the sun with them, learning about a new sport!

5. Include blogging into 11PE

As reflected a little in a previous post, I am currently bringing all of the pieces of my dissertation together. I spent the second week of my holidays writing a draft of my dissertation. This has been a difficult process, but I have learnt a lot about the blogging process and started to refine how to include blogging within my classroom next year to benefit my students. I am really looking forward to this hurdle being over - roll on the 20th of November once it's handed in!

Overall, I feel I developed great goals for myself, and I'm looking forward to the final 9 weeks of the year to wrap these goals up and make new ones. The important thing for me to keep in the back of my mind, is that although it's the nearing the end, every minute still counts!

The Pastoral Role of a Tutor

Over the past two days the school has been closed for Student Achievement Conferences, for the second time this year. These involved students and their families meeting with their tutor teachers to discuss their progress at school. I have loved having a pastoral care role as a tutor teacher this year, so have enjoyed the past two days.

Throughout the year as a tutor teacher I am responsible for my classes uniforms, attendance, overall behaviour and happiness at school (put simply). I have a Year 10 class, so as their pastoral carer I need to ensure they're reading to move into Year 11 next year. Even though there is a considerable amount of time spent following up with students and calling home for a variety of reasons, the role has been incredibly rewarding. I feel like I have successfully 'moulded' my students this year, to be the best student they can be, and I am so excited to see how they grow the rest of this year and next year as Level 1 students. 

I felt incredibly proud of the success and progress my students have had. I found myself expressing my pride in my students, and sharing more strengths than weaknesses with their families over the past two days of conferences. I tried hard to share the feedforward or next steps, but for some students I found this difficult! Upon reflection, I think it would be useful to have a brief conversation with each of their subject teachers and ask for any general comments about the class holistically and any students causing concern. As a result, I would feel more comfortable discussing student progress in their subjects and also be able to identify their gaps or weaknesses. 

Overall though, I really enjoyed engaging with the whānau of my wonderful learners yesterday and today. I have grown to have a lot of love and respect for my tutor class, and I loved sharing their successes with their caregivers. Conversations with my class have been incredibly different for each student, some simply needing to read more, others needing support developing self confidence, one student has needed support with her health and I am helping one student to quit smoking this year. I am learning a lot about my beliefs and values throughout the process, and trying to prepare my learners for the most successful future possible. I am now looking forward to seeing what changes students make after their Student Achievement Conferences, and seeing further progresses and successes in their final reports!

Substances Have Been Explored

Throughout Term 2 in Year 10 Health, I taught an exploring substances unit for the first time. I enjoyed the unit, especially trying to include more technology into the learning activities. At the beginning of the unit, students completed a short Google Form with some key questions for me to gauge student understanding. The answers (which were collated in a Google Sheet) highlighted the topics students had gaps in their knowledge, so this is what I based my planning around. Please see my unit outline here. I also asked students to complete this Form at the end of the unit, to see student growth in understanding from the beginning of the unit (i.e. summative assessment).

I feel overall, that the unit was reasonably successful, however there are still many parts to adapt for next year to be even more successful. I feel proud of the unit I created, and the learning opportunities the students had, especially when there hasn't really been anything like this before! As I am more confident with the content and key ideas I would like students to take away, next year I will be able to differentiate between the classes, as this is my greatest weakness. Because I teach 6 classes, and the teaching is all new to me, there is very little differentiation between classes. As a result, some classes had in depth discussions, and completed more activities than other classes, and some classes felt rushed. With more thought into extension activities or how to cater for the lower literacy class for example, this may enable greater understanding and application of knowledge for students. I would also like to possibly focus on less, but more in depth, rather than scraping the surface.

Throughout the unit, there were lots of different activities, to try engage all learners. There were posit-it note activities, mix and matches, think, pair shares, student presentations, human continuums, online games, and research tasks. I tried to include a huge range of activities, so the students were learning in a different way each lesson. As a learner myself, even though I like to have routine and know what to expect when learning new things, I know I am most engaged when I am involved in different and new learning tasks. I found majority of students to be most engaged when they were in small groups, and able to discuss their ideas, and when they were off of their netbooks. I think that technology has an important place in education, especially in my classes, but there are times where the students like to step away from their screens, as their tasks are regularly on their computers in their other subjects. This is something I am actively thinking about for their current Sexuality and Relationships unit.

