Blogging does make a difference – one teaspoon at a time
Image by Henry Patton used under creative commons licence
One of the purposes of my blogging has been to been to effect change. I’ve never for one minute thought that me putting my learning out there would shift major mountains but I did and still do think it could be used as model a different way of looking at how we document and develop the scope of documenting professional practice beyond the dreaded ring binder. I love blogs because there is much of an interactive element. I get an audience for my journey far beyond the walls of my school and physical confines of my city or even my country.
But that’s not to say I’ve not wondered on occasion if I should be putting my learning out there for all to see. It does mark me out as a freak in so far as I’m doing something a bit different Moreover it goes against the conventional social media advice given to student and beginning teachers from the powers that be. Where in general the feeling is that teachers should be locking down their social presence and even using a blog for professional purposes has bought up some interesting issues for me. Whether to blog anonymously has caused an enormous dilemma for me that I still haven’t resolved. You might notice I don’t use my full name, post student images nor directly name the school I work for on this blog. These decisions go back to my own set of guidelines I drew up for myself in the early days of blogging.
I never thought for a minute that my geekish tendencies might start to influence others. However a few weeks ago, I got an email asking if I was interested in having my name put forward as part of project on the ethics surrounding teachers’ use of social media. I felt hugely honoured to have been asked as I’m just a first year teacher. Although I might have been blogging for almost a decade but its really been since about June/July last year that I’ve reached any kind of significant audience so I did wonder if I was the right person to be taking part in a group.
Nevertheless the opportunity to help inform the thinking of this project was too good to pass up. I’m sure that there will be more posts as about this project in the upcoming months. But for now I’m pretty stoked to have been put forward and can only hope to make a worthwhile contribution worthy enough of all the awesome advice I’ve been getting from my fantabulous PLN.
This might not be a huge difference in the grand scheme of things and isn’t up there with finding a cure for cancer, bringing peace to the middle east or explaining why the Kardashians ten minutes of fame is not up. But this something I can do with my teaspoon.
The post in which I come out as an Apple Groupie
Oh dear the I suspect I will be the subject of much public humiliation both on the blog and via twitter for this post.
But here goes.
Despite my love of social networking and the fact I am pretty much almost always online, I actually run a very low-fi operation. My laptop is five years old and it is a little known fact that contacting me via cellphone is actually the least reliable form of contacting me. I’ll check twitter, facebook and my email in that order almost any time I’m near a computer however my cellphone is frequently sitting at home under my bed with the batteries having long run out of charge.
But then there have been times when cellphones do come in handy. For instance an iphone got me out of a rather sticky situation in China where a lack of transit visa at Harbin airport was saved by my travelling companion at the time showing the border guard an expedia ticket on his gmail account as proof of onward ticket. However in general I just don’t see the point of cellphones. In fact I would got as far as to say that not having a cellphone is an excellent way to strike conversations with people but I digress.
Last week something awful happened that rocked me to my very core.
I had no internet at home for nearly 5 days.
To put this occurrence into perspective the longest I’ve gone without internet since I first got online back in 1997 was 7 days and that was because I was in North Korea. I check my social networking feeds at least 3-4 times a day so to be without internet at home was, well, on par with BEING IN NORTH KOREA FOR A WEEK.
Which can only explain why I am now the owner of sparkly new iphone 4s.
Yes me, the same blogger who decreed apple worship as nothing but a status symbol, now has an iphone. And not just any iphone but the 4s. Yes I probably just used a sledge hammer to swot a fly as all I really wanted was a device I could tether to the internet but it is a little known fact that 4s actually means for ‘for Steph.’ Because now that I finally have one of these devices to call my own, I’ve had the biggest geek epiphany since I got online back in 1997.
Mobile devices are indeed not just a way to access the internet on the go, but those amazing augmented reality apps and QR codes really do change our conceptions of physical space. I wish every kid in my class could have some sort of mobile device and imagine how all the cool stuff we could do in a classroom where the walls could come to life with video and audio files or just a view of the universe. As it is, a few of my kids were absolutely entranced with sky view and I’m now determined to find out as much about this type of learning as I can.
In the meantime I will ask Siri to remind me about updating my blog when I get home tonight..
