New School Year - Fresh Ideas

Nothing like a new school year approaching to think about ways to improve on the previous year. I am looking forward to working in a new classroom environment and it has been rather exciting sorting out the learning environment. We have gone through this company 'Class' for the furniture and you can read about that on my other blog soon.

So what is the plan for my Year 10 (14/15yrs) 2014?

This year I want to have a strong literature focus as feedback from students last year said English felt a little like Social Studies at times. We are going to focus on '100 years of texts'. I want  students to have choice in what texts and in how they deliver the work.  This choice is something that is a continual positive with students and also allows their creativity. 

What we will do is create a timeline of decades from 1914 - 2014. Students will choose their texts from decades. How they do this is up to them. They could choose an author and look at a range of work, or a genre and examine how the genre has changed, it will be up to then. They will need to look at a variety of aspects within the texts e.g. character, but they will have to look at context. What was the world like at the time the text was created? What were the possible influences? Who was the author/director? and more.
Student will have to make sure they hit a range of texts, visual, written and oral. As well as presenting their work in a range of ways. This will be for term 1 and 2. Term 3 is creative writing with workshops by our in house author and final speech presentations in preparation for school speech comp. 

I am looking at showing the students how to use sites such as Scoop it to curate information. I will give blogging another go with the class. We started off well last year but by term 3 has lost our way - students losing passwords. I am not to sure what other sites we will use and I plan to search some out this week. I will post what I come across that look good. If you have any useful ones please let me know.

Classroom Re-Design

I have been given a grant from TSB through the ISEA to visit schools with innovative learning environments. Last week I visited SCIL in Sydney and I have written about my experience here: http://modernlearningenvironments.blogspot.co.nz/  please take a look and make any comments.

English Conference 2013 - My workshop

Yesterday I presented my first workshop at the NZ English Teachers Conference in Hastings. It feels a bit daunting to present to your peers but I was very lucky and the people what chose the workshop had some great questions and made me feel comfortable. 
I thought I would post a link to my Prezi, which is mostly photos/images I used as prompts and the link to the padlet with resources. Please add to the padlet any resources or links that have been of use to you and share with others who might find it helpful.

A reflection on Term 2 and what next.

After counting up all the teaching weeks to-date is seems 21 weeks have flown past and there are only 12 teaching weeks before NCEA exams. This little piece of information I shared with my students. Despite being the final week of school many of them have a renewed focus in class.

Again I am super impressed with my Year 10 class. We decided to enter the Mix and Mash competition which has a deadline in August. I am a little worried about the time frame but the students have been motivated and engaged with their different projects. Those that did not want to enter are creating storyboards or working on creative writing.

I graduated earlier this term with Masters in Teaching, which was a huge achievement and something I am quite proud of. It has however, led me to thinking about what my next step should be. I am still somewhat unsure and this sense of what next and for what purpose makes me feel somewhat unsettled. What I am finding is that I love working with teachers as much as with students and I have a strong interest in the potential for change in education – so how to combine the two?

As a teacher at an independent school I took to opportunity to apply for a TSB grant offered through the ISEA. I recently found out that my application was accepted, which is very exciting. My proposal was this:

I would like the opportunity to visit a number of schools in NZ and Australia that have redesigned their learning spaces to reflect a 21st century approach.

A number of primary schools, intermediate schools, secondary and tertiary schools have made this change. However I am interested in how an English classroom which caters for students studying NCEA can be redesigned.

There has to be a solid pedagogy behind the design of learning spaces and I would like to put together a portfolio that contains case studies of different learning environments including the pedagogy and vision of the schools. From here I plan on creating my own 21st Century learning environment. I plan on documenting this change and the effect on classroom learning.  I want to make this information available for other teachers and schools.

I plan to create a blog with what I discover and my journey.  Any help, advice or guidance would be very welcome. Either via this post or through email.

Modern classrooms

I am interested in redesigning my classroom; making it more 21st century. However, I am wanting to see what other secondary/high schools have done. As well as this I am interested in what English teachers are doing and how they are changing their teaching and learning. If you know of any good website or schools, please can you let me know.

Student blogs

This year I thought I would try a blog with my Year 10's. I am so pleased and that the students are keen, so we have the blog up and running. We spent a lesson on how to set one up, privacy and getting that first post up. The students have been really responsible and I think are enjoying getting the thoughts out there. I designed it so that they have their own blog with a link on a class blog, that way  at the end of the year they can till keep control. 

Please take a look through and comment on their work so far as it would be encouraging
http://yuilley.blogspot.co.nz/

ICOT 2013: Simon Breakspear - Radical innovation for learning

Simon Breakspear provided a workshop for the ICOT 2013 via Skype and despite the technical difficulties is was a thought provoking workshop. Essentially we need to be providing students with skills, as it is skills that are needed now and for the future. However the question is what skills will be of value? and how to we design programs that enable this learning to take place? But what we do know is that it is important to find ways for students to learn these skills as Andreas Schleicher (Deputy Director for Education and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary-General) states: "Skills have become the currency of 21st century economies" 

Students need to be problem finders and problem solvers. I think  some of the important skills  that they need to know are how to: create ideas, how to build and create knowledge and how to know how they think. Simon Breakspear talked about learning design and prototypes. Rather thank having students redraft a piece of work getting them to design and create prototypes. Having teachers design structures to capture peoples/students best ideas in order to create innovation.

Creating a 'live learning experience' - learning design
What is the minimum set of features that you need in order to begin the process of feedback and discovery. The website 'Design thinking for educators' is well worth a look through and even has a pdf you can download on Design Thinking. Here is another link to the Opening Minds Curriculum a practical example.

I am not sure if I have captured the essence of this workshop with this post but this is one workshop that has had me thinking and wanting to learn more. For a more in-depth and succinct blog post on this workshop read Hazel Owen's Blog

On a side note my favourite quote from the workshop:
"Smart may have the answers but stupid has all the interesting questions"