PASSPORT TO LEADERSHIP

NPS LEADERSHIP PASSPORT

The above link is a working document which is looking at tracking student leadership.  If you use any of the content could you please acknowledge me as the original creator/source.

The idea is that throughout the senior years of school the children have a working Google Doc which they add to and use as evidence of their leadership in different areas of the school and the community.  

Looking at the document, I thought it was important to track both home and school initiatives to encourage children to that their leadership skills into the wider community.  This is similar to the Duke of Ed awards that children complete at High School.  

With the move to teachers needing to provide evidence towards their Registered Teacher Criteria, I realised that there is a need for children to be accountable for their own personal growth and development towards being a leader and a good citizenship.  The inclusion of values will promote our school values and also provide teaching opportunities for teachers, while supporting all students to earn their badge, fill in their passport, receive tokens or PB4L bands.

With +Sonya Van Schaijik we are developing a Leadership Passport for teachers.  This is a work in progress but the ideas are being developed continually - will post more soon.

Weekly Planning - Moving to Google Docs

Planning using Google Docs has been a massive change in my practise this year.  The open access of planning has made me more accountable and also the ease of planning and sharing it with children has made it more relevant!

I started the year my planning in separate documents for each subjects which is what many of the teacher at NPS are doing.  It seemed like a nightmare each week to update and check planning was shared with the correct people and uploaded to the right place.

My answer... Google Spreadsheets.

All the planning for each term in on one spreadsheet which includes different tabs for each week of planning.  I now have four documents for the year (one for each term although Term one is partially in separate docs and partially in a spreadsheet) which includes weekly, reading and maths planning.

Benefits from Google Docs Planning:
- ease of planning each week in one document.
- user friendly planning which is only one page to refer to each day.
- ease of including class description and groupings on different tabs also (have been removed for privacy reasons)
- one document makes it easier to share my planning with my appraiser, senior management team and my own team.
- Google Docs makes collaborative teaching and planning easy with multiple teachers working on a doc remotely.
- For me, increased accountability because I don't like missing a tab (perfectionist trait)

TERM TWO WEEKLY PLANNING

TERM THREE WEEKLY PLANNING

INQUIRY GOAL - 2014 - TERM THREE REFLECTION

Term Three Reflection:

• Noticeable difference in writing of target group.  
• Ideas are more complex and looking at Asttle data most have improved considerable in sentence structure and organisation which was my focus for their writing.
• All but two are confidently using paragraphs in their writing now and correctly grouping similar ideas.
• All have indicated that they are more excited about writing lessons now and aware of what they need to do to improve their writing.  
• Results are pleasing and indicate improvement and steady incline of writing results based on Asttle.
• All children are now above the NS for writing for their Year Level.

Formative Results:

	2013 Writing Level	Term One Asttle 2014 (recount) – asttle marking	Term Three Asttle 2014 (character description) – conversion table	Term Three Asttle 2014 (recount) - asttle marking
Child A	2a	2b	2a	3p
Child B	2b	2a	3p	4b
Child C	2a	3b	3a	4b
Child D	2b	2a	3p	4b
Child E	2a	2p	2a	3b
Child F	<2b	2a	3b	3p
Child G	<2b	1a	2a	3p

Term Three Teaching Reflections

Term Three Teaching Reflection

Room 4 Writing - Worth checking out...

Haunted House - by Edward
http://kidblog.org/Room4-NPS2014/8b82afd6-0fa0-49bb-b6a3-9ac12b3c9ed1/haunted-house-recount-homework/

Haunted House Near the Lake - by Shotaro
http://kidblog.org/Room4-NPS2014/153d3682-4de5-489f-a177-30292bd7f457/haunted-house-near-the-lake/

Letter to the Oinking Brothers - by Emmanuel
http://kidblog.org/Room4-NPS2014/01479d3b-796c-4524-a4bc-c5576c6c36c6/dear-oinking-brothers/

Skittlicious Experiment - by Molly
http://kidblog.org/Room4-NPS2014/33aa04b9-b7a0-461f-812b-40e315948851/mollys-skittlelicious-experience/

Letter to Captain Hook - by Renee
http://kidblog.org/Room4-NPS2014/9022a052-f543-41af-a6ee-513a645ead60/captain-hook/

Haunted House Recount - by Hannah
http://kidblog.org/Room4-NPS2014/c234d707-fab0-4e43-9674-8a5b2cf8581b/my-haunted-house-recount/

Haunted House - by Emmanuel
http://kidblog.org/Room4-NPS2014/01479d3b-796c-4524-a4bc-c5576c6c36c6/haunted-house-recount/

Term Two Teaching Reflections

TERM THREE TEACHING REFLECTIONS

INQUIRY GOAL - 2014 - TERM TWO REFLECTION

Term Two Reflection:

• Target group are having weekly focussed lessons on sentence structure where they are learning about the different types of sentences simple, compound and complex.
• Target group being more able writers compared their Asttle writing samples to each other and gave feedback against the success criteria that we constructed collaboratively.
• Although original marks did not get altered, I then gave them a copy of their Asttle writing and they were able to make changes to it based on their peer feedback and looking at the SC.
• Lots of co-construction of SC has meant this group understand the task more.
• Introduced Free Write Friday where the boys get to write their own stories but have to include aspects of the writing grammar focus we have had in class each week eg. highlighting the different types of sentences in different colours.  
• These are highly engages in the #100daysoflearning task set for homework which gets them to write a summary of something that interests them.  This has increased writing at home and their writing quality has improved from term one.
• Attitudes towards writing have changed as they now feel more motivated to write about more exciting things.

