Moira's Year, 2017

The Ti Kouka team undertook a teacher inquiry based around student engagement, with the three of us all focussing on a different aspect of engaging learners. My main focus was working with parents and using one-on-one personal conversations with selected learners, on whatever topic(s) they wanted to talk about, to enhance a relationship of trust and openness. Here's a link to my aspect of the inquiry. I felt that this approach was very rewarding, although it was quite difficult to manage within time frames and because some of the children I chose, I do not actually teach very often. However, children were better engaged and they were more pro-active in seeking me out to chat.  This rapport meant that a relationship of trust built and this in turn meant that, when difficult conversations about behaviour had to be held, children still knew I cared about them. I think this is a great, and very simple, strategy that is well worth utilising again.

Teaching Practice, Assessment, Authentic learning , Student engagement and 2017 Targets With my team this year, we created a Learning Intent which we returned to and reviewed regularly. We worked with SENCo to develop programmes supporting at-risk learners. We reviewed core curriculum groupings at the end of each term and made adjustments that we felt useful, eg moving some children into a different group. Assessment was completed on new children and they were placed accordingly. I also undertook regular assessment with groups of children, eg PATs, running records, GLoSS, writing samples, e-asstle assessments, etc, and ensured team members also did this and that data from the team was collated and considered with a view to teaching and learning practices. I learned heaps of new skills around the use of devices and apps, all of which were unfamiliar to me, and I gained in confidence to push learning and tasks out to the children via devices and to use hapara to monitor work....