Interview with Jenny Luca

Visit Working together 2 make a difference


I have just been listening to Jenny Luca being interviewed on the Wicked Decent Learning podcast. It is a very inspiring listen. Among other things Jenny explained about the ning she has set up to "detail the efforts of educators and their students who are doing their bit to think outside of themselves and raise funds for worthy causes. We encourage you to join this space, create a new page for your school and start detailing what you and your students are aiming to do to help others less fortunate than yourselves. Chart your progress on your page and we'll see what we can achieve by working together to make a difference." I have joined and I am looking forward to sharing it with my school.

Literacy for all

I was lucky enough to go to a workshop on "Comprehension for All" yesterday led by Diane Snowball and Faye Bolton put on by Australian Literacy Educators' Association (Victoria). The strategies that Diane and Faye showed us and that they recommend teachers to teach to the students are:

1. Predicting/prior knowledge use

2. Answering and forming questions

3. Thinking aloud about reading

4. Using text structures and features

5. Visualizing and creating visual representations

6. Summarising

We went through the methods of teaching these strategies and heard about the importance of using the language with students. I thought it was a worthwhile workshop to attend and allowed me the time to stop and reflect on what I am doing in the classroom when students plaintively say, "But I don't GET it, Miss."

There is a set of CDs available with film clips of classrooms where the teaching is being done in this way and I thought it would be helpful to view these so I ordered a copy of the Years 6 to 9 CD.

I would like to finish with a quote from Diane: "Research has shown that comprehension instruction can improve the reading comprehension of all readers, even beginning readers and struggling older readers. It will help your students to understand, remember and communicate with others about what they read. Most importantly, it will help your students want to read more!" And that's what I would like for my students.



Image attribution: 'CompCommDay2'
www.flickr.com/photos/59479445@N00/2627204991

Amazing Siftables

I found this Ted Talks video via the Edtech Crew and Mr Robbo who was interviewed in the last podcast. (Mr Robbo is a 2nd year teacher who uses blogging in his teaching of PE). I was blown away and will be showing it to my students this week. Hope you like it.

Getting started in ICT: a presentation by Rachel Boyd

Love this slideshare by Rachel Boyd. The abstract for this session said: "Are you overwhelmed by the spectrum of choice in Web2 and ICT? This "taster" session will examine how to pick the cream from the crop of the field of Web2 and choose what will best support learning for your students. Great for beginners, we will also look at practical ideas for the management and implementation of ICT in your classroom." Thanks to Amanda Marrinan for the heads up.

Eating The Elephant (that is ICT) and eating it one bite @ a time!

View more presentations from rachelboyd. (tags: ict educación)

Keen student bloggers

I have just started the year 8s blogging and they are in the very early stages, still making mistakes, giving away too much personal information, using copyright images without permission and writing their posts without making sure their potentially global audience will understand their idiosyncratic spelling and slang references. Soon this will improve and then I will link to the blog and hopefully facilitate some global connections. But one student has really got it. I got a comment today on the class blog:
"To Mrs Mcleay,
Did you hear about the 2009 Student Blogging Challenge on this website. It looked interesting and I was wondering what it was? It looked like we could maybe try and look into it for a challenge."

I was so happy that one of my students had found this site and made a comment encouraging our class to get involved. It is a great idea and I am looking forward to getting us started. This is some information about the challenge: "The challenge begins in March 2009 and continues to May 2009. Weekly challenges are posted here on this class blog. Students can complete as many as they wish to try. Please fill in the google form below if you wish to register either your own class blog or if students wish to register their own individual blog."

What has the first month been like?