And why yes I have my iphone resting on my window every night with $5 and a picture of Steve Jobs for my daily worship of the awesomeness that is this device.
Let the mocking and app recommendations begin.
Weekly Reflection: More than the sum of their academic parts
I have students.
29 of them to be exact.
When people talk about raising class sizes as if just a couple of kids won’t make much more of a difference I wonder if they have ever actually experienced what is like to mark and analyse the results of 29 students. Don’t get me wrong I’m the sort of geek who loves playing around in e-asstle generating reports and find spending an evening entering the data oddly soothing after a busy day in the classroom.
However when it came to assessing my students’ writing samples I’ve spent hours reading and re-reading their work trying to get a fix on where the kids are at and trying to group them into ability groups.
Because I do so much writing I thought that would make the process easier. In fact I found it so much harder. I write mostly for pleasure and when faced with having to write something within a certain space of time ie. an exam or a work deadline any enjoyment I derive from writing goes straight out the window. And I know that for some students when they are faced with having a directive from me, their teacher, asking them to write there will be a few that will struggle to say anything let alone anything profound in the time allowed to. It worries me that there may very well be a couple of kids who are brilliant writers but I’m missing them because of the pressure to produce something in the time allowed.
However what ultimately helped the most with making a call on the students writing wasn’t the rubrics but spending time on a field trip with the students. That might sound counter-intuitive but spending time with the kids enabled me to see that little snippets of themselves that came through in their writing. The turns of phrases, how they talk. Some of those details I completely missed when I first read their work. Had I not had those interactions I might of missed those details of their writing and saw the students’ work only as writing levels rather than the product of emerging writers.
The further people get away from the classroom, the easier it is to reduce not only teaching and learning but the lives of children down to nothing more than a number on score. The kids are so much more than that. Yet how often do we hear people talk about raising academic achievement levels as if assessment is the master of our education system rather than the servant of teaching and learning.
Our understanding of what it is to be educated should not be based simply on what is present, but also on how the spaces between what is given are seen, named, unnamed, ignored. Because ultimately the kids are so much than the sum of their academic parts.
And when we see only the parts we miss the spaces in between.
Why are you blogging with your class?
New Zealand Registered Teacher Criteria 6.1
Registered teachers articulate clearly the aims of their teaching, give sound professional reasons for adopting these aims, and implement them in their practice.
Blogging platforms (design by author)
I’ve often said that first thing anyone needs to do when setting up a blog is think about why they are blogging. In fact I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most blogs fail because the author has no idea why they have a blog other than to have a blog.
So I’m taking my own advice and outline the purpose of setting up a class blog and came up with 5 reasons. Strangely enough my reasons aren’t because my school asks every class to have a blog.
- Authentic writing opportunity for students. Above anything else blogging gives kids an opportunity to have an authentic audience far beyond the walls of our classroom through regular posting. Commenting and responding to comments also serves as a way for students collabrate and learn from each other.
- Home school partnership. Blogs have the potential to change the ‘what did you do at school today?’ conversation to parents being able to talk about specific activities through blogging. They also have the potential to make information from the school more personalized and therefore relevant to each parent.
- Enhance digital citizenship. Blogging is an authentic oppourtunity for teachers to model effective digital citizenship so that students can manage themselves online as well effectively participate and contribute to digital communities.
- Global collaboration. Blogging gives students a chance develop their own personal learning networks whether it be like-minded kids, a scientist to help with a topic we are studying.
- Sharing teaching practice. As a new teacher I find reading classroom blogs a great way to learn about what goes on in other teacher’s classrooms and will
shamelessly stealborrow teaching ideas in order to adapt them for my context. If someone happens to gain something out of what is happening in what’s happening in my classroom this makes me happy.
Why are you blogging with your class?
Analog Teacher Education = Digital Teacher?
The typical teacher network and the networked teacher (images by @Courosa used under creative commons licence)
The Commerce Commission released an interesting report back in January on the implementation of high speed broadband into New Zealand schools. The report itself is worth a read for a general overview of the potential that high speed internet will bring to the New Zealand compulsory school sector. However the area of greatest interest to me was the report’s scathing assessment of New Zealand’s teacher education providers’ ability to prepare new teachers for the opportunities and challenges of teaching in the digital age.
