Working with a beginning teacher (BT)

So far this year I have worked with three different teachers and three completely different styles of teaching and planning. This has got me thinking about they way I teach and plan. This term I am working with a BT (beginning teacher) and I have already realised that my way of planning lessons doesn't gel with there's.

This is one problem you have when planning and teaching in a team. I have had to adapt my way of planning to suit someone else. Now, I can hear some of you asking 'why doesn't the other person change theirs?' and to be honest fair comment but as an experienced teacher and them a BT is that fair? I have the experience to adapt and change where most BT find this quite hard to do.

I don't plan long detailed planning these days. Back in the UK we were always expected to have detailed planning of every single lesson and even then I found that hard as I had a tendency to chop and change everything. These days I don't plan in so much detail and I tend to plan the first two days and then from that gauge how the rest of the week will transpire. My planning is fill of scribbles annotated notes or post its. I am quite happy to go off on a tangent if it means meeting my students needs.

I am someone who can pretty much think up an idea on the way to work and run with it. I chop and change my planning, ideas and pretty much my day sometimes.

This isn't for everyone.

I began to realise this in the first week with my new colleague. While I was explaining my ideas about blocking out the whole morning for reading and writing I could sense she wanted actual times. I had envisage we would mix it up a bit. Set whole class teaching of the writing, let some go off, small groups teaching, a bit of reading, back to writing etc. What they wanted was a lot more structure and a block for reading and writing.

I am learning (slowly) that sometimes you have to let go your ideas and slip into others even if it is not want you want. There will be time for me to help develop my new colleague into being a little more flexible but for now my role is to be supportive and help them become a great teacher.

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.

Do MLE actually raise the academic achievement of students?

Edchatnz is a great Thursday night twitter conversation that is fast paced and really gets you thinking. Last week’s conversation was no different - MLE Modern Learning Environments.

Lately I have distanced myself from this term as since beginning my journey into this area, I have realised how much my opinion and ideas have changed. I have realized and seen that although some schools use the term MLE they still teaching like a single cell classroom just in a bigger space.

I began to question what was really changing. Had we misinterpreted what MLE were supposed to be? Should we have never introduced the ‘bean bag’ catch phrase? Had we run with one idea and forgotten to look at all the other parts of a MLE? Is ‘modern’ the best word to use at all?

A lot of educators have been throwing out the term MLP- Modern Learning Practices. To sum it up teachers are creating a personalised, collaborative and reflective classroom. This is where I am. I teach in a single cell classroom in a school where the buildings are older than me! But I am changing the way I teach and think students should learn. My pedagogy is changing and becoming more in line with what students of today need.

One of the questions raised by the devil’s advocate aka @BeccaSweeney was Do MLE actually raise the academic achievement of students? This is what others thought.

I have been questioning this as a parent and a teacher. To be honest, I don’t think they do. It’s more about the MLP that is happening inside these buildings rather than the building itself. And this can happen in a brand new  building or  a 40 year old prefabs. The only bonus of a MLE is that you can easily fit more than 30 students into a room and it allows for more collaboration among teachers.

I made a hard decision last term to pull my son out of a MLE. I began to realize some MLE schools believed that by letting students move from class to class to be taught by different they were  ‘modern’. Yet they were still streaming their reading, writing and maths groups.  I wrote about this and my own personal battle about how we were trying to develop a more MLP and what I felt wasn’t working. The more I reflected on my own teaching and learning practices with my own class the more I became aware this was not happening in my sons own school. Therefore I made the decision to move him. I realized by putting him into a school that worked more on MLP rather than focused on the MLE his own mindset about school and learning had completely changed. I suddenly had a child who was learning and wanted to learn!

So no, MLE don’t raise the academic achievements of students it is more about the teaching and learning and how inline it is with MLP’s. This is only my own personal experience and I also think a lot also come down to the teacher/ student relationship as well as how dedicated a teacher is to wanting her students to succeed. But then if they’re dedicated, they are probably a teacher who is always reflecting, changing and looking at ways to improve themselves to meet the needs of their students.

This has got me thinking a lot about where I want to head with my journey. So far we still stream for maths and reading. This is something I want to try and change next term but and still unsure how. Mainly because this term we had two new teachers start with us and next term I will have another new teacher starting. I have to think about what is best for my students but also what is best for a teaching coming in half way through the year.

With 112 students and five classrooms where 3 are still single cell it does face me with a lot of challenges. I know where I want to head, but it is the getting there that is causing me headaches!

Part of me still feels I am only halfway there with my MLP’s and I have areas I still need to work on and change.  Where we are focusing more on MLP I can see the benefits. In those areas I can see that students have succeeded and are enjoying their learning. My job now is to work out how to continue and develop my MLP’s so that the whole day is like this.

Collaboration- It's a winner!

The great thing about planning as a team is all the wonderful ideas everyone else comes up with. This term we have been trying to link all our subjects together more rather than just stand alone lessons.

Our Topic this term has been ‘Change’ and we decided to look at it from the scientist point of view and investigate solids, liquid, and gases. The idea was that we wanted to do some hands on experiments that even the students could do at home with their parents.

As I have been somewhat unhappy about how we have been planning and integrating our learning I decide to try a more ‘cross curriculum’ approach to these lessons.

