Beyond a Blackboard

This year I have ensured to cover careers education, as I understand the importance of providing these opportunities for my learners. The Ministry of Education explain that students need to be aware of different career pathways and the knowledge and skills that are required to follow various career paths. It can also support students to be more motivated about school and higher education. This term I have done a lot more work in this area than I had previously and I introduced a range of occupations to my learners, from architecture to engineering to working for the police. As a school we have invited lots of different individuals and organisations in to talk to our students about their careers. I have found that this has had a positive impact on my learners, as they are far more aware of the different avenues that they could pursue. I found that they particularly learnt a lot from the engineer that I put them in contact with. He reported the importance of maths and physics for e...

This term my teaching inquiry has been focussed on eliciting rich discussion from my learners and supporting them to justify their answers. I have been focussing on this across the curriculum and I have found new ways to promote discussion in different areas. In reading I have been using a mixture of reciprocal and guided reading all year. My students are now able to follow the reciprocal reading cycle in their groups without my support, and they can engage in great discussion. However, I have used guided reading alongside this to probe the students for deeper responses; to make inferences and judgements about the text. I also encourage my students to use the text to justify their answers during this time. In writing I have utilised peer feedback to get my students discussing their writing more often. I also use language experiences and text analysis at the start of the year, so that they discuss their ideas before they put them to paper. The use of text analysis has been able to g...