Sharing and Modeling

Photo: @Karen0986

Earlier this term Karen Ferguson, one of my CoL colleagues from Tamaki College came to visit us in LS2. She spoke to my learners about how we use self assessment in our learning. Karen's blog post about her visit can be found here.  Although initially a bit shy, it was great to see how my learners were able to talk confidently about their learning. I was able to see from Karen's conversation with my learners that I scaffold this quite a lot, and perhaps need to lessen this to promote increased independence. My take away is to visit Karen and have a similar conversation with her Year 9/10 learners. Doing this will help me blend into my instruction, some of the self assessment language she uses to set our students moving on to Tamaki College, up for success.

Today Dot Apelu, another of my CoL colleagues from Tamaki College came to observe us in LS2. Dot had seen a previous post I wrote and contacted me about sharing my practise. Her summary of our initial discussion is here. I explained to my learners that Dot was here to see how we used some of our learning strategies to strengthen our understanding to new learning. 

To model our dialogic learning in practise, I asked my learners to identify and summarise the main points of our learning linked to our work with Tamaki Wrap the previous day. I explained that we needed to hear their learning talk so it was important to use their words, and as we moved around the groups I observed something that was new to us at the beginning of the year, is now something perceived by my learners to be the norm. They were able to explain their thinking and use examples from the available information (including our rewindable example of the flipgrid they created yesterday) to support their reasoning. 

The well established collegial connections we have in place in Manaiakalani are definitely as asset to both our teachers and our learners as we work towards bridging the transition gaps between Year 8 and Year 9. My take away from today is to make time to observe more of my colleagues across our cluster, as the best professional development is available right on my doorstep.