Asking for help.

Do you as a teacher do this?

Do you feel confident to do it without being judged? We expect our students to always ask for help or advice but as teachers are we role modelling this enough in ourselves?

I will admit, I ask for help but only with those I feel will give me constructive feedback that will help me. And sometimes it's not just those who I teach with, more often I will ask my PLN and head to Twitter to find my answers.

One area that I have learnt to ask for a lot of help is Reading. After spending a year with year 2/3's I began to see a whole range of readers and what worked for one didn't necessarily work for others. I was lucky enough to work alongside two teachers who were trained in Reading Recovery.

I used their expertise a lot and was for ever asking questions and pondering about how I was going to 'move students on' who were 'well below' or 'below' according to national Standards. I actually learnt a lot from both of them. There was so much I hadn't thought about and a lot of skills they used for Reading Recovery that I had never seen that were ideal for my students. I have continued to utilize their expertise even though I am now teaching in the senior area.

Recently I asked our Reading Recovery Teacher if they could give me some feedback about two of my students. I was stuck. I couldn't see how I was going to make changes if previous teachers couldn't. I had exhausted all the strategies and ideas that in the past I have used and in my reflections I wasn't seeing progress.

I didn't see it as failure, I saw it as wanting the best for my student and asking someone with more expertise than myself in this area.

Sign Language Week.

When you have a child in your class that's first language is Sign, you try as hard as you can to integrate as much sign as you can into everyday class life. This has been my goal this year along with more Te-Reo. Although my student is hearing, both parents are deaf. I have wanted to learn as much as I can so that when I meet them at parent interviews I can at least greet them and 'try' to communicate a few things about their son.

It's been interesting for me as Sign doesn't fall under ESOL (correct me if I am wrong) because he was born in NZ yet English is his second language. Which begs me to question what is there for children (who hear) of deaf parents? L is quite capable but there are noticeable differences in his phonics, blends and vocabulary. 

An example of this was when he sat the Star test at the beginning of the year. He was looking at the picture of the parachute and he was stuck. His comment to me was, I know what it is but I don't know the word. I asked him to sign what he thought it was and he did! 

Spelling is also the other noticeable difference!  

We started this year learning sign and following the lesson plans from Thumbs Up which is on the TKI site. Although designed to be used for years 7-8 I found it quite easy to use and so did the class. It may have been because we had an expert in the class therefore we could be easily corrected.

What was great, was that I stopped being the teacher and instead was the learner. The class saw that I was also learning and making mistakes. Boy did I make mistakes! L has been a great teacher and as a class we have embraced his knowledge. Sign Language Week was one of those times. 

I challenged the class to record (on Seesaw) a few phrases about themselves. As we had completed Unit 1 of Thumbs Up they were told they had to challenge themselves! They worked in pairs and also used the NZSL online dictionary.

The class had a blast! It was also lovely to embrace someone else language.


Millie and Mihana

Aidan 

The wonderful thing also was with the help of Seesaw I was able to share the students work with all their parents. I was able to also write a special 'Thank you' to L's mum and share with her how amazing L had been in teaching the whole class. 

Promoting Language in the Classroom.

I will admit I don't pick up languages easily so for me to make my students feel at home in my classroom I have the words around the room. It means it's easy for me to see and use but also the other students can see them as well.

The language speech bubbles and the Sign Language cards with Te Reo are from Twinkl.  Although a UK based site they now have New Zealand resources. You can get some items for free but it is well worth paying for the subscriptions as there are so many wonderful ideas on their site.

I also want to respect all the different languages and cultures that are in my classroom. It is important to me to respect that students in my class have another language and culture and I need to embrace this. 

Time Table in Te Reo 

Commands in Te Reo

Labels around the room in Te Reo

Twinkl- Respect the languages spoken in my class. 

Everyday phrases I try to say in the classroom 

Twinkl- Sign is one of my students first languages. 

Effective Communicators

What we have been doing all this term all in one place!

How do you teach others to grab the moment?

Having a graduate student in my class at the moment has me pondering over a number of different things. This week I have been wondering how we train teachers to learn to adapt and go 'off road' as I like to call it.  If the opportunity arose in class would they adapt? Deviate from the planning? Grab that teachable moment?

Where do you learn this when you’re training to be a teacher?

Do lecturer’s and associate teachers help? Do they encourage them to plan but adapt? Do they model/show this and the importance of not always sticking to what is written down in front of you?

I have been trying to model this with my student because I feel that it is important.

The two I told her in the first week were:

·         First and foremost build a relationship with the students – get to know them well.

·         Learn to adapt, change, and go off timetable when the situation arises.

I still find a lot of teachers cant or (maybe) won’t do this. To me, part of being a good teacher is all about taking a risk.

By doing everything to the letter are we actually benefiting the student’s we are teaching or are we being detrimental to their learning?

Male, Female or just an effective teacher?

Like some other teachers last night I watched the Sunday programme and the discussion about ‘Boys only classes’. To be honest none of it convinced me at all. What frustrated me straight away is that the class had a male teacher. Why did the school feel that a male teacher compared to a female teacher would be more affective? Are we then saying that all female schools should only have female teachers as they will perform better?