The most memorable activity from the unit was when we completed a Google Expedition inside the lungs. I first learnt about Google Expeditions (a free app) at the Google Conference earlier this year. Our lesson focus was about the effects of smoking tobacco on the body, one being the effect on the lungs. The Expedition begins with inhalation and travels from the trachea, through the bronchi to the alveoli in the lungs. As the guide of the expedition, the app gave lots of suggested questions to ask the students, which started some great discussions and encouraged students to think. I was surprised how interested the students were looking around; they were so engaged! After these lessons I had a look through the other various expeditions available and have found some which could be used in PE for anatomy, which I will definitely utilise next year! There are lots of expeditions available for all learning areas, so highly recommend others to look into it.

I am really enjoying teaching and leading Junior Health this year, even though it has been incredibly challenging trying to create engaging lessons. Next year will be great, as there will be foundation lessons to make better for future students. I am currently enjoying teaching a sexuality education unit, and am impressed by the response from the students so far. Bring on the next challenge, whatever that may be!

Planning is Not Set in Concrete

As part of my beginning teacher mentoring programme with Cheryl, we focused on Criteria 9 of the Practicing Teacher Criteria in our last meeting. Criteria 9 suggests fully certified teachers respond effectively to the diverse language and cultural experiences, and the varied strengths, interests and needs of individuals and groups of ākonga.

As a group, we broke down the criteria using The Education Council's Self Assessment Tool. This is a great resource to really reflect on the criteria, to identify my strengths and weaknesses! After our PCT meeting I felt criteria 9 was an area of weakness I needed think about further. Although I know I have a lot of evidence for each of the criteria, sometimes I struggle to show, or put into words what evidence I have. One of three parts of Criteria 9 asks;

Am I flexible in my teaching approaches?

I feel I am constantly adapting my plans to suit my learners in front of me, particularly my Year 11 PE class. I wrote an outline of lessons for the first few weeks of term, and I have already changed this multiple times! As this is a Senior class, I want to ensure students have ample time to really understand the topics, so they can effectively explain and apply their knowledge. Sometimes this means spending twice as long covering a topic than I had initially planned for.

Last year I co-taught Years 12 and 13 PE. We realised throughout the year how so many of the students had gaps in their knowledge from their previous years, especially for anatomy, biomechanics and exercise physiology (which is the most difficult unit for most students). As a department we realised we needed to be increasing student understanding at a deeper level in Year 11, to better prepare them for Year 12. Therefore, although the suggested time to spend on anatomy, biomechanics and exercise physiology is probably about 7-8 weeks, I am planning for about 12 weeks. I would rather the students have a greater understanding this year, in prep for next year, than try to smash out more units. Quality over quantity. This can be quite difficult, because we obviously want our students to achieve their NCEA, but I would prefer they achieve Merits and Excellences and less credits, than more credits at an Achieved (or Not Achieved) level.

To achieve this, I have had to have regular conversations with students about their understanding, to ensure they are ready to move on. My inquiry this year is about blogging in Year 11PE, which I have found to be a great way to formatively assess student learning, and adapt my teaching to suit my students gaps. By reading through their blogposts, I am able to identify the parts they're still struggling with, and revisit this in a different way from before. For example, I am trying a variety of revision activities with this class currently, such as Kahoot, mix and match activities and team challenges (I will be writing a post about these different strategies in a couple of weeks, but see some of my observations here). If something works well for some students whom I struggle to engage, or who are struggling to understand, I try to replicate that in future lessons.

Therefore, to continue to feel I am flexible in my teaching, I need to continue to take risks, continue to read students posts to gauge their understanding and continue to seek student voice. In future, I think it would be useful to have more conversations with students about what they thought about the activities during lessons. I often think about the activities, and how I think they went, but don't as often ask the students what they think. I have started to collate some of their responses from a Google Sheet.

Observing Learn, Create, Share in Action

Today I observed Karen Ferguson (her blog here) and her Years 7&8 in Design and Visual Communications (DVC) class. I chose to observe Karen because she is a COL leader, is our Google go-to at school and is currently part of Google Class On Air. Therefore, Karen has experience with visible teaching and learning, and the Learn, Create, Share process. I feel I am still developing my confidence to incorporate the learn, create, share pedagogy into my practice, so this was the focus of my observation.

