A+Personal+Journey+-+Thoughts+and+Reflections-+A+journal+of+sorts


 * 25/4/12 **

__ **First Steps** __ This is my attempt at capturing quality. The quality of my capturing evidence of learning and growth depends on how I fill up the pages of this wiki with artifacts of my interactions with the place, people and ideas. I have not decided on a particular structure as to how I will arrange my learning. Some ideas off the bat: - chronological - people I have been assigned - areas as indicated in Junyuan's proposal


 * Particular Practice in a Particular Place/Context by and for Particular People**

My first day. Given card to access staffroom. I'm sitting in the HOD room which is located in the staffroom. Given cubicle. Went on tour of the school with SSD. Visited top P6 class. Could not locate top P4 class. :] Will have access to school’s shared folders to look at curricular resources and documents. :] Given pass card access to staffroom. Cool! School is doing its best to make me feel welcome. :] Will be introduced to staff on a Thursday. Most probably next week. They gave me a laptop. Will have SOE access to school folders by next week. Meeting EL AL group at 2 pm. They will set the agenda.

Had good conversation with PE HOD – shared assessment ideas and practices I helped to plan and implement in Rosyth – NAPFA, Adventure training and C2015 competencies. Will share with him what I have developed and implemented. Had another good conversation with HOD ICT. She attended a TN course I conducted at TN about 10 years ago. She shared with her colleagues that I cld help them with their writing programme as she found my workshop very useful. We also talked about use of ICT within the curriculum. Also sharing with her my resources on flipped classrooms – she saw affordances in HBL (Home based learning) as two levels would be staying home as teachers are involved in the oral exams. She saw how ‘actual teaching’ could take place with the use of blended learning, So good to eat canteen food and talk about actual contextualized problems/issues in the classroom. Interesting. Met teachers from AL group Discussed on writing module How to create/design instructional/assessment rubric for P3/4 narrative writing (Kelvin working with P1/2 teachers) Talked about alignment - what are LOs? Reflected in writing package/module? - Will influence teaching Not just up to individual teachers but across dept - how do we ensure LOs are aimed at n achieved? Problem of PK - pupils not knowing real life/authentic situations - thematic/archetypal approach - what are situations most common in writing and life - accidents - presence or police/medical help - what are realistic/likely situations ? - situational grammar/vocabulary - how long are crimes solved? What are the procedures for medical assistance/crime etc? When do we teach this? - (I learned from and together with them) AR project - Annotation - WWWWH - shared my txt connections and questions - what kind of reading/readers do we want? Discussed writing - BIG ideas n enduring understandings - Key ideas that will drive instruction – Conflict/Change/POV How will writing programme and assessment look like across levels? - alignment and progression. Teachers were looking forward to lesson observation and recording of lesson Have to arrange for observation of P4 class soon.

Helped out in mock interview of Waheeda

Illiminal – confluence of complexity n chaos – authentic n messy

Writing – refer to syllabus – LP – Stellar SBA impact UP – look at Situational Archetypes and accompanying lexis and PK – what wld lesson format look like – tie in with PWA (Process Writing Approach) – Scope n Sequence

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Share Rosyth P1 personal Recount rubric – always stress alignment and SSBAs in syllabus

__** Duty Calls - Back to work! **__

ST as senior learner. Learning about the environment – Importance of context – variables we ignore or misunderstand the place/function or role

Possibility of Demo class on Reading/Writing and Grammar – Whole-Part-Whole approach Opening Up Interpretive Space – Flower’s Model of Writing

Multimedia AR – webpage? Wikispace. Electronic portfolio? Blog? Meditations on Professional Learning

Protocols? Maintain humility What are learning points? AFIs? Evidence of Improvement?– Practice/Thinking/Learning

BIG Qn – What is quality Professional Learning? What does/can it look like? An exploration

Points of contact- Difference between connection – relationships Points of impact – assessing/measuring the improvement – results/structures/processes/affective – perspectives/understandings

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Multimedia report - videos, photos, montage of artifacts

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Narrative recorded on voice thread or flipped

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Tentative at first - just ideas and words and graphics without the realities of work and practice in effect

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Need to flesh out - principles/ideas - reiterative and recursive - not linear - working with people and ideas

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Acknowledge messiness and waiting -

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Week in between

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Have looked at the P5 writing package. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Looks good. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Grapples with many concepts/skills I would have and have done myself - Plot, Conflict, Show Don't Tell etc. Follows a particular pattern - Present concept/learning; Practise concept learning - micro; Apply concept Learning in Composition Lack of alignment with assessment protocol/instrument - No indication of AfL to see whether or how 'new' learning is applied. Something we have to look into. Also, majority of topics deal with a mini-disaster of sorts. (We have an archetype!) Have made recommendations to work with pupils PK and perhaps use mentor texts. Writing: Whole-Part-Whole approach. How to incorporate pupils' texts as exemplars. How to incorporate Hayes and Flower's model?

**DAY 2 2nd May 2012**