Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Techniques that affect student learning the most!

Frist of all I would like to thank Dr. Anne Davies for sending this interview discussion link to me!

Dr. John Hattie, Professor and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at theUniversity of Melbourne, Australia speaks to introduce a panel discussion entitled Visible Learning after his book. What I found most helpful was the list of techniques that have the most effect on student learning. When you watch the video these techniques are on the slide show beside Dr. Hattie. The top of the list is Studihent Expectations! Teachers must set standards higher than what students think of for themselves to keep challenging them. Most students don't know how well they can achieve until they unleash their potential. This is what the teacher needs to tap into and he/she can do this by setting good expectations for the students. This will help the student learn to self teach. I also noted that in the top ten was Micro Teaching of which I first heard at Teacher's College at Brock University. Cathy Miyata taught Micro Teaching in our Language Teaching class as well it was taught in our Cohort - this was our first Teaching project when we were working in our practicum. You know you've received good up to date education when you see recent studies indicating a reflection of the things that you've learned. Other techniques among the top ten are: Response to intervention, providing formative evaluation, classroom discussion - Grand Discussions  and feedback! Part of my Professional development is continually learning and when I see a review of what I've already learned I take the time to reflect on how I've demonstrated my learning and I seek to continue to put it into practice.


Friday, September 14, 2012

My Professional Learning Day at a glance!




As you probably know that when we have a Professional Development (Learning) day the students have the day off as well. So today was my day to entertain as well as to use it as a Professional Learning day since I was home. These are some of the things I was able to accomplish:

I introduced a diorama to a student, my daughter. She created a home for Nemo in a diorama using construction paper, scissors, pencil, markers and glue. She used an extension of a Mermaid sticker fold out sheet to extend Nemo’s home along each of the sides of the box.

I set up a webpage for a student, my daughter in SK, for fundraising for the Terry Fox run on September 27th.

I discovered a new blog “We are Teachers” http://bit.ly/QfYRAo  with interesting posts and guest bloggers.

I found out about a new ebook  “Why School?: How Education Must Change when Learning and Information is everywhere” by Will Richardson  http://amzn.to/O3QTMf from @colinjagoe for which I’m trying to search on kobo but to no avail.

I reviewed “The Daily Five” by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser and reflected about applying it in my previous classrooms. I also remembered learning most of the content in Teacher’s College.

In the afternoon, I lead a craft with a student, my daughter in SK, to make a Panda Bear Puppet. We used brown paper bags, construction paper, scissors and glue. My daughter had so much fun.

Then we played a game; hide and seek with a giraffe puppet. Whoever has the giraffe puppet was hiding and the other person must find the puppet (or the person with the puppet).

This went on for a while until we took a break then we played another activity – we played doctor. One of the patients was so sick her temperature went up to 5 million percent (corrected to degrees) and she had to get a house call from the regular Doctor, then the Dentist, followed by Dr. Squirrel and then Dr. Whale was able to cure the illness. Horray!

Combining Professional development with my daughter’s activity is very interesting, and demanding, I might add, but all in good fun!

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Supply Teaching is on the Palette for this year!

I am thrilled to be Supply Teaching at another private school this year. I have new resources that I can reference such as Differentiated Literacy Centers by Margo Southall and The Daily 5 by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser. In addition I am volunteering at my daughter's school so I look forward to all the wonderful work and learning experiences that this may hold. In addition I have "The Occasional Teacher's" course under my belt which I enrolled in and successfully completed during my time at Teacher's College. It was a supplementary course to the regular teaching courses that I was required to take so it seemed like a heavy work load at the time. However, I'm glad that I participated in it because I feel that it has already helped me in my last year of supply teaching. So I plan to be well prepared to manage almost any grade and subject that may come my way this year. Wish me luck!

My daughter's day of orientation to Senior Kindergarten was today and I had the opportunity to meet her teacher. Let me first comment on the classroom and how impressed I was. The classroom was huge! I learned that it was a double room which was to be shared with another class. This was even better because the two classes are planning to share all of the centres which are set up (reading, writing, water table, play doh table, building and drawing centre etc.) This is fantastic. The room was neat and tidy, well organized and the walls had only the important information on them. I think the teacher did a good job of planning her room and decorations/wall information to optimize the classroom space to the fullest and I shared my thoughts with her.