I asked three students the steps of accessing their learning from when they walk in the door, and what they thought about it. These were their responses;

• We go onto the rotation sheet because that has our tasks. I like because everything is in one place. I don’t have to go lots of places to find my files.
• We go here to see what we have to do, and what we have to do next. I like this because if I don’t know what I am doing, I can just go here to see what I am doing and then ask for help if I don’t understand
• Miss gives us instructions and examples of what we need to do. We can also see the rotation sheet and this shows us where we need to go and what we need to do. I like it because it’s easy for the teacher and us to see our work, and the teacher can see our blogs too.

The rotation sheet the students mention, is the tracking sheet of tasks (see picture below). Students access this Sheet to see what they are expected to complete, where they are up to and where they are heading, which is great accountability, and tracking of their learning. I have been attempting to use tracking sheets in my practice this year, particularly in Y11 (see Sheet here). These tracking sheets allow for differentiation within the class, which was evident in Karen's class today. The students were all working at different levels, on different tasks, in different parts of the room - it was incredible!

Reflecting after the lesson, I feel I am heading this way with my students slowly in Year 11, but definitely need to refer to the tracking sheet more often in class. Like the class I observed today, I probably need to include the expectation to access the tracking sheet at the start and/or end of every lesson, to continue with their tasks. I suppose with the nature of PE, this is a little different though. I also realised all of the students' links are open for anyone to view, but in my classes most of the students' creations are only visible by myself and the student. The students in today's observation were using their peers creations to support their learning journey, which I thought was incredibly powerful. Moving forward, I would like to encourage students to share more of their work with their peers, so they can learn from one another, rather than always learning from me! I hope that this may engage and motivate more learners in the classroom too, particularly the students who rely on me helping them individually.

Finally, I asked students to give me an example of when they have completed the Learn, Create, Share process in DVC;

• We learn about an idea or something, then we design and make it and then we share it - usually with our peers like a presentation, sometimes on our blog.
• Miss gives us a template to write our ideas on, and then we create our own. After we have finished creating it, we have to put onto our blogs for evidence to show that we have done it.
• We learnt about different types of clocks, and then based off of the different types of clocks we had to make our own. Once we drew and made our own clocks, we shared on our blogs with a description of what we did and our creations

Although I am trying hard to include the L,C,S pedagogy, I do not feel my students could articulate how this is evident in their class like the students did today. This is an end goal for me for next year. To do so, I need to make the process more obvious to the students, by referring to the process more often. Our balance and stability lessons (see Autymn's blog, and Isiah's blog to see further), were a great example of the process. The students learnt about a biomechanical principle, participated in a practical, created a resource to represent their learning and then shared on their blogs a synopsis of the learning process. However, I don't think students could yet explain this as Learn, Create, Share. Something to work on.

Overall, I enjoyed the observation, and think that having a specific focus meant I took away much more than if I didn't have a focus.

Time is Passing By Quickly!

I cannot believe we start Term 3 tomorrow. I have completed 18 months of teaching! Time is flying by, so thought I would take some time to reflect on how I am tracking related to my 2017 goals.

1) More time for me

Throughout Term 2 I felt like I had barely any 'me time'. I felt very busy and incredibly stressed trying to juggle everything, especially with a bad back. However, since I started teaching, this has been the most social term I have had so far. I spent lots of time with my friends, rekindling friendships I hadn't spent much time developing last year, and strengthening my relationships with my closest friends. So although my taha hinengaro is a little down, my taha whanau is the strongest it has been for the past 18 months.

During the holidays I read a book about Matariki (see my reflection here), and this made me realise how much I love to read for pleasure. So throughout the coming term I need to spend more time reading and doing things I enjoy - that isn't work related!!

2) Read educational blogs

Due to my regular engagement with Twitter, I have found lots of blogposts to read, which I have really enjoyed. Some posts have made me reflect about my own practice, some have shared resources, and some have encouraged me to explore further. Throughout Term 2 I have tried to leave comments here and there, because I know how much I love when I have comments on my posts! Cheryl and Marc both started working at Tamaki this year, and have embraced blogging, so I regularly read, comment and share their posts within my own.