Senior School Enrichment - Innovation Unleashed

The Senior School have been working collaboratively on building an enrichment programme this year.  The 2 day programme is organised to ensure learning time is maximised for all students, we provide differentiated learning in all areas and students are given greater opportunities to participate is less traditional subjects.

NPS Enrichment Programme Presentation

Being two terms into this programme I was interested to know how the students were finding it compared to last year where the programme was more scattered over the week.  I created Google forms to collect and collate student voice.

Year 4/5 Student Reflective Survey
Year 4/5 Responses

Year 6 Student Reflective Survey
Year 6 Responses

As teachers we are finding the 2 day enrichment programme is meeting students learning needs and wants more effectively and also allowing more time to be spent on core curriculum subjects.  The programme now provides a wider range of subjects such as Robotics, Philosophy for Children, Mandarin, Te Reo Maori, PE etc which build children's capabilities and equips them with the skills they need to be life-long learners.  The programme incorporates areas of the NZC and ensures that children are given the opportunity to learn and practise the key competencies.

Teacher Reflective Survey
Teacher Responses

One of the reasons the enrichment programme was designed, was to address teacher frustrations regarding the interruptions to core curriculum areas due to timetabling issues with music, Mandarin and Te Reo. For teachers who run a 3 phase reading and writing programmes were severely truncated due to the students coming in and out and predictable, but nonetheless inconvenient times. 

We designed the programme to incorporate some 21st century learning tools (coding programmes/robotics), as well as thinking skills (P4C, Thinking Skills).  These programmes had not been offered previously, but have a proven track record of engagement and positive impact on achievement. While it is too soon to make any assertions about impact on achievement, anecdotally, we can say with some confidence that levels of engagement are high. Low rates of managing off-task behaviour, high levels of focus and commitment.

The programme plays to teachers' strengths and interests, which naturally flows on to the students. 

Reflection by Belinda Hitchman (Year 5/6 Teacher)

Lily-Belle and David have written student reflective blogs about the programme which can be read at the following links:

David's Reflection about the 2014 Enrichment Programme
Lily-Belle's Reflection about the 2014 Enrichment Programme

My thoughts on #100daysoflearning as a means of motivating students!

Part of my inquiry goal this year is to engage students in writing by using ICT and blogging as a means of communication. In particular my target group is a small group of boys who are not enthusiastic about furthering their learning and have started to plateau with their writing because they no longer enjoy writing. Along with implementing lots of other initiatives in my writing programme, I am really encouraging #100daysoflearning with them. This gets them thinking about things that they are passionate about and can use as inspiration in their independent writing.  

#100daysoflearning has really started to take off on our class blog http://kidblog.org/Room4-NPS2014/

The children are encouraged to post something that they are passionate about and I am finding the posts really interesting to gain insight into my students interests and strengths.  It is amazing how many of them are choosing to post information about things that we seldom cover in school for example history, geography, zoology, art history etc.  

The next step for me as a teacher is to promote their #100daysoflearning posts to others so that they get more feedback and people reading and responding to their posts.  I would like to do this via a quadblogging initiative but I am still learning how to get started on this process.

I asked my students what their thoughts about #100daysoflearning were so far and two things became apparent.

1 - they love having the freedom and opportunity to post about things that they are personally interested in.  The ownership is on them and they are engaged in mini personal inquiries that promote thinking, questioning, exploring and problem solving.

2 - they all said that it was fun being a teacher and writing questions about the video or picture so that their friends could learn from what they had shared.  This is so powerful and for Year 4 and 5 children to have this depth of thought from a simple task which has very little teacher input is amazing.

Final thoughts for tonight from me... I am excited to see those children who do not usually engage in homework getting involved in this project.  It is having a peer pressure effect on the class and each week we are getting new children posting something with the hashtag #100daysoflearning.  This is extra to their syndicate homework but yet it is the first thing that many of them read on the blog.  

You know you are onto a good thing when you as a teacher are learning about King Charles the Second from a Year 5 student!

#100daysoflearning brought to your by Monty

http://kidblog.org/Room4-NPS2014/6e2e2d46-8cfc-4a33-bfb3-eb5f8f1373e9/100daysoflearning-horrible-histories-slimy-stuarts/#comment-478

Another great #100daysoflearning post by Monty who is Year 5.  He is really interested in History so is basing all of his posts around the Horrible Histories videos.  I am really engaged by his posts and I have learnt something about Charles the Second and Oliver Cromwell...but I cannot get the rap song out of my head!!