I imagine this part of the report has generated a bit of debate as Teacher Education providers felt the stinging criticism of their teacher methods was entirely unjustified. However what seems to be missing from the debate which sees industry perceptions coming into conflict with institutions view that they aren’t doing that bad is the experience of teachers coming out of pre-service teacher education into teaching.
As a bit of background I completed my first ICT in Education paper online way back in 1999 and finally got around to finishing my teaching credential as an online student last year. So I’ve been around long enough to be part of the first wave of Education students experimenting with using html to code basic webpages for students to access from outside of school hours back in the late 1990s through to a recent graduate of a teacher education programme just entering the school sector with all the tools of web 2.0 now at my fingertips.
What amazed me about re-entering the university system was that despite the vast changes in the internet over the last 10+ years in terms of the number of users and devices, the speed at which we can access the net, the ability for users to interact and the amount of content that circulates through the world in a given day how little my experience as an online student within the university structure has changed..
In fact even the most basic stuff at some Teacher Education programmes seem mired in old school techniques. Most New Zealand Colleges of Education require a handwritten form and all student Teaching Experience documentation is done via pencil and paper (my simple request to submit digitally was firmly rebuffed). Although there were some videos and discussion boards, most of our learning was still firmly rooted around the old style of learning; lectures and textbooks.
Very rarely were we asked to find our own resources and discuss the implications of those rather than simply responding to the content we were given and outside of one assignment there was very little time for creating digital content. Some lecturers were fantastic about using the internet to engage with students, regularly posting individual feedback on comments posted to bulletin boards but there too many dreaded group response emailed off after the week was finished and in a lot of cases feedback was not received at all.
Perhaps most concerning aspect of teacher education is current assessment practices. I sat six pencil and paper exams which accounted for a large proportion of my final grades. And although my essays emailed off, they were printed out and returned by post meaning that the opportunity to add a rich multimedia dimension and interactivity that web 2.0 offers was lost. If we want to prepare students teachers for 21st century teaching practices, then institutions need to stop examining them using 19th century assessment practices.
Part of the problem is that the New Zealand Graduating Teacher Standards make only a passing reference to ICT stating that graduating teachers having ICT proficiency relevant to their professional role. This vague statement could mean a teacher can print a word document to demonstrate proficiency when we know ICT has moved a long way from word processing. Perhaps New Zealand needs to follow Australia’s lead and develop ICT standards for graduating teachers.
For me the biggest take-away from experience as an online student is that using ICT, using ICT to learn and teaching with ICT are fundamentally different activities and I don’t think Teacher Education providers have cottoned on to the latter two in particular. Having course content available online does not mean students know how to implement e-learning pedagogy into their teaching practice (although perhaps we’ve been given an example of what not to do).
I say that because right now I feel like a bit of failure.
I’m someone with a huge amount of interest and enthusiasm for using the internet to learn yet I’m little ashamed to admit that the computers in the classroom haven’t had much use by the students yet. That’s not to say I haven’t identified the moments where ICT could have enhanced our classroom activities but right now I’m working on the real basics of classroom management. Modulating the tone my voice, thinking about body position, getting kids moving the classroom, thinking about how we talk to each other. All teaching 101 stuff but without those fundamentals firmly in place I can’t effectively embed ICT into my practice.
Even just the basics of ensuring that the devices in the classroom are well cared will take me time to effectively establish. My digikids (computer monitors) need to be trained up, we need to think about how the computers are cared for, charged, where you can use them and that’s before even a single device is turned on.
Of course right now everything seems so overwhelming because right now I’m in new teacher survival mode. I’m sure I will look back on this year and this first term in much the same way a new parent does when their children reaches their first birthday, in a hazy blur wondering where the last year of my life has gone.
The first few months of teaching are tough.
There’s no shallow end to dip your toes into and getting to grips with the ins and outs of building relationships with the kids and their families, administering and analysing student assessment and even how your school runs means that a lot of new teachers, myself included, retreat into what we know. Not included in what we know is how to implement e-learning practices and pedagogy.
But what scares me is however difficult I’m finding it to integrate this new learning style into my practice I have it relatively easy. I spent last year as an online student and a lot of my downtime was spent immersing myself in the world of social media in education. Although I didn’t know it when I started blogging and tweeting gave me a crash-course in how to learn digitally when my own education history was largely analog. What will get me to that next step of embedding my own learning into the classroom is my school.
