19/7: Reflection - National PENZ Conference - Past, Present, Future

Reflection: National PENZ Conference - Past, Present, Future

19th July

From 10th - 12th July I was down at Papamoa College attending the National PENZ conference. The conference is made from a wide range of educators, from Primary to Tertiary, along with other external providers from the 3 key organisations of Physical Education New Zealand, Education Outdoors New Zealand & Health Education Association New Zealand. This year's theme was around celebrating the past, understanding the present and looking forward into the future. 

Across the 3 days I was able to attend a variety of sessions, present my own session with Georgia & continue creating many new connections. Like last year, I had many great takeways from conference and hope to share some of my highlights.

The conference started off with 3 key note speakers - Professor Ian Culpan to represent the past, Cameron Smith to represent the present & Helen Tuhoro to represent the future. These 3 speakers were a great way of captivating the theme right from the start of conference and are my first highlight. 

Ian is one of the creators of our current New Zealand Curriculum document. He emphasized he would be to trying to address the influences of what is happening in our learning area. This started with the idea of HPE being the hostage of politics, ideologies and cultural concepts through key themes of controlling and discipling the human body and normalisation of behaviour. However, he wanted to remind us that HPE is a learning area based around humanism and the development of people. Throughout his Keynote Ian got us thinking about how we ensure we challenge these 'norms' we are faced with everyday.

Cameron's key theme was putting the emphasis in the value of Physical Education not physical outcomes. He got me to reflect on what the role of a Physical Education teacher is, ensuring that we are putting the learning and sociocultural thought at the forefront of our subject and whether we are doing enough in our junior curriculum to cultivate critical thinking. He also gave fun practical examples of how our students could learn, in, through and about movement rather than through theories in a classroom. One example was how Deb Robertson is trying to get away from formal standardized assessments, so is instead getting her students to reflect throughout the units.

Helen finished off by inspiring us all through Tarawera's journey. Helen spoke about the importance of relationships and giving students hope. To do so at Tarawera three things needed to change; the people, the environment & the curriculum. This involved the creation of the MANA (Manakitanga, Ako, Ngāku-pono & Āwhina) acronym and asking the questions of what are we here for, what do we want from them and how are we going to do it? Key points that I am going to take away is ensuring that my students see the point in every learning activity and where it is taking them in the bigger picture. Key quotes I am also going to take into my practice include:

• "Great teachers engineer great learning that put the students in the driver's seat"
• "The first step to raising achievement is by raising engagement"
• "If it is not tough and doesn't challenge you it won't change you"

Tracey Clelland along with Rachael Dixon & Jenny Robertson's presentations also stood out to me. I decided to go to these as I am currently trying to rewrite the Year 9 Health programme. Tracey's presentation was around building resilience. She gave us some activities that we can take into our classes to get students to truly think about who they are through using 'the power of vulnerability' and how we can put the '5 Ways to Wellbeing' in action not only within our classes but our own communities. Rachael & Jenny's was around teaching and learning activity ideas around the topic of Alcohol & Drugs. This 90 minute session gave us ideas on what we may want in the unit and activities that can allow us to challenge our students thinking. These activities included; continuums, scenarios, identifying influences & PIPS. Look out for a future blog post to see how my unit planning is going and how I have used these ideas. 

Another highlight was Sara Hayward's 'Engaging the disengaged' presentation. This session stood out to me as it closely links through to my inquiry for the year of how to create independent learners.  Sara's improvements were made over 3 years with the same cohort. These findings were inspiring and being able to talk to others in the session helped me to brainstorm new ideas. Not only was I able to pick up on some new ideas, but it also allowed me to acknowledge that I have been on the right track in what I have currently been doing and that maybe all I need is extra time. Keep an eye out for a future blog post on specifics that I took from Sara's presentation and how it has helped my 2017 inquiry. 

Other highlights included Lesley Park & Alison Schofields presentation on troubles with marking and moderation surrounding Level 2, Mike King's closing Keynote and presenting my first ever PENZ presentation with Georgia on our BT Journey and the part Twitter has played (see her post on this here). Georgia and I also won a prize for our costume (pictured below) and of course we were both humbled when we were awarded with the PENZ award of Outstanding New Professionals!

