PTC 4

Criteria:
Demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of personal professional practice

Key Indicators:

• identify professional learning goals in consultation with colleagues
• participate responsively in professional learning opportunities within the learning community
• initiate learning opportunities to advance personal professional knowledge and skills

What this means at Halcombe School:

• Identify professional development needs in response to class needs.
• Reflect on teaching practice in order to improve
• Take a full and active part in all school PD and support other staff in their professional development.
• Take responsibility for own PD; through release time, observations, readings, inviting observations of yourself, videoing and reflecting

____________________________________________________________________________

10th May 2016:  Shared Writing Observations

Today I observed and was observed teaching shared writing.  I enjoyed visiting R5 to see how Kirsten did her shared writing.  Discussing what we had seen as well as the benefits of the process was very useful and I'm glad we had time in our staff meeting to do this.

17th May 2016:  Staff Meeting Guided Writing

Had a useful staff meeting today around what guided writing is and how to do it.  Considering I never do this, there were lots of messages for me to take on board.  I need to be better at this, and plan to timetable it so that I am initially 'forced' to do it.  I'm looking forward to teaching guided writing (and shared writing), but just worry about how to fit everything it.  I will just have to figure out a way!

16th August 2016:  Writing Reflections

During a staff meeting, we had the opportunity to reflect on how things are going in writing so far.  This information was then collated and shared with our BOT.

31 March 2017
Today I attended a Sexuality Education course in Palmerston North.  The purpose of the course was to familiarise ourselves with the new resource we have purchased and to start thinking about how we are going to teach Sexuality Education this year.  The course was excellent, and has given me a lot of confidence to teach this content.  We have a lot of work to do in terms of how we are going to make it work at our school, consultation of parents and the subject content we plan to cover.  


24 May 2017
Our staff meeting this week focused on Rich Tasks, and how we really know that our students understand they have learnt.  It was an interesting discussion and certainly made me think about my teaching.  It seems such a basic concept, but I think I could do a better job of finding out if students really do understand.  I will be thinking about what we can do at the end of our next inquiry group that could be considered a 'Rich Task'.

20 June 2017
Completed a First Aid Course.

Inquiry Learning Survey - Student Voice - 7 August 2017
In order to gather feedback on how the students in my class feel about inquiry learning, I designed a survey to gather some student voice.  I collated the information and summarised the key points.  Overall it was very affirming, though there are some good points that the students have raised that I need to keep an eye on.

TO VIEW SURVEY - CLICK HERE

Sample Of Collated Results:

Key Points:

Sexuality Education - PMI Chart

This year, we have implemented a new Sexuality Education Programme.  This has been run for an hour per week, for ten weeks.  At the end of the programme, I reflected on how things went using a PMI chart:

PLUS:

• The scheduling was good – one hour per week for 10 weeks was just right.
• The confidence and ‘comfortable-ness’ of students really improved during the programme.  Students were nervous and hesitant at first, but most became far more comfortable.
• Establishing the rules and going over these at the start of each lesson was useful.
• The resource was fantastic - very user friendly.
• The Question Box worked very well.  I have also kept all the questions.  This is now a great resource for the future.
• The informal discussions I had with parents about Sexuality Education during the programme were all very positive.  Parents were nothing but supportive and all thought it was great that we were teaching this topic.
• The way we approached the content area was a plus – it was okay to have a laugh.  This made it more bearable for everyone!
• No bookwork was a plus and made a nice change.
• The professional discussions I had with other staff during this unit were great.  Everyone was interested in how our lessons were going.
• The best part for me was challenging stereotypes, and forcing students to look at different aspects of society in a different way.  We had some awesome discussions about this, and for the most part, the kids were incredibly mature and open to having their ideas challenged.

MINUS:

• There was quite a lot of prep work involved in preparing lessons, but now that I’ve been through this once, it will be a lot quicker next time.
• There are a couple of lessons I would approach differently next time.  They were a bit ‘dumbed down’ for our kids, and I would pitch it at a more advanced level.

INTERESTING:

• Even after ten weeks, some students still felt very uncomfortable with the topic of Sexuality Education.
• Some students who are normally super confident, took the ‘pass’ option when directly asked to respond.
• There were massive gaps in the knowledge of many students about what I would call basic information about puberty.  Some kids had no idea of what is about to happen to them.