I’m fortunate to be beginning my career in a school which has embraced the use ICT for teaching and learning. However there are hundreds of Beginning Teachers starting out who don’t have the professional learning environment to support e-learning initiatives. I think one of the biggest mistakes policy makers and indeed everyone involved in education is repeated making by propagating the idea of younger teachers as ‘digital natives’ who know how to use ICT for learning and inside their classrooms.
This isn’t always the case.
Even something as simple as responding to blog comments is something that I’ve learned a huge amount from reading the likes of @kathleen_morris and her fantastic classblog. Kathleen has fundamentally changed how I respond to content and has provided a great model for how to create effective digital learning environments for students in my class. I didn’t come across Kathleen through any sort of university channel but through trawling the internet for teacher blogs. What concerns me is that there seems so little online activity from the New Zealand tertiary education sector available online for pre-service and in-service teachers to access.
Why aren’t student teachers commenting on class blogs? Where are their Graduating Teacher Standards wikis that can be used to develop a digital portfolio? Can anyone name a New Zealand tertiary researcher who drives debate and connections on social media like @courosa ,@timbuckteeth, @tomwhitby who runs #edchat or @dianeravitch on twitter?
Because when I think about it so much of my education about e-learning took place outside of the university system at educamp, on twitter and through blogging yet those same social media channels which I learned so much on were the same ones where student teachers were told ‘danger! Will Robinson Danger!’ I wasn’t the only one whose learning migrated away from my institution. Outside of the compulsory postings, a large number of students from my course ended up ditching the student management system to communicate with each other in favour of hybrid Facebook group and dropbox.
Which brings me to a brief comment around managed student learning environments.
At present there’s a lot of money and energy being dedicated to implementing various online learning environments around the country at the moment. However based on my experience as an online student the most vibrant and active communities are the ones that live outside of the digital gates of the university. I think that as there is a fundamental shift occurring in education especially for online study and the future is likely to be a far more devolved concept of what online engagement by teachers might look like.
Currently most students need to assume different digital identities to visit institutions. However to be successful in the future I think institutions will need to take their learning to the places where their students interact online. What the implications of this for younger children I’m not sure. But I think one of the challenges and opportunities for ultrafast broadband is the creation of individual digital identities but questions remain in my mind over how will retain ownership over the identities and how portable those identities will be.
This post has covered a lot of ground and I’m not sure if I’ve done much than ramble some incoherent ideas but as some conversation starters:
Are Teachers Colleges preparing new teachers to teach digitally? What could they do differently?
Should a separate set of Graduating Teacher Standards in ICT be developed?
Are managed student learning environments are future innovation or likely to be a relic of the past within the next decade?
Weekly Reflection: My first RTC reflection
Strictly speaking this isn’t my first post that demonstrates competency in one of the New Zealand Registered Teacher Criteria. However since I’ve finally got my project under way, let’s get this RTC party started.
New Zealand Registered Teacher Criteria 1.i
Registered teachers engage in ethical, respectful, positive and collaborative professional relationships with whānau and other carers of ākonga.
Image by Wild_child_HC used under creative commons licence
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Since school has started, the passage of time seems to have picked up pace. I can’t believe that we are already a fifth of the way through the first term. How did that happen?
The highlight of my week was my school’s community get together. During my last two weeks at school I’ve been astonished with how supportive the community is of their children. I was surprised by how many parents showed up on the first day of school to help their children transition into a new school and was amazed by how many parents took the time to come to visit our classroom and find out more about their children’s education.
Although teacher education stress the importance of building those relationships and give student teachers a lot of tips about to go about how to going to build relationships, the experience I drew on came not from books but from spending time as a stepmum in previous life and watching my stepdaughter start school. School was this place I didn’t know much about and I often worried about her getting bullied or slipping through the day unnoticed in a school where she was one of hundreds of kids. As a result, I’ve always been mindful that classroom teachers can spend more time with children than their parents do. Particularly in the case of the younger children whose families don’t live together.
