Beyond a Blackboard

How well do you reflect on your inquiry? While it is common practice to reflect upon the outcomes of an inquiry, reflecting on the inquiry process itself is often overlooked. It might be that you struggled at a specific stage - data collection or generating hypotheses, so it is important to identify this as an area to work on for your next inquiry. This afternoon we met for our first CoL PLG for 2020. Our focus was to reflect on the inquiry process in terms of the things that worked well and the challenges that we faced.  What worked well in 2019 One of the strengths of my 2019 inquiry was my ability to monitor and tweak the approaches that I was using. I knew mileage was key for my target group and that I had success with reciprocal reading in the past, so I started by increasing the number of texts I gave my learners and the number of times I met with them for reciprocal teaching.  I later realised that I was giving them far too many follow up activi...

This year I am fortunate enough to be taking part in Manaiakalani Class onAir once again. Class onAir involves recording a lesson sequence and posting it online for the world to see. I share everything from my planning, lesson resources and the students completed learning at the end. Not only is this helpful to other teachers, but it supports me to reflect on my practice and challenges me to up my game!      I am just one of many teachers who are part of this programme. Over the years these teachers have covered a range of subjects from new entrants to year 13. You can explore the website here .

My 2020 CoL Inquiry Focus: “Will reading across the curriculum lead to improved reading outcomes?" The Manaiakalani Community of Learning is working together on this task using the expertise existing in of our community of learning. I have selected the achievement challenge of:  Increase the achievement in Years 7-10, in Reading, Writing, and Maths, as measured against National Standards and agreed targets. The teaching as inquiry framework I will continue to use in 2020 has been specifically co-constructed for Manaiakalani schools using our familiar Learn Create Share structure. Throughout the year, I will be labelling my blog posts to reflect our Learn, Create, Share structure. LEvidence Learn - Gather Evidence CPlan Create - Make a plan SPublish Share - Publish LScan Learn - Scan CTry Create - Try new things SCoteach Share - Co-teach LTrend Learn - Identify Trends CInnovate Create - Innov...