In this post I am going to do what I often ask my students to do - step back and reflect on some amount of learning they have been involved in. As you may remember (have to review - it was a while ago) I started a new school after having a term of Long Service Leave (I guess it might be called a sabbatical in some places). It turned out to be a lot easier than I supposed getting back into teaching after such a long break. Only once did I feel a sense of relentlessness at the pace of life at school. But that was soon over. I am remembering peoples names better than I expected as well. Coming from a school where we had four periods a day of 75 minutes each, I found the new school's seven periods of 43 minutes each to be strange. But it has a certain rhythm to it, and of course, you see the students more frequently. Maybe that's why remembering names is easier. I am teaching Geography now, which I haven't taught for over ten years and I am enjoying the discipline. I love this video which I found through Jess McCulloch on the same topic that we are exploring in Year 8 Geography the diversity of Asia and the challenging of stereotypes. I am loving the energy and life of the Year 8 Homegroup I have (who I teach for English and Religious Education as well). We are getting into blogging and literature circles, and I am sure I will be reflecting on those activities when we are a bit more into them.

Some of you may know that I have been challenged with my family life with the serious accident of my 17 year old son Kieran. He was just about to start Year 12, and was newly appointed vice captain of the Under 18s Victorian state gridiron team. These things have had to be put on hold while he has recovered from a subdural haematoma and three broken vertebrae. Luckily, it looks like there is no permanent damage, but he will be doing his year 12 over two years as he can only go to school part time starting from tomorrow. He fully realises how lucky he is, but there are some things that he will not be able to resumes for several months (such as driving - he was an exemplary learner driver, and contact sports).

Another thing that I have enjoyed more than I ever thought I would has been the twitter 365 photo challenge and the 2009 365 flickr photo project. Here are some tips if you are participating as well. I am blogging about these here. It is such a great record of the daily ups and down of life, and a challenge to look deeper at my life and see a story in it. After the somewhat rocky beginning to my 2009, I am looking forward to the rest of it, and starting to fee more confident in my new role at my new school. One of the best things was that I was called up by the Head of school and given the additional title of coordinator of ICT pedagogy. It was a great boost indeed to my feeling of belonging at the school.

Circle Time

Today, all teachers at my new school had a PD (Professional Development) day on an approach we will be using as a whole school, Circle Time. Wellbeing Australia defines circle time as “a democratic and creative approach used to consider a wide range of issues affecting the whole school community. The strength of circles is that they address values, attitudes and skills within a structured, safe and supportive framework.”

The PD was facilitated by Sue Roffey and it was great not to be talked at and endure death by powerpoint on such a hot day. Sue encouraged us to get involved and the workshop was experiential. It had two purposes that I could see: increasing our knowledge about circle time and our confidence in using this pedagogy, and to build up the staff as a team, given that the staff numbers this year have more than doubled to 26 teachers. A bit of research turned up the following info about Sue: “Dr Sue Roffey is an educational psychologist and academic at the University of Western Sydney. She's spent many years teaching children with learning difficulties, and now believes that children's emotional literacy, that is, their understanding of themselves and how they relate to others, is a crucial but sometimes neglected part of their education.”

Sue herself describes circle time thus: “Circle Time is a structured framework for social and emotional learning and promoting a positive class ethos. This means it has powerful potential to reduce bullying, increase resilience, explore values and improve communication skills. It deals with serious and important issues such as understanding feelings and reducing prejudice in a way which is highly motivating for students.” There are always three rules for a circle time meeting: everyone must listen to the person who is speaking to the group, no put downs, and everyone has the right to “pass” if they do not wish to or cannot respond to a question. It is mostly about inclusion and about respect. Sue has a number of publications that I will be following up.

At first glance it seems as though it is especially suitable for primary schools, but after seeing how well it worked for us as a group of adults, I will have no hesitation in using this technique in secondary classes. I have a year 8 homegroup this year and I am so looking forward to getting to know them. I will spend a bit of time tomorrow decorating my homegroup room ready to welcome the students on Monday.

For those who have not seen my 365 challenge photos, I thought I’d put two of them here: My colleague, office mate and fellow English teacher, Mel, and a glimpse of my desk in our brand new building. The value of today for me as a new staff member was that it helped me and the many other new teachers get to know more about each other and about the values of the school. I will report back on the experience of using this pedagogy as time goes on. It is anticipated that we will be doing it once a week for about twenty minutes with the students in our homegroups, so I should something to report soon.