In all my previous teaching experience I have always lived within less than 1km of the school. I often saw my students and their families at the supermarket, on the bus and walking down the street. Living close by gave me a context. I knew the kids weren’t just kids in my class but people with lives and families. By the same token the families in my community knew me because the saw me around town at the supermarket or catching the bust. Now that I live some distance from the school, I can see how easy it is to think of my kids just as students in my class rather than people with their own lives and interests.
Meeting my students’ family underscored again a huge amount of responsibility and trust the parents of the children in my class place on me to do the best I can for their kids. When these kids are in the classroom it’s up to me to not just educate them but to care, to give a damn, to not pass the puke.
So what have I been doing in the last few weeks?
I’ve set up our class blog which amongst other things is a space to let parents know not only what is going on in the classroom but also as a space for reminders about upcoming trips and due dates for home learning tasks.
I try to have a fast turnaround on parent emails. However because online communication is something that is permanent and without the context of body language and tone of voice, there is a risk of causing offence or unwittingly escalating sensitive situations with poorly-worded responses. As a result, when I get an email from a parent that I’m unsure about I’ve asked my tutor teacher or syndicate leader for help drafting a response before hitting send.
The other aspect I’ve been thinking about is that of time. Having made a few last-minute cakes for the school fair in my time I know that parents are no different to the rest of us in that they are working long hours. As a result, I need to be mindful of the demands I place on students and their families in the hours outside of school.
More than anything this week has reminded me that a great deal of my success as an educator wouldn’t be possible without a highly supportive parent community. My work as a teacher will always stand on the shoulders of giants; my students’ families.
Dr. Strangeblog or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the RTC
Image by Fortaguada. Used under creative commons licence
Despite my somewhat irreverent post title induction into the teaching profession in New Zealand is serious business.
Beginning Teachers are granted provisional registration when they start their teaching career and spend at least two years being supervised by an assigned mentor before they can apply for full registration. In order to gain full registration Beginning Teachers are required to gather evidence of their professional development to demonstrate how they meet each of the New Zealand Teacher Council’s Registered Teacher Criteria.
Most teachers are still using the dreaded ringbinders as a way to gather evidence in the event that the Council decides to audit their application. After unsuccessfully doing battle with University of the Hill last year to submit my paperwork via google docs I’m seizing the opportunity afforded by working in a digitally savvy school and am going paperless with the evidence-gathering process for registration.
Some of my work will go on behind digital gates however I would remiss if I didn’t also consider about blogging this journey. My Graduating Teacher Standards eportfolio has generated a lot of traffic to the site and provided a useful analyitical framework for my edublogging. I enjoyed the process of using blogging as a way to gain evidence for the Graduating Teacher Standards that in a fit of edugeekism I decided to take on a second blogging project, the Registered Teacher Criteria.
Following my credo that blogging doesn’t work without a purpose. Here’s my purpose
1. To Share – Bloggers love to share. Some would say we over-share, but if someone at some point gets some use out of my ill-formed ramblings then that’s marvellous.
2. To learn – I’ve got an awesome group of teachers to learn from at my school. But yet still I love that there’s a network of teachers around the world that I can on for advice (and who so freely give it). Thanks PLN!
3. To provide an ‘adjacent possible‘ - So much of the discussion around teachers use of social media is ill-informed scaremongering. Someone needs to show that not only can you blog while teaching without the sky falling in. In fact there are many benefits to using social media for professional learning.
4. To inform. One of the troubling misconceptions that came out in the comments section of this post is that people seem to assume that Beginning Teachers come into the profession knowing all there is to know about teaching. Documenting this journey from provisional to registered teacher as a way to de-privatize teaching practice and show that developing teaching ability is a process not just talent a set of innate personality characteristics.
So yes it seems you have at least another 2 years of reading my opinions, rants, and musings.
Accountability – I do not think it means what you think it means
If you’ve ever seen the movie The Princess Bride, you’ll know that the character Vizzini keeps referring to various situations in the movie as being “inconceivable.” You’ll also know that eventually Inigio Montoya responds to Vizzini’s cries of “inconceivable” with the second best line in the movie: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
I am reminded of this conversation every time I hear the word accountability used in relation education.