Overall it was another successful conference in which I am walking away with new ideas and inspiration, new connections and having finally met other educators that I have been previously connecting with!

20/6: Reflection - Life as a BT Presentation

Reflection: Life as a BT Presentation

20th June 2017

Last night Georgia and I had the awesome opportunity to go and present at Takapuna Grammar. The presentation was to a group of HPE students who are just finishing their study at AUT. The presentation was based around life as a BT. The opportunity arose as Hayden Viles (teacher at Takapuna Grammar & tutor to the AUT students) contacted the pair of us via Twitter. He thought it would be a great opportunity to have his students' questions answered by current BTs. 

In the lead up to the presentation we were sent 10 different questions which had been collated by Hayden, covering key points from his students. We started by writing our ideas down on a Google Doc before transforming them into key points in a Google Slide presentation. 

In some ways the whole presentation was a bit of a surreal experience. Students were taking notes throughout the session and asking extra questions. Some were even asking for advice! By being able to share my teaching journey so far, along with my learning curves and experiences, I hope others can take away tips and learn from some of my own mistakes.

Overall the feedback on the presentation was postive - even receiving a tweet from one of the students who was at the presentation last night thanking us for the presentation.

So what was the relevance to my own professional learning by taking this opportunity? 

By answering the questions given to us it actually forced me to stop and reflect holistically on my first year and a half of teaching. Not all of these were questions that I had previously thought of myself. 

A second part was being able to give back. By sharing my experiences I hope that it may help others in the PE community. I would have loved to have received an opportunity like this before starting teaching. To be able to question a BT and ask them about their experience, it would have helped me feel more prepared. Knowing how much I would have valued the opportunity as a student myself, why would I pass the opportunity to do this for someone else? I realize that everyone's experiences will be different but at least you can enter your first year of teaching with some advice and answers, rather than unknowns. 

1/12: Reflection - Planning for 2017

Reflection: Planning for 2017

1st December 2016

At the start of Term 4 and only having one junior class, I was wondering what I was going to do with all my spare time once my senior classes had left. Looking back now I'm laughing at how naive I was. Who was I kidding this is one of the busiest times of the year! PD, planning and meeting after meeting.

So over the past few weeks I feel like I have done so many different things and learnt so much. So what have I been up too?

• Language of Learning in Physical Education
• Co-constructing the Junior Programme
• Reviewing the Junior Health Programme
• Creating NCEA L2 Assessment Booklets & Resources
• Integrated Learning

Language of Learning

We all know the simple words of identify, describe, explain and evaluate but what do they actually mean? Different people and learning areas can hold different views on what they expect when using these words.

Alex, Dan & I worked on creating a Language of Learning for Physical Education. The purpose was to help both Teachers and Students alike by allowing consistency. Consistency of language in class discussions, questioning through to NCEA standards and Cambridge papers. Take a peak at what we created below:

We are associating key words and questions under each of the verbs and these are even broken down to potential sentence starters. To remain consistent we will ensure that these verbs, questions and sentence starters are used in the Junior Programme, including our Achievement Criteria and in our NCEA standards and booklets.

So we started with this and finished with our document below!

We are also looking at creating these into posters to be able to display in the gym and in our other teaching spaces!




Co-constructing the Junior Programme

As King's offers both Cambridge and NCEA we had to ensure that our Junior PE Programme will set students up for future success no matter which pathway they choose. We made sure to list the skills and subjects that students would need in future if they were to continue on in our subject area.

We then revisited the 8 units across Years 9 & 10 that were used this year. As this was the first year that this sort of structure had been put into place in Junior PE there would be a lot of repetitions for next years Year 10s if we were to keep the programme the same. We decided to make the call that the Junior PE Programme would be seen as a two year programme in which students could collect all the skills they would need in their future PE pathways by the end of the two years. We made sure to alter the units to suit this idea of the two year programme and then cross-checked them with the list of skills and subjects we believed the students needed to cover. After deciding the content we refined and recreated the Junior units to include our Language of Learning.