3) Experiment with more digital tools

Last holidays I attended the Google Summit, and one of my takeaways was Google Expeditions introduced to me by Angela. As part of the Y10 exploring substances unit (resources here), we completed an Expedition called Human Anatomy, Respiratory System - Smoking and Your Lungs. This enabled us to track down the trachea and into the lungs to look at the alveoli then explore what can happen to the lungs from smoking cigarettes (see the below pictures). The students were incredibly engaged and asked lots of questions about the lungs, oxygen intake, cigarettes and other effects on the body. So, this new digital tool was a great success, which I will definitely be including again next year! I am hoping to include a couple of others into my anatomy revision lessons with my Year 11s in the coming few weeks!

  

I have also tried to include educational games into the lessons, as I know many of our students love gaming. These include the alcohol clock game, a cyberbullying decision making game, Anatomy Arcade and Interland. I feel therefore, I am tracking well with this goal and look forward to learning and implementing more tools.

4) Attend more extra curricular activities

I have watched a girls rugby game and a girls basketball game during the term. I was able to make connections with some students who I have struggled to connect with in the classroom environment, and also see some students participate in another part of their lives, which was so great! Last year I enjoyed supporting the First XV, and hope to attend a game or two during Term 3.

Throughout Term 2 I leapt out of my comfort zone and started coaching the U17 boys basketball team. I played miniball when I was much younger, but never basketball, and I have certainly never coached it before! I have had lots of support and fun so far, it's been a great learning journey! I will reflect in a few weeks once the season has finished.

5) Include blogging into 11PE

This is part of my dissertation and inquiry process for 2017. I will be reflecting on this specifically in a couple of weeks, because our next PCT meeting is about inquiry, and so is our next #NZBTchat.

I feel overall though, that for most of the class blogging has improved their confidence and their writing. Others have struggled to post, who I will continue to work with throughout the next term. I have really enjoyed reading through the students posts, and seeing their portfolio building up! 

Bring on another big term, with heaps of exciting things on the way including teaching sexuality education for the first time!

Giving Back to the PENZ Whānau

As previously posted, I attended a Health, PE, and Outdoor Ed conference last week. I stepped out of my comfort zone and decided to present twice this year! Before starting presentation prep, I realised that I had never created my pepeha, so this was my first step. A pepeha is how you introduce yourself, related to the community you identify as home and your ancestors, spoken in Māori.

I worked alongside Whaea Melba, our HOD of Māori to create my pepeha, which was an awesome learning journey. I found out a lot about the history of the land I grew up on and more about my whakapapa (genealogy), and became incredibly interested in my family connections to and with the land. Melba asked me to write out my pepeha on popsicle sticks, cut up each word and then match the words to practice putting my pepeha together. I enjoyed this task as I was physically moving the words into place and practising how to say the words at the same time. After a few weeks of practising, I was excited to finally present my pepeha at conference! 

My first presentation was with my friend and fellow HPE teacher, Mallory Bish. Mal and I moderate a Twitter chat (#NZBTchat) together, and have found Twitter to support our journeys as Beginning Teachers. See more about the chat here, and more about our BT journeys here. Unfortunately, our chats are very quiet currently, and we are struggling to recruit new BTs onto Twitter. So, we presented about the affordances of Twitter both professionally and personally in hope for newbies to join in. Please see our Google Slides presentation below, which also includes my pepeha. We also showed/taught the attendees two digital tools - Plickers (example here) and Lino-It (example here).

I really enjoyed creating this presentation and running the session with Mal, as we have grown as professionals as well as grown closer as friends (check out our costumes below for the conference dinner - the characters from the movie Up!). We were also incredibly blessed to have been awarded together the PENZ award for 'Outstanding New Professional'! I feel so proud of our achievement, and incredibly thankful. I was nominated for the award by Celia Fleck for sharing on my blog and Twitter alongside the moderation of #NZBTchat. Until last Sunday night, I had never actually met Celia before, we had just read each other's blogs and interacted via Twitter - again showing the power of Twitter! So I feel so blown away she nominated me for this award without even knowing me. Please see Celia's blog here.