If we could just find that magical mathematical formula of what effective teaching is through testing the kids, the teachers, the schools, the caretaker’s cat against benchmarks then we’d be set. From those numbers we’ll be able to find out who the super teachers and super schools are, what they do to get results and then replicate it on a grand scale. In short we would be able to teacher-proof our education system.
Is that a good thing?
I’m pretty happy to wager a Big Mac that there is nobody out there who is talking about lowering standards. But the problem is that we want our schools to be a bit like McDonalds all identical, all good. I can see the appeal. There’s some comfort in knowing that if I rock up to a McDonalds in Beijing or New York that my Big Mac is going to taste like the one I can order at the Maccers on Queen Street. More importantly nobody is going to argue that school is the place we send kids to learn. Right now there are some children out there who aren’t engaged and this is causing problems both for the kids themselves and also for the wider community. So our schools need to do more to help those kids in particular but also others to succeed.
The problem is that we’ve defined success in education as passing assessments to demonstrate literacy and numeracy. Don’t get me wrong being able to read, write and be able to do maths are important not just economically but also for the functioning of our democracy. But there is a deeper purpose to education which we often forget when we focus on test scores.
Broadly speaking the purpose of education is to help students discover and cultivate their passions so that they can lead happy lives.
We don’t just read and write because it is good for the economy and society that we are literate. We do so because there is something innate in our humanity that we wish to understand and be understood. Likewise we humans have an innate attraction to pattern structure, and symmetry that maths helps us refine. Gambling, soduku, rubick’s cube are based on maths but we don’t think of it is as such because we’ve mistaken computation for maths.
I don’t think for one minute think that literacy and maths are the only ways humans seek to make sense of the world. It saddens me greatly that science, social science, the arts are getting the squeeze put on them in order to focusing in on the good old 3Rs. But this is what happens when only certain parts of the curriculum are deemed worthy enough to be ‘accountable.’ We start to forget about the other learning areas which means we also marginalize the children in our schools who might have particular talents or interests in those disciplines.
On a more broader scale standards do not reflect a student’s ability to think creatively, persist in the face of adversity, work collaboratively with peers or use problem solving skills. If we think in terms of those skills, National Standards are not able to adequately assess them. It’s not just educators who know the value of these so-called soft skills yet they are deemed superfluous when a student is evaluated by national standards.
So when Dom Post tells primary teachers to suck it up when we voice concern about what the accountability measures might mean in schools as cover up our ‘poor performance’ I get scared. Not because I think my performance is poor at 2 weeks on job but I’m scared more broadly about a set of assumptions that are being made to measure performance and the effect this will have on our kids.
I’m scared that the National Standards that are being used to measure accountability aren’t particularly accurate right now yet we assuming that they are.
I’m scared future classrooms will be focused more on students making the standards rather than learning.
I’m scared for the students who have an interest in the arts, science or social science will miss out on developing their passions because they aren’t deemed important enough by our policy makers to measure.
I’m scared for that the gifted and talented kids learning needs will be ignored because they are functioning well above standard and the focus on improving gains for all might marginalize this group of learners.
I’m scared for the kids with severe learning difficulties will never have their efforts and progress over the year acknowledged because they are below standard.
I’m scared that I might be labeling english language learners below standard because their thinking got lost in translation.
I’m scared that by reducing teaching and learning down to passing a series of assessments we will lose sight of the reason why we educate children in the first place.
Despite my rantings I do believe that standardized tests have a place in education. They can provide useful diagnostic information about a child’s learning needs when they are used appropriately. However just like blood pressure is only a small measure of a person’s health and can not give an overall picture of a person’s well being standards should not be the sum of all a student’s academic parts let alone the focus for the entire education system.
That word you keep using, accountabilty, I don’t think it means learning.
Weekly Reflection: I’m a stranger here myself
The spires of the Kremlin (photo by author)
No matter how much you read the guidebook the tired cliché about travelling is true, being there is everything.
Which brings me to Russia.
The palaces of Saint Petersburg, Red square, Saint Basil’s cathedral, Yekaterinburg, Lake Baikal, the frozen tundra of Siberia and rumours of the world’s most bizarre museum in Vladivostok. Russia was always going to be a place I just had to see.
So I did in 2010.