Reviewing the Junior Health Programme

As there will be 3 main Junior Health teachers in 2017 our Head of Health, Chris, set up a meeting. He asked us to bring along ideas and resources for us to review.

He started the meeting with what I thought was a strange question - "How do you like your eggs cooked?". We all answered with our personal preferences. He then went on to explain that when students enter the class they all bring different preferences and opinions but that the purpose of Health is for us to listen to others even though we may not agree.

From there we had a look through different resources that were available to us, some of the ideas, topics and curriculum areas he thought we should cover or focus on. We had a look at the possible lesson outlines to start off Term 1 and gave some suggestions and ideas on how we might tackle them. It was a great way to see how different teachers might handle similar content by putting their own spin on it.

Chris' plan is for us to continue having little meeting like this throughout 2017 so we are able to share activities and ideas that have worked well for us so that others may get to try.


Creating NCEA L2 Assessment Booklets & Resources
Next year I will be teaching Level 2 for the first time. To help myself become familiar with the standards Alex gave me the task of creating the Assessment Booklets & Resources. She would give me an assessment to be edited with a to do list on the front and notes and highlights right the way through the standard like below:

I found doing this for each of the tasks and creating the resources really allowed me to get my head around the standards I will be teaching next year. It was a great way to get a base understanding an insight.

Integrated Learning

After Twitter chats based around the topics of integrated learning I was interested to find out more. I had heard Alfriston College were doing some pretty cool things and managed to get in touch with a couple of PE teachers from Alfriston College. From there we organized the opportunity to go out and see it in action. *Please see post on Alfriston College Visit for more info

Since then the PE Department have actually been approached by the HOD of Maths to look at the possibility of integrating one of our internal assessment standards at Level 2 with theres. We have made a time to discuss this more next week so I will keep you posted.

So it's fair to say that I've been rather busy lately.

15/11: Reflection - Alfriston College Visit on Integrated Learning

Reflection: Alfriston College Visit on Integrated Learning

15th Novemeber 2016

After participating in Twitter chats based around the topic of integrated learning I was interested to find out more. I had heard Alfriston College were doing some pretty cool things and managed to get in touch with a couple of PE teachers from Alfriston College through Twitter. From there we organized the opportunity for me to go out and see it in action. Here are some of the things that I managed to note on my visit:

How did you start?

• Starting website
• Key themes and questions for each term e.g. a catalyst and then driving questions 
• 5 people one form each curriculum area to create the plan
• Website to create consistency across all whanuas
• iLearns – project based learning in which they can dig further into their own learning and present back to the class
• Wonder walls – students are able to
• Non-googable questions

What have been some of the barriers?

• Not everyone is on board
• Collaboration can be hard but needed e.g. even small things like teachers pet peeves aka being late need to be shared for a successful learning environment

What did I see to help encourage Integrated & Authentic Learning?

• Modern learning environments – mixed furniture including traditional desks and chairs, stools and high desks, low benches
• Classroom with doors/walls that can be pulled down for a large classroom – 60 students with about 3 teachers (generally from different curriculum areas)
• Students work in classes based on year groups within Whanau groups

What’s happening in classes?

• Year 10s
• Do now focusing on filling the gaps for their Astile testing
• Year 10s within whanau group are split into different groups in which they are responsible for planning a trip/camp for their year group
• Groups include activities, EOTC Rams forms etc.
• Students are responsible for their whole trip – no teacher involvement in planning

• Year 9s
• Split into subject rooms by topic
• Topics include science, maths or English
• Not really integrated learning at the moment
• Year 9 maths class working on algebra – students were stuck on their equation
• Aimee sat down to help kids, admitted that she was struggling and sought help form the teacher and other students
•  Helped students through working out different equations, got students to focus on the learning process
• Before leaving asked students questions about what they noticed e.g. what were they like at the start – always checking with her to see if they were correct after each stage etc., what effects did it have on Hauora, collaborative learning

Behaviour Management:

• One teacher stood in the middle of a large class with his fist in the air and the whole class went silent
• In another large class although they were all doing the same task one teacher stopped half of the class to go through the answers. He counted down to wait for silence started to work but didn’t wait for complete silence and was writing answers on the board so students started getting rowdy again. Also what is the point in stopping half of the class? Why not work with the whole class or get students to share answers with each other?

