Future Focussed?

By -
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 engineering, but expressed that he was not a strong writer at school.  A lot of my students could relate to this and found this quite meaningful. He was also very impressed with the students ICT and the fact that they were learning to code.

This caused the students to realise that they are quite privileged to belong to a cluster of schools that promotes the use of ICT, different media and programming skills, as it is not offered in all schools yet. We had a large discussion regarding this and they began to identify some of the other special skills that they have learnt so far, such as movie making and editing.

I look forward to hearing from past students in the future and learning which career path they decided to choose.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unpacking Our Reading Journey

By -
Image
Over the past two years I have been able to track a target group of students in my literacy group. The students are all girls except for F and G but these boys left in 2018.  I wanted to track this group closely this year as they came to me with reading ages between 8 and 9, where our learners seem to get stuck. In the first year, some were able to achieve accelerated shift, while others only made 6 months. Student End 2017 End 2018 End 2019 A 8.5 9 11 B 8.5 10.5 12 C 9 10.5 13 D 9 9.5 11 E 9 10 11.5 F 8.5 10 / G 9 9.5 / I focussed on those that had made the best shift and surveyed them to see what they thought caused it. F said that he enjoyed the topics that we were reading and that he was reading more. B and C had similar answers, with my hunch being that B made so much shift due to reading more at home. In fact, I gave B an extra text every week. In 2019 I attempted to give the students texts that they would find more interesting, and for the end of term 1
Read more

Inquiry 2018

By -
As the year draws closer and I reflect on 2017, it is time to consider what aspects of my practice I wish to work on next year. This year I completed an intervention and dissertation on mathematics; specifically using differentiated approaches to accelerate the learning of all of my students in a mixed-ability setting. I learnt so much from this intervention and it has altered much of my mathematics pedagogy and use of my class site.  However, next year I would like to focus on writing, as this is another area of the curriculum that some of my learners struggle with. As I will be teaching a year 7 and 8 class, I must ensure that my teaching will support the students to transition between intermediate and high school. It is also vital that I facilitate accelerated learning so that they can cope with the literary demands of college. I would like to investigate the use of text analysis, peer and self assessment to make the connection between reading and writing explicit. In t
Read more

Top Tips for Online Learning

By -
Image
With the world in lockdown every teacher is having to make adaptations for online distance learning. To help speed your learning journey,  here are seven top tips that I've curated from the experts Harry Fletcher-Wood and Dr Nina Wood at the  Education Hub . 1. Students attention spans are going to be far shorter . We know that there are many distractions for children at home and they are definitely not dedicating six hours of their day for school work. We don't want to overload parents either - if there is too much content and they have multiple children things get very tricky. A couple of hours of learning a day is great. In fact, my 11 to 13 year old students tend to clock out after about 90 - so I make the most of them! 2. Your learning activities need to be simple. We don't have the chance to meet face to face with students, to answer questions as they arise, so our tasks need to be easily introduced and explained. It is helpful to use a similar format each we
Read more