While the environment in which children are nurtured clearly affects the way they turn out, research into gender shows that there are significant physiological and behavioural difference between boys and girls from birth. (Anne Moir & David Jessel: Brainsex). Brains play a lot in this but it is the makeup of it. They have the same functions like vocabulary, mechanics of language, Visio-spatial perception and emotion (bearing on performance at school) but research has shown that the male brain is more specialised, with each of these four crucial functions being located in just one hemisphere, whilst in female’s three of the functions take place in both hemispheres (Anne Moir & David Jessel: Brainsex).

At five a boy is typically less able to sit, to concentrate, to listen or to communicate than a girl and has a greater need for variety, stimulation and physical activity. Therefore, the early years of schooling girls do perform better than boys.  And I am in no doubt that schools acknowledge this and play to both sets of strengths so that all pupils are able to achieve well. The problem is by the end of year 1 some boys have already switched off education. Girls typically do this by the end of year 4. (This is UK research I am not sure if it would be the same in NZ).

Even before my own son I have always been interested in Boys Education. I taught in East London and usually was given the more ‘disruptive’ boys in my class and (when we used to set) taught most of them for Literacy and Maths. If result were anything to go by, I as a female teacher did extremely well educating these boys. But it wasn’t just their results, they also socialised better and were in less trouble then they have ever been before. I not talking about silly antics on the playground I am talking about full on fights, chairs flying, knife welding 10-11 year olds that on many occasions I had to restrain.  As my head teacher said, they left our school as a completely different child to the ones that entered.

Typically girls will be keen to learn; boys need a little bit more convincing.  I spent years planning the majority of my lessons especially writing around the boys in my class and what they enjoyed. Due to the makeup of one year group, I changed a whole scheme of work and re wrote the entire Year 5 units for every subject so that it focussed more around the boy’s interests.

I’m not doing this to ‘brag’ but to highlight a point Does the gender of a teacher really matter? These research findings revealed that the gender of teachers had little apparent effect on the academic motivation and engagement of either boys or girls. For the majority of the children, the gender of the teacher was largely immaterial. They valued teachers, whether men or women, who were consistent and even-handed and supportive of them as learners.

As I only have 28 minutes I am stopping. In the end as many mentioned on Twitter what it comes down to an effective teacher regardless if it is male or female.

Steve Biddulph, Bill Rogers, Lucinda Neall, Ian Grant, Celia Lashlie are all great authors who have written about boys education. Well worth a read.

Communication- How well are you doing?

Reading @Stephen Lethbridge  really touch me as a mum. His post on communication and connecting with parents especially new parents to the school just showed how much he realised parents matter but also it’s the small things.

As teachers we all know communication is important but I sometimes think we forget how vital it is. I am guilty of this and it wasn’t until my own son started to attend school, I realised how little communication we as teacher can sometimes give. Yes, I understand we need to get our own children to be more self-reliant and learn to share information but it doesn’t always work that way.

My son is your typical boy when it comes to communicating. Unless he had art or pe all I hear about is what he and his friends did on the playground. Yet my daughter would give you a rundown of the complete day, who said what, who got into trouble, what the teachers said and everything in-between!

I work fulltime and therefore can’t do the drop off or pick up like other mums can. It wasn’t until my son started school that I realised how much ‘informal’ conversation I missed out on. It’s those informal, spur of the moment chats that can tell a parent a lot more sometimes than a three way conference can because it is very personal.

I have been lucky that my child minders daughter has also been in the same class, so I have allowed her to talk on my behalf. Check-up, show interest and basically become his second mum. It made me feel connected.

Yes, the school does email and three way conferences but they are not the same. Emails can be read in a completely different way to how they were intended, three way conferences although I like them, squeeze in too much of the ‘formal’ information and not enough of the ‘informal’ . And even though I could email his teacher I felt I was the one emailing asking for updates more than the teacher was.

Obviously this got me thinking. As a parent if this is how I felt, what do my parents think of me as a teacher? When you teach year 5/6 you tend not to see the parents at all. Our school opts not to do teacher emails for various reason therefore I had to think of alternative ways to communicate informally.

Luckily the students had diaries which became more line of communication. I had working mums and dads who I rarely saw and I wanted to make sure that they kept up to date about their child. The success they were having. So every Friday, I would write a comment in everyone diary. No diary a piece of paper. I wanted them to know how much I valued them as parents but also how much I enjoyed their child in my class. Just one little thing they had done that week that as their teacher I was proud of and could share with their parents.

I also made sure that the first time I meet them or communicated to them was on a positive rather than a negative. I didn’t want parents to feel that every time they meet me, received a note or phone call it was a negative rather than a positive.

Having moved to year 3/4, I am learning even more how important it is to communicate. Mums just need it (I am sure dads do to). This year I have no diaries, so I need to think of other ways to communicate to every parent. Share with them how wonderful their child is and all the success they are having. As I said at the beginning it’s the little things that matter.

I am still thinking about how I can keep that ‘informal’ communication regular so that parents feel connected and have that connection. Ideas are floating about but at least I know tomorrow all my students will take home a little note just to let parents know something special I have noticed about their child.