What does 2015 hold for me?

You can tell when teachers are back working while on holiday as Twitter once again is filled with their blogs. A lot have been reflecting about 2014 and what they want to see in 2015.

A lot happened for me in 2014 and I have tried to get onto the ‘blog train’ and reflect about all the changes that have been taking place. But for me it is all about 2015!

I am moving away from my comfort zone completely. Yes, I am making a change which I am excited about and at the same time terrified. Not only that, but the school is also making a lot of changes which I am super excited to be part of.

So what am I going to be doing?

I am going to be teaching year 3/4 students. The last time I did this was over 12 years ago and in the UK. For me this change is important. I need to be able to confidently say I can teach a range of year groups and have a solid understanding of them as individuals and how they fit into the New Zealand curriculum. I love teaching older children and enjoy the banter and conversations you can have with them. They are also a lot more independent! So I am slightly worried about how I will cope with younger students. Moving from year 5/6 is a big leap but I'm sticking with the idea of ‘what my year 5/6 students could do, so can these 3/4 students’ (It just may take a little more scaffolding and time).

The other change is that we are going to be working in teams rather than having our own individual class that we would teach throughout the day in our single cell rooms. I’ll still have a group of about 25 students that I will over sea for pastoral care but it won’t be like last year where I only taught those children and they were ‘my class’.

Our year 3/4 intake is big (over 100 students) therefore we have four classrooms but 5 home-bases (we have yet to work out a name for this) as two classes are going to be in one room. My concern is the odd number and how this might work. Collaboration between 5 teachers could be interesting as well as movement of over 100 students around the classes and school.

 Part of me wonders if we will break off into two groups and have 2 teachers together and the other 3 as a team.  I also wonder if we should have made a separate year 4 class with two teachers while the other 3 taught year 3. At the moment we are still trying to work this all out.

We have a tentative timetable and what we might see happening each day. Thursday seems to be the day where we will see every single student in our team (that we have called Arohanui) through the rotation of subjects we are doing. I am excited about whom I am working with and having worked this way before, I know that communication is the key. We all have expertise in different subject areas which is great but we also have our own ideas as to how a MLE could be run so we are going to have to tread carefully.

Still I have a few concerns. Maths is one of them. At the moment we are grouping students by ability and each teaching a group of students in a classroom. To me this is still what we have always done. I am not a big fan of ability setting and while in the UK we moved away from this and I enjoyed teaching mixed ability. We are trialling mixed ability lesson on Thursday which is what I will be taking (all classes during our rotation day) so hopefully we can branch out if this is successful. Also how will we work this? I guess this is when I jump onto Twitter and get help from my PLN to come up with ideas.

I like change. I have always taught different topics and chopped and changed the way I teach things every year. I am looking forward to this and I know there will be a lot of hurdles we are going to have to overcome. Questions will be raised and hopefully solutions will be found.

 As we are still set up as single cell classes (some walls will be cut through but not for a while) it will be interesting to see how this work. We are lucky that two of our classrooms are big; hence we can fit up to 50 (maybe) into the one room. So I hope that we utilise this as much as we can.

The biggest thing for me is how will we teach the students so that we are moving away from the traditional way of teaching?

This year, I hope to try and blog about what is happening to me as a teacher as I grapple with year 3 and 4 students and the changes taking place in our school.