So although it was very interesting for myself and most of the teachers that I got to speak to loved the integrated learning I was curious to see what the students thought. I managed to talk to some of the students to see what their opinion was. Of course there were differing opinions and they seemed to fall into either liking or disliking the integrated learning approach. Some students believed that they would be more on task and more productive if they were in a smaller class with one teacher focusing on just one subject at a time. Others enjoyed the modern learning environments and having a variety of teachers in the same class.

Overall the visit to Alfriston was great. I learnt a lot and it was great to see the idea of Integrated Learning in action. Now to try and put some of these ideas into action!

4/11: Reflection - PRT Meeting Focussing on Stress & Time Management

Reflection: PRT Meeting Focussing on Stress & Time Management

4th November 2016

On Monday we had a PRT (Provisional Registered Teachers) meeting, with this weeks focus on Stress & Time Management. Julie lead the discussion, asking questions in which we were all able to share our answers and ideas. Below are some of the notes and key points we spoke about:

When have you found yourself stressed throughout the year? What makes you stressed?

·      Reports

·      Co-curricular

·      Marking

What are strategies that you can use to help with this stress?

·      Reports

o   Aiming to complete so many per day

o   Make comments throughout the term before comments are due(a couple of sentences) e.g. about classwork or behaviour

o   Mentor reports – students creating parts of their own comment and then being able to quote students or filling in an 8 question list (Keith Rowley)

·      Co-curricular

o   Putting a cap on how many activities you commit to

·      Marking

o   Certain time limit per paper

o   Giving yourself a break, especially if needed rather than pushing through

·      Mental Awareness

o   Knowing it’s going to end

o   Having something to look forward too

·      Planning

o   Don’t spend more than 50% of time of the lesson on planning for it

o   “Planning for tomorrow today”

·      Remember to try and not be a perfectionist

·      Trying not to take work home

What helps to relieve stress?

·      Collegiality - having support from staff members

·      Being organized – knowing what you are doing tomorrow or an overview of the week

·      Planning

·      Meeting deadlines

·      Understanding the vocational job of a teacher

·      Interests outside of work - although in some cases it can create more stress

·      Not over committing to co-curricular

To help with wellbeing:

·      Exercise

·      Eating and Hydration

·      Mixing up your routine - changing where you sit and do work or what you eat etc.

·      Sleep

·      Making sure you still have down time - whether it is by yourself or with family and friends

I believe this is an important topic to cover  as we all need to find our own effective ways of managing our time and relieving stress, as what may work for one person may not work for another. It was helpful to actually take the time to sit down and reflect and talk about your own strategies. Through sharing I hope that others may have taken away some new strategies to try just like I have. Although, I feel like there were both pros and cons about having this conversation so late in the year. 

Pros: 

• I was able to reflect back on my year with a clear head now that most of my stress has been relieved
• I gained some new ideas to help me with my time management and to help relieve stress later on

Cons:

• As it is near the end of the year, most of the Senior classes have gone and with them a lot of stress. I feel like this may have been more useful earlier on in the year where I may have been able to try other strategies that we discussed

8/3: Lesson Reflection on Class Feedback

Lesson Reflection on Class Feedback

8th March 2016

30/6: Phil Coombe's Lesson Observation

Phil Coombe's Lesson Observation (Official Copy in Folder)

30th June 2016

Key points from overview meeting:

• A lot of my teaching points and learning intentions are implicit. To get the students to make the most out of these, make them explicit at the start of the lesson. Students will then know the point of the lesson
• Get students to identify or create their own success criteria, this way they will know if they have been successful
• Create links as to why this topic is important and how it relates to other aspects of life e.g. interpersonal skills can e taken into team environments, social settings and group work within other classes 

LESSON OBSERVATION: Miss M Bish

DATE:                                    16 June 2016

SUBJECT:                              11 PED. Physical Education and Health

Encouraging and Supporting (Moonball)

Environment

Observation:	Suggestion – Aim for:
A very positive, purposeful atmosphere evident in all aspects of learning and behaviour within the class.  Effective beginning to the lesson.	Consideration to the time element for the formal beginning of the class.
All planning is thorough and detailed; subject links are clear; assessment opportunities could be identified and developed; an integrated approach through the lesson.	Look for cross-curricular links; self and peer assessment by students in a more explicit way.
Full range of classroom resources and specific lesson resources are effectively prepared, available and distributed, routines lead to minimal disruption.

