I have now created another Blog for use by the Year 7/8 teams at school as a way of sharing knowledge and communicating about the new literacy initiative. Check it out at
jacqueh.globalteacher.org.au
I am heartened by the number of responses I have recieved from colleagues to this blog. Hope this is the beginning of a really useful dialog. Thankyou for all the responses.
This post is to test the Avitar I have just created for the site. Also have done more reading and think I know how to set things up for mulitple users.
After becoming excited at a meeting at school last week (yes sad is’t it) where our Year 7 and 8 teams combined and started talking about our own learning I have had the idea of starting another Blog for the group. The idea being that we would all be recording our learning by keeping a journal, but if we have a blog we can use it to post comments and discuss things online, so as well as looking at student literacy, which is the focus of our discussions, we will be learning about and using web 2 tools. some of the logistics still escape me though. I don’t know how to give lots of people access to be able to post on the site rather than just write comments or whether this is necessary and comments are enough. Need to do some more thinking and investigation.
I followed a link on Will Richardson’s blog the other day and ended up watching a video presentation by Chris Lehmann principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, about how they go about enquiry learning at that school. http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/988-Progressive-
Pedagogy-and-21st-Century-Learning.html
Despite the dreadful focus of the video I was mesmerised by his presentation, which went for almost an hour. I am finally starting to get an idea of what this is all about. I was particularly struck by his 5 step description of the enquiry process and where content fits into the overall picture.
The role of content teaching has been a real problem for me. I remember Will Richardson saying at the workshop I attended in May that we didn’t need to teach content because you could find it so easily. His example was his child being taught all the capitals of the states in the USA and what a waste of time this was. I have been uneasy about getting rid of content, but in the model proposed by Chris Lehmann content and skills are taught as part of a larger process and I can see where they fit into the enquiry process, but are only staps along the way and not an end in themselves. I am starting to feel that I may, at some time in the future , be able to get my head around this stuff.
I need to follow up by looking and Chris’ book and also Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggers and someone esle so the next job is to track these down.
Today I spent the day in the 5/6 unit at Wooranna Park P.S. looking at how they organise teaching. It is very different to a conventional classroom. The unit has 100+ students and 5 teachers. The students move around the unit which has lots of different teaching spaces, small groups with 1 teacher will be involved in Target Teaching, larger groups will be in a workshop and other students will be working independently. All of this is very structured. Students have a timetable to follow and move from activity to activity. All went very smoothly. The students were organised, articulate and on task. Very impressive.
I am finally beginning to see how we will function next year in the new buildings. However there are still many questions about how this approach will translate into a secondary setting, and what we will need to go through to get to the point Wooranna Park are now. The whole process takes huge amounts of pre-planning and work by the team of teachers. We were also told that some teachers experience burnout under the strain.
Much food for thought.
This is the first posting in a journey that really began last Monday when I attended a seminar by Will Richardson, in which he discussed the role of Web 2.0 tools in education. I felt that a whole new world was being revealed to me. I am just starting to learn how this all works and how I can use it in the classroom.
