Effective Communicators Launch!

We have officially ‘Launched’ our terms Effective Communicator!

This term it is our team’s job to promote one of our new graduate areas. All last year as a school we worked on what we wanted our new dispositions to be called and the steps in which students would achieve them. Where would they start at the beginning of school? What they would need to do to achieve the next step and so forth. We used words like ‘starting’, ‘learning’, ‘using’ and ‘leading’.

Each team was given the challenge to launch a new one each term. We choose Effective Communicators. Term one was Team Players where as a whole school we spelt the words out on the field and the Ninja Turtles arrived by helicopter to present us with a gift. Term Two was Self- Managers and the whole school watched a magician and he promoted the idea of Self manager.

Now it is our turn! One of the main ideas I had wanted to do was to promote Effective Communicators right throughout the term. Rather than just having a launch at the beginning of the term, I wanted to continue involving the whole school until the end of term three. Making sure the students had a good idea about what it meant to be an effective communicator.

I am very fortunate that I work with a great team and there were plenty of ideas flowing. Knowing that I am a ‘yellow’ brain and that I tend to think outside the box, I did run a lot of the ideas past our principal first to gauge whether or not I was heading down the right track.

Obviously I can’t give away what we are doing all term but I can show you our first week and what we did.

We first used our News Centre to communicate to the rest of the school they needed to watch our video we had made.

By watching the video, they received their next task.

The clue was printed onto a colourful background and rolled into a scroll and placed into their Effective Communicator bags.

The first weeks clue to solve

Each class has their own bag.

Ideas for Term Three

It’s only week 9? I am finding this term has gone incredibly slow. Term two has been interesting. Having taken over the ‘team leader’ role, I feel I have only caught up with everything that I had to do. I am lucky to get half a day a week release time but it does make my week feel very disjointed.

 Last week I spent most of the week assessing reading. This week it is writing and maths so I can complete all the reports due out in week 11. I find it interesting in the first 3 years of schooling we test more than we do in the last 2 years at primary. The crucial years where we want them to develop a love for learning we are constantly testing them over and over again (that no doubt will be another blog for the future).

This is the time where I start reflecting about term 3 and what I want to do. To be honest, I have no idea. My head is full of ideas but reality is I am not sure if any of them will work.

We have another new teacher joining us which means so far every term someone new has joined the school. This is great but does mean re thinking how we group individual students. I know what it is like joining a school half way through so I want the transition to be smooth and somewhat less daunting.

Ideas that are milling in my head are;

·         I want to get away from grouping in maths

·         I want to integrate reading, writing and topic into our morning block. Begin to take small groups rather than whole class teaching.

Problem there is we don’t all take our own homeroom students and whatever we planned would need to flow back into the afternoon without any issues.

·         I want everyone to team teach this term

Only two of us do this as their classroom is big enough to cater for this. Idea would be to do this for writing and maths as some of us are still in single cells.

Term 3 Reflections.

Last week the class reflected on what Term 3 was like in our classroom.

We used three criteria's:

• What worked in Term ?
• What didn't work?
• What did we want to see in Term 4?

Students opted to work on their own or in groups of their own choice. The conservations I over heard were amazing. My students were really reflecting about the three questions and the language they were using made me feel so proud. Words like, self manager, independent, options, student voice could be heard throughout their conversations.

I wanted to punch the air as it finally seemed to all be working.

One BIG issue I have had with all of this change is how long it 'seems' to take. It wasn't a 'quick' fix and there were times I wondered if it was all going to work. I guess I thought all children by now should be 'self managers' and it has taken me a while to realise that this isn't always going to be the case.  There are still some students in my class who are 'directed' learners. I would say 2 definitely and another 3 now and them. So I guess out of a class of 26 that is pretty good. I think until I did this Term 3 reflection. It wasn't until I heard them discussing and talking about the questions did I realise how far they had come.  Rather than just say 'this didn't work"   they were trying hard to find alternative solutions and working with other groups to gather ideas.