I flew into Saint Petersburg and made it right through to Vladivostok in the Far East. And I made that journey old-school style. No planes, no smartphone, no laptop. Just a guidebook, phrasebook and my backpack. The Russians I met in the third class sections of the trains were quick to point out I was insane to undertake such adventure on my own not speaking Russian.
And they were right.
Travelling across Russia without a guide and no Russian language is extremely challenging. Just when you think you’ve got things figured out you’ll find yourself lost, being yelled at by the Kremlin guards or wondering if you’ll miss your flight out of the country when the taxi booked the night before is an hour late.
No matter how much you think you might know, Russia regularly likes to remind visitors who is boss.
That mix of euphoria and disorientation from being a stranger in a strange land is perhaps an ideal one for a first week of teaching.
I am sure I am not alone.
Even with the best induction programme and the most meticulous planning in the world, the kids actually being there in the classroom and putting those ideas into action is so awesome but also involves taking a leap into the unknown.
I didn’t know my kids on Tuesday, I’m starting to get to know them now.
At the beginning of the week I had some ideas about setting up a class but was not entirely sure of which ones would work well, which ones need to be reworked and which ones I might need to rethink entirely. Now I have some experience to draw on when I repeat the process next year.
When I look back now I realize how my first week of teaching was like finding my way in a new city. Spending my day wandering around thinking wow this job is so awesome only to being reminded that I also have a lot of learning to do 10 minutes later. Even if that learning is remembering where the student toilets are located.
While there were a couple of kids in the class who were undoubtedly missing the familiarity of primary school, I really missed having another teacher in the room. This week is the first time I’ve been in a classroom alone with kids for an extended period of time as student teaching is heavily supervised and when I was teaching in Korea it was a co-teaching situation. While I will have regular classroom observations as part of my Professional Development, the interaction isn’t going to be as frequent or immediate as what I am used to when there’s someone working alongside you in the classroom.
But much like how my guidebooks often ended up being pulled out a lot less frequently once I learn how to navigate my way around new cities, gaining my formal teaching qualified means that I am entrusted with far greater responsibility than I ever had. Alongside the nearly 30 children to teach there’s classroom equipment to keep safe, administering and marking student assessment, communicating with parents and making sure everyone in our class knows what to do during an evacuation. Even with all the support around me, there’s a lot take in which explains why this week went by so quickly.
I thought it useful to document those first days in the classroom that will undoubtedly be lost into a hazy memory of all those ‘firsts’ I’ll go through this year. Next year things will be a bit different and when I greet new students instead of being a stranger to a new school and the teaching game I’ll hopefully have moved up to expat status.
But by capturing that feeling of disorientation that comes with arriving in a new place, I’ll be easily able to remember where I am right now not just to measure my professional progress in a year’s time but help put myself in the shoes of the new students arriving into school this time next year.
January Byte Counting – Blog stats
Welcome back to byte counting, 2012. I didn’t keep much in the way of stats in December but had my busiest day ever on December 6 with 923 hits after the charter schools went (by my standards) viral. Despite only starting posting from January 23, I had a reasonably large amount of traffic considering it was the school holidays.
I’m found interesting how much of my incoming traffic these days is from blog searches and also from the the Registered Teacher Criteria Wiki. I didn’t realize my ramblings had now become a source of information for people but there you go.
Onwards to the stats:
Posts: 5
Comments: 63
Page Loads: 3,993 (129 hits per day)
Biggest day: 25 January (427 hits)
Most commented on post: Very interesting conversation in the Six weeks teacher training? Our neediest kids deserve better than that.
Top 5 most popular posts (in order of popularity)
- Why #wordpress is better than blogspot (426 hits)
- Six weeks teacher training? Our neediest kids deserve better than that (387 hits)
- Should students call teachers by their first names? (260 hits)
- What they don’t tell you about your first day of teaching (131 hits)
- Weekly Reflection: The First Post (106 hits)
Top Referrers
Search engines are way out in front with over 1,800 referrals. Facebook generated over 200 visitors to the blog this month while the Registered Teacher Criteria Wiki, best new education blogs and http://www.everybody.co.nz/ generated a bit of traffic through some linky love.
Coming up in February:
- Teaching, teaching and more teaching!
- I crash through 40,000 hit mark. Wow I was so happy when I managed to make it to 4,000 hits!
