Planning for Collaborative Teaching Approach...

So blogging in Room 4 has been ticking along nicely and children are so motivated by what we are doing in class with ICT.

The students in most curriculum areas are highly engaged and the blog is used as a carrot which motivates then even further.  The boys in particular are highly engaged in writing because they know that their end product and even the process will be able to be shared digitally with a real audience.

We have done lots of talking in Room 4 about making connections between our learning and real life contexts... so much of what I remember learning as a child seemed to have little purpose because back in the 80's (yikes), learning happened in the classroom and was more traditional and predetermined than it is today.

Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about what is important to me about education and looking at ways to redefine what my syndicate is teaching to better fit the modern learning approaches that we are trialling this year.  Looking at the very impressive timetable for term two... we are only teaching literacy in our own classes but have managed to incorporate a collaborative and student led model in conceptual studies, maths, languages, music, thinking skills, the arts, PE and aspects of ICT.  This is really empowering for students.

LITERACY https://docs.google.com/document/d/18YZ5nwVW5bw3GkIxI2ovoePlop5tXmeOIc8JrNtOpn0/edit?usp=sharing

CONCEPT
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hDUdb97irlCtOB4I5mDyID3bvEjw4mm19cQ3KiHbu3g/edit?usp=sharing

READING
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AYe4Z1xrB_WENGDh357YOEKLQdDpBsdQrDd5UzBb9GA/edit?usp=sharing

The planning for our topic and writing models are attached below.  I have tried hard to make these planning models user friendly and the contents of them should actually be useful to teachers as a way of tracking and formatively assessing student learning.  They are working documents and the process we are going through is a new learning curve, however the team seem really happy with the planning this term...will reflect further down the line to see what worked and what didn't.  

http://dmlcentral.net/blog/howard-rheingold/co-inventing-curriculum #mindshift