Learning

Observation:	Suggestion – Aim for:
Learning objectives permeate all aspects of the lesson; effective routine for sharing, reflecting and assessing the learning objectives are in place.
Success criteria are shared, and children are not given clear indications of what constitutes success, although this was implicit in the lesson	Students are actively involved in developing effective success criteria before the task commences.  Success criteria are referred to throughout whole lesson and used for group/peer/self-evaluation.
Clear links are drawn between previous learning and how the lesson builds on this.	There is a shared and understood link between previous learning and the lesson; preparation is made to link learning to next/previous lesson, although this was the final lesson in the module.
Tasks are carefully designed, chosen and adapted to meet the full range of learners needs; a range of effective strategies is employed.
Learning objectives and success criteria form the basis for praise; reasons for success are articulated and explained.	Evident culture of success being celebrated based on specific aspects of learning objectives and success criteria; students know that their success will be recognised and celebrated.
Reference is not made to cross-curricular links.	Specific links are made to how skills, knowledge and understanding can and will be used in other areas.
All students make progress against their previous learning and most fully meet or exceed the expectations of the lesson.	All students engage fully with the learning and demonstrate that progress has been made in their learning.

Miss Bish:

Observation:	Suggestion – Aim for:
Able to use subject knowledge beyond that being taught to support learning.	Uses her in-depth subject knowledge to support learning, support able students and extend learning for all.
Asks students questions in the course of the lesson.	Carefully chosen closed questions are used strategically to explore, for example, levels of understanding, misconceptions and for assessment.
Asks carefully chosen open questions to encourage thinking skills and discussion.	Uses carefully chosen open questions to extend students learning and understanding.
Completes examples of what the students might be expected to do.	Clearly models student expectations through modelling, and indicates how to both meet and exceed expectations in learning objectives and success criteria.
Makes effective use of speaking and listening strategies to support learning.	Effectively uses a range of carefully chosen, effective speaking and listening strategies to enhance student learning.
The lesson has a clear, appropriate structure that ensures each section is built on the last and supports the next at a pace that continues to engage the students throughout.	The lesson has an effective structure that injects a sense of determination and perseverance into the lesson.

Student’s Habits

Observation:	Suggestion – Aim for:
The lesson is planned and presented in such a way that the students are actively involved throughout the lesson.
Opportunities for dialogue are planned in the lesson and used to promote learning.	Effective use of dialogue, including modelling, within the classroom ensures that all children have opportunities to express and discuss aspects of their learning, including with the teacher.
The students have opportunities to use skills of independence in the course of a lesson.	Work in the class is organised in a way that the students must use skills of independence to succeed, while support mechanisms are also effectively used.
Opportunities for students to demonstrate are planned and used to support learning.	Students demonstrations are used effectively by the teacher to encourage, praise, support learning, model and support self-review, and to provide opportunities to extend learning.
The students have some opportunity to assess their own work.	The students use the learning objectives and success criteria to effectively assess their own work, identify strengths and weaknesses and set targets.

A well structured lesson, which was well designed.  The students enjoyed the lesson and developed encouragement and support strategies as the lesson progressed.  Ensuring that the objectives of the lesson and the measures of success are more explicit will focus the students on learning behaviours that they can then transfer.  There is clear progression in terms of overall lesson planning as well as planning for the student group as learners.  Emphasising learning concepts and areas of externsion are two areas of recommended focus for the future to provide an expert teaching and learning environment.

________________________________________________________________

Philip Coombe

Director of Studies

22 June 2016