We had just finished two weeks on ANZAC where we based our reading and art work on this and we had thoroughly enjoyed it. So we decided why not continue.

The hardest part about doing this is all the ideas everyone has and narrowing it down to what is best for the students. Planning together is great but there has to be an understanding that your ideas may not be used. I think this can be a hard one for teachers to grasp and understand as obviously we all have great ideas!

The next challenge was to try and link it to writing!

This is where one of my colleagues came in with the book ‘The Oobleck’ by Dr Seuss. This is a book I had never heard about and when I Goggled it I realised that making Oobleck was a thing. Straight away I was hooked!

Collaboration works as on my own I would have never come up with this idea. To be honest I don’t think any of my ideas would have been this exciting either.

What we managed to do was link our writing, maths and science from just one book. It meant that even though I only have some of my homeroom students for an hour a day when we were talking about Oobleck they knew exactly what I meant.

I have always been a big fan of planning together and trying to link more of our subjects together and so far it has paid off.

So simple yet so effective

Term Two started with a change in teacher, change in classrooms and a slight accident. Because of changes that occurred at the end of term two, one of our team members moved up to the senior school therefore we employed a new teacher. This meant that we had to switch two classrooms around (and teachers) to support the changes we had made. Then our team leader had a slight accident that (at the moment) will see her out for four weeks.

So it has been a busy two weeks for me!

When I last posted I wasn’t sure how I would feel about term 2 and doing exactly the same as we had in term one. However, slightly small changes have seen me feel a little more comfortable.

With is being 100 years since Gallipoli, we decided to start term two with a mini Anzac Day unit. What came out of this was we ALL decided to do the same planning throughout the team rather than the spilt planning of two ‘power’ teams. That meant we ALL used the same big book (Dawn Parade), taught the same writing and completed the same art ideas. Now before you think-  exactly the same? We structured it so that we used the same resources but we still had the freedom to teach it in a way we liked rather than feeling like synchronised  swimmers.

What this meant was when I got my own class back, I could refer back to resources like the big book, or the clip we used for writing and they knew what I was talking about. To me it flowed more and I felt more connected with my own class. We also were ALL talking about the same things throughout the team and no matter if we were in homerooms or literacy we were ALL on the same page.

As a team, we all enjoyed this and therefore decided to continue this for the next two weeks. Our Topic this term is ‘Fizz, Bang, Pop’ with a science focus (which I love as I personally feel we do not teach enough of it in the primary sector).  Therefore we found a book that would tie into our topic and are also uses this as the basis of our Topic work in the afternoon. We will also been incorporating our maths into this as well.

It doesn’t answer all my concerns but we are making changes that I personally feel are positive ones. Because we mix and change the students throughout the team rather than just between two classes, us ALL teaching the same things makes more sense.

We will see what the next two weeks bring but I am feeling a lot more positive about how term two is shaping out.

Wow, this has taken a while to write.

 It’s taken me nearly three weeks to finish this blog as I have had to question a lot. I have doubted myself, had to think hard, question my own ability, reasons and question if I had my own fixed mind set about how I taught.

Last year when I started giving students more independence, own timetables, group teaching rather than whole teaching it felt right. I enjoyed what I was doing and feedback from the students also showed this. Yes, it took a while to get there but in the end I think as a class we thoroughly enjoyed it. This was me trying hard to take on MLP in a single cell classroom.

This year it has been different. Although we are still single celled, we are planning as a team and working more together in twos or threes  rather than individually. So why then do I feel disjointed, lacking enthusiasm and not enjoying myself? This is quite a hard thing to admit as I have to question myself, my surroundings and where I am working. I am quite good at reflecting on my own teaching and learning. I know I can be very head strong, stubborn and see things very differently to those around me. I feel I have had to sit back and accept things, question less and go with the norm (even when I am not sure it is right). Is this how I want to teach? Is it me?

I guess this is why it has taken me a while to write this as I really do have to reflect and wonder if it could be me. I enjoy the fact that we are working as a team. I love the fact that I am not planning on my own, coming up with my own ideas and feeling a little like I am by myself. I enjoy bouncing ideas off others, listening to different ideas and views.

But I feel more constrained and restricted then I did last year.  As a school we have been encourage to change our way of teaching and work more closely as a team. To have a growth mind set and to look at things differently.

What I am wondering?

·         Are we really making a change?

·         Have we actually made a difference?

To be honest, I don’t think we have.

To me it is like a messy desk, moving things around and making piles isn’t really the same as creating a tidy desk. And I feel this is what we are doing. We have moved students around given them different teachers for different subject but have we actually really changed the way we are teaching?

The truth is no.

I have been questioning these MLE where they think giving students different teachers all the time is MLP. But is it? We are meeting the needs of your children by grouping them and they may not have their usual teacher. Isn’t this the same as streaming, groups, setting (or any other words you want to use)? Is this really MLP? What are we doing differently?

And I guess this is what I have struggled with this term as I feel this is what we are doing.

Do we really need to split all five classes up? Could I not work with the teacher next door with just my own homeroom and theirs? Teach more small groups rather than whole class? Give students the choice?

What do I want next term?

Integrate our topic so I don’t have stand-alone lessons.

Give students more of a voice.

Feel excited about teaching again.