Other people who have been incredibly supportive of Mal and I, and the development of the chat are Rachael, Carl, Susie, Alex, Hayden, Myles, Hanchen, Stuart, Andrew and Paul. These people have been there every step of the way, and without their help, challenges and critiques we would not have continued to moderate our chat, nor would we have presented at conference! All but one of these people we 'met' through Twitter!

My second presentation was more of a show and tell session of my visible teaching and learning, followed by a Q&A. I showed how my students access my site to see their learning resources, and how my planning is also available for teachers. I also demonstrated some ways to use GAFE applications within teaching and learning, and then answered questions the attendees had about anything I do and know. Finally, I showed how Blogger (and blogging generally) can be used for the learning journeys of teachers and students. Reflecting on the session really highlighted to me how much I do know, and how much I have learnt throughout the MDTA programme over the past 18 months! Shoutout to Dorothy for getting me to where I am today, and continuing to push me to have the greatest knowledge possible. I also found the GAFE conference last holidays to be incredibly useful for educators of any experience with Googley things.

I loved giving back to the HPE community, and hopefully the attendees took away something to reflect on, implement into their practice or experiment with!

PENZ hui - Past, Present & Future

This week I was blessed to be able to attend the national Health, PE and Outdoor Education conference in Papamoa. You can see my reflections from the 2016 conference here Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. The conference brings together educators from early childhood through to tertiary, with the aim to connect with others and learn from others too. Last year was a little more intense because there were more sessions across the three days, and I didn't present (this year I presented twice, post here). Therefore, I am able to summarise my key reflections into one post from this week (although a little long!).

The proverb for the conference was;

Hapaitia te ara tika pūmau ai te rangatiratanga mō ngā uri whakatipu

Foster the pathway of knowledge to strength, independence and growth for future generations.

This shaped the theme of the conference; Past, Present and Future. The essence of the theme, is to ensure the greatest future for our wharekura and tamariki, we need to reflect on the past and analyse the present.

Three presenters shaped the opening keynote of the three days; Professor Ian Culpan, Cameron Smith, and Helen Tuhoro. We were challenged to think about the shift from humanism to neoliberalism, the need to challenge the norm and to consider what our role as HPE educators are today. Even after all of the other sessions, these presentations were still my favourite.

Ian questioned whether we have really changed from military style, teacher directed teaching? Explored the 'norm' and wondered what we are doing to break down the norm? What stuck with me the most, was his exploration of biopiracy - if one complies to a particular view of normality, then one is rewarded (i.e. skinny, eats vegetables, exercises regularly). I have been left thinking about how to discuss/challenge these normalities with my students, without upsetting anyone. Something I need to think about further...

To further support Ian, Cam questioned what it actually means to be physically educated? He spoke of an 'old school' Junior PE curriculum and I felt waves of guilt rush over me as what he was describing reflected our curriculum in some respect. Moving forward, Cam suggested that students are to learn how to think critically about movement, rather than how to throw and catch a ball. I feel I am still only a beginning teacher, but hope to make some changes next year!

To conclude the keynote, Helen shared her journey creating a new school, in a low socio-economic community. I felt captivated by her story, and found myself relating to her on a small level. She blatantly stated that if students don't like what is happening in the classroom, then they won't come. I have seen this at my school on numerous occasions. It saddens me that there are teachers whom don't care if their students are present in their classes or not, and I fear there are students who don't want to be in my classroom! What can I do about it? Ask the kids. Ask what they do or don't like. Ask why they haven't attended, or have walked out of classes! Helen also quoted Theodore Roosevelt, because for many of her (and my) students, care is the foundation of an effective learning relationship and environment. She summarised by explaining the importance of putting the learner's into the drivers seat. As part of a PCT meeting last term, we discussed this article about learners in the drivers seat (see Cheryl's post reflecting on our discussion here).

I attended two sessions on cross-curricula learning and the inclusion of literacy into the PE curriculum. I have blogged before about the importance of including a variety of literacy strategies into our teaching and learning, but these sessions were great to show some specific examples to use within my subject. Carl's example of gathering letters relay style and then creating words related to a particular theme or idea was a stand out for me. This encouraged group work, key words within a theme and correct spelling. I can see this being a great activity to complete both in a practical sense in the gym and in the classroom. Other resource ideas, which I took away from Ormiston College (Brendan, Jefferson, & Simon - Literacy Coordinator), were a word jumble including conjunctions to create sentences, telephone whispers (groups of 4 to define, draw, define and identify a word), and concept circles.

