Beyond a Blackboard

 Wow, I am super eager to get started with my inquiry this year. After spending a couple of weeks with my two main classes, I cannot wait to get further into investigating their learning. In fact I'm probably too excited in terms of narrowing down my inquiry focus. On one hand, I have an amazing opportunity to focus on reading. This year half of my class are 'stuck' at an 8-9 year old reading level. I also have one group slightly lower and one group who are at. I have spent the last four and a half years focussed on reading, with particular focus on this level. This could be an amazing year to get shift and work with this level on a larger scale. But after spending so long focussed on this, would it truly be an inquiry, or more putting my past inquiries into practice on a larger scale? On the other hand, my real passion started with maths. It was the topic of my dissertation and a subject I really enjoy teaching. I love planning for maths - I can clearly imagine learning pa...

What a way to end a term! This morning we fled our classrooms on the promise of coffee, pastries and a day full of professional development at Glen Taylor School. It was a fantastic day full of experts sharing their knowledge on effective reading practice. Ko te Kāhui Ako o Manaiakalani - Dr. Rae Siʻilata and Kyla Hansell   The day kicked off with a keynote by Dr Rae Si'ilata.  This was inspirational. My biggest takeaways were to use more bilingual texts, to broaden my use and understanding of multi-modal texts and how sharing the power in the classroom is so important. I will be looking further into these slides and reflecting more about the provocation in the holidays. Engage the High School Reader with Multimodal Resources - Kerry Boyde-Preece and Maria Krause   This was a fantastic refresher about the use of multi-modal resources, not only to build engagement but to enable students to be more cognitively challenged. This is something I am always interested in; ...