D24 - Educational Trends

Educational trends or initiatives come and go all the time.  As educators we like to keep up these as we all know education is forever changing.

Today's post from the 30 Day Reflective Blogging Challenge is what educational trends captures your attention and why?  I know for me it is anything where I can teach more meaningful for the students such as the work from Jeff Anderson or personalising learning with a strong link to LwDT.

However, I think the bigger question isn't about what educational trends that capture you, is how much of it do you get to try out and use authentically to make it your own before moving onto another trend?

For me and my experiences I have seen a lot of trends come and go quickly through our school.  For the trends that have stuck with me, has been the PLP (personal learning plan) which the children have all their individual targets to work on and how Jeff Anderson delivers his lessons with a strong reading/writing link.

It is up to the schools to take a good look at these trends, see how it fits them, and give their staff enough time to experiement, get it wrong, play around further, discuss it, make it their own, keep the parts that fits, then move onto the next.  The saying that springs to mind is: quality not quantity!

 

Day 23 - Community Involvement

As a school we always have someone coming or going through the school whether it is to support the Environmental Group, talk to a syndicate, view the school, or support learners in their classes.  

Reflecting upon how I meaningfully have the community involved I instantly thought about social action. As an teacher I haven't had much success with social action.  We've always thrown the idea out there and got the children working away at it but they loose steam as they are waiting on a response from someone or it didn't quite workout the way they wanted.  This is all a part of the learning process with social action however can feel like a waste.  Again throwing caution to the wind, social action is on the cards again for next term!

So what do I define as meaningful involvement?
This can come in multiple forms:

• Sending an email to gain knowledge/information from an expert
• Visiting a site to learn more about what they do and/or help out for the day
• Experts coming to visit us
• Children getting involved in worth causes like the SPCA cupcake day 

And the list goes on.  I believe community involved is a vital part of learning.  A lot of children want to change the world, for our social action this year we are looking what we can do either at a class/syndicate, school, or community level. The children are looking to change the mindset of it's not just about fundraising it is about doing more.

A bit more information about our Social Action for Term 4

As next term our overarching theme is "Let's get Accelerated" instead of doing careers, like we normally do, we thought it meant using their learning targets to do more, push more.  So to motivate the children we watched a TED talk:

Stephen Ritz: A teacher growing green in the South Bronx

Session 2:
From there we got the children to complete a Bronfenbrenner style diagram with them at the heart of it.  Each level being: me - class - syndicate - school - community.  They were to list the things that concern them.

Session 3:

The next session we got them to get their diagram out again and have a think about what learning they were going to get out of it and tentatively choose a topic.

Session 4:

We emphasised the choosing of a good group that these were groups of 3.  They then chose a topic that they would like to do and start to map out the following:

• Timeline - what were they going to do when (8 week window)
• Holding time - what are they going to do while they are waiting for responses etc.
• Targets - what targets were they going to achieve?
• Learning - what learning are they going to go from this?
• Workshops - what workshops would they like the teachers to run

We are looking towards this week getting the children to cement what they did in session 4 so we can match them to one of the teachers in the house to be their mentor and who they work with for this project.

Day 20 - Curation of Work

Sharing and celebrating the learning of your class is an important aspect of learning however sometimes never gets any further than the walls of your classroom.

Technology has been one way to curate students work and as it becomes more and more accessible the limits is becoming boundless.  Over the years I have experimented with Wiki's, e-portfolios, and last year with a class Weebly.  To be honest, a person who isn't ICT challenged, I found it like putting another subject into my classroom that I didn't have time for.

This year, with the new found motivation through my lovely LwDT teachers Leigh and Barb, I have started up a class blog through Blogger, as we are on the Google platform, to each child having their own blog.  The children are starting to want to blog things about their learning.  

Now the next step is how to build our audience!

Day 14 - Feedback to Feedforward

Thinking back to teacher training we were taught the CRC method (comment recommend comment), encouraged to do a lot of written comments, and some verbal.

Almost 8 years down the track, experimented with lots of different ways, and many PLD sessions later.  I have discovered a few things about feedback, it has to be:

• timely - given in the moment but also enough time for them to act on it
• focused - linked to what they're learning/doing to give it meaning, to push them to do more either to extend further or to rise to meet the expectation

I have spent much time sitting and writing comments in children's books for it to be not read or acted upon.  I have found the following strategies to work for me:

• verbal - having 1:1 conversation with the child, I can gain better understanding of what they are doing, if there are gaps or a need to push.  With that they also need time to be able to act upon it, usually they are back before I know it for further discussion.
  NOTE: to indicate that I have had a conversation with the child or sited their work, I sign and date it for a record for me and the child.  I either make anecdotal notes and/or remember what we talked about.  Usually sessions follow each other so this is not hard to do.
• Google Comments - when the children submit a piece to me I am able to highlight a section and leave a comment, they are able to reply to it and we can have an open dialogue about their learning



Comments section using Google

• question - when addressing the learning I ask them questions, getting them to think further about what they're doing or why they did what they did

 Feedback has to be meaningful, or I believe it's not worth giving it.