Next term I will be beginning my first sexuality unit, which I am really excited about. As I have not taught before, I feel nervous about how to effectively teach/facilitate and how to include sooo much into only a short period of time (7 lessons). Lesley-Ann, a Family Planning representative, encouraged us to think critically about a variety of topics within sexuality education. Rather than standard strongly agree to strongly disagree, our continuum was four corners (strongly agree, agree, disagree and strongly disagree). The four corners encouraged us to really think about where we placed ourselves, because there was no middle or neutral. I love how in less than an hour, I felt like as a group we had covered so many difficult topics and had really been challenged, highlighting how much I can potentially explore with my 7 lessons. I also liked another alternative to continuums we were exposed to - step forward or step back for agree or disagree (and then asked to put ourselves into the other person's shoes and consider why they might think that way).

Recently I have been tackling some of life's challenges, and have been reflecting on my own resiliency. I have pondered whether I even understand what resilience is, therefore wondered how to include into my curriculum. The final session supported this thinking further. Pip Woodward explored the meaning of resiliency and suggested we cannot teach how to be resilient, but we can teach how to reflect on situations we have been through and what we have learnt from these situations. To grow resilience, we need to focus on our strengths, which can be harder than focusing on our weaknesses. This is something I need to consider for myself personally, as well as within my teaching. A growth mindset, rather than a fixed mindset. Thinking about the risks versus the rewards, without taking risks, how can we reap the rewards, as Chris Betcher explores. One resource Pip suggested was Dr Seuss' book Oh, The Places You'll Go! I have found this narrated video, which could be played while the students have the text in front of them and highlight/annotate the text (also another literacy strategy).

Overall, I have taken a lot away from the past three days, and cannot wait to head to Otago for conference next year! 

Know Thy Impact, You're A Leader

Our teacher only day today had two focuses; unit planning and restorative conversations.

Recently, the middle leaders have created a unit plan, which they would like to have consistent across the school. The house representation on the left were some of the many things taken into consideration when developing the unit plan template for teachers, as these are the key parts of our teaching and learning at Tamaki College. In addition, we were suggested that students reading and writing levels should be considered, inclusion of opportunities to increase literacy and numeracy and pastoral care logs may change how particular activities are managed.

Our deputy principal, Russel Dunn, spoke about the importance of lifelong learning, and how we might see it in the classroom. He discussed how students won't 'close their lid' at the end of the period (or earlier than!), because they want to continue learning, even after the bell goes. This really made me think about how so often I feel like my students do want to leave as soon as the bell goes, which really saddens me. This suggests they aren't engaged in learning and aren't interested to learn more, therefore I need to adapt my teaching so they don't feel tempted to close their lid. So, I will attempt to seek some feedback from students this week about the learning activities and lessons, in hope for some feedforward to increase engagement.

The key message I took from our discussion before heading into creating a unit plan, was to know thy impact - a message from John Hattie, the golden rules for educators.

Other reflective questions we were posed, which I am still reflecting on include;

What is success? Can the students explain what success looks like? What is expected of them?

Can students self regulate? Are they able to identify on their own strengths and weaknesses when they have met the expectation/success criteria of a task?

We spent a couple of hours throughout the day attempting to use the unit plan template to create one of our own units. We were also encouraged to use data as often as possible, in order to improve current unit plans.

Part 2 of the day was a restorative practice session, encouraging teachers to get into the learning pit. initially we were asked to think about low level behaviours in the classroom, and categorise the behaviours, then discuss how we would respond to the situation (see below photos).

We were then given the scenario of students gaming or on Gmail chat during a lesson, and then we needed to role play a restorative conversation using the acronym WARM. Please see my previous post about the structure of restorative conversations. This short clip also discusses restorative questions. As small groups we created short videos acting out a response to this scenario, which is a positive conversation, a restorative follow up. Please see below the example of Whaea Melba (HOD Māori) and Mrs Pamaka (principal), which I thought was a great example.