Coaching Session Number One

Last week I had my first coaching session with the first teacher that I am coaching.  I was a little nervous as it was my first coaching session ever!  My biggest concern was making sure that I was able to elicit enough from the teacher to ensure she was able to set a clear goal for her teaching focus.  I came armed with some questions and the goal template that we were shown from Skella during our coaching session from her a few weeks ago.

I felt the conversation went okay.  I manged to ensure I limited my comments to questions and clarifying statements rather than trying to offer solutions to the challenges she mentioned she was facing at the moment.  However I did feel that at times I lacked enough questions to enable the teacher to reflect really deeply on her practice and set a goal that truly reflected her biggest challenges.  Her goal, although something she wants to work on, seems like something that she can achieve quite quickly without too much support or work required.

Before my next coaching session with my next teacher, I would like to make sure I have done the following:

• have a wider range of questions pre-prepared to draw from during our coaching session
• ensure the teacher has reflected and answered the questions Myra has prepared for teachers to reflect on before their session.

My next set of coaching sessions are at the start of April so we will see how these go!

Criteria Covered with this experience:
Support others to:
1. establish and maintain effective professional relationships focused on the learning and well-being of ākonga

4. demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of personal professional practice

WLA Professional Development Workshops 17 March 2016

Born to Read - Rob Southam

• Reading to students is extremely important
• Find a series to hook them in - it doesn't matter what the series as it will lead to further reading in the future
• Children should be in charge of their reading - let them choose
• Find a book that they love to read

Top 10 Global trends right now for books:

1. Diversity themes - check out cool nukes by Des Hunt
2. Science fiction, Fantasy and Adventure
3. intriguing non fiction and sophisticated colouring books
4. novels with cartoons
5. Kid lit on screen
6. War themes
7. Humor is huge
8. fun early readers format
9. Graphic Novels - Gorillas in our Midst
10. Pop Fiction

Lynden Cook - Writing

Learning pit - James Nottingham

Growth Mindset

Student Agency

Teacher role is the provoker and inspirer

Teachers role is also to explicit teaching 

Students taking this to independence

Sequence  - connect to students interest

• I have noticed . . . . . . 
• Activivate prior knowledge - What do you know about . . . . 
• Connect ideas What do you know?  What does that mean?  How do you know that?  Do you think that?
• Did you know - Grow vocab, did you know facts
• Introduce the artifact/motivation (video etc)
• Planning talk - This reminds me of, I could explain how
• Writing cycle process

I want my writing to . . . . . (genre)

Explicit teaching

5/7 learners over four days

• Discover
• Compare/contrast start to form a success criteria in student language
• Collaborate with a partner
• Practice

check in with the students the following week to see if they are including the skills taught.

Easier Said Than Done: Collaborative Learning Reading

Easier said than done: Collaborative Learning - Chris Watkins

This article is a look at how teachers can promote collaboration with their students in the programmes and activities they do with their classes.  I thought this would be a good place to start my thinking as our syndicates big idea for the term which is 'collaboration'

Here are some important points I found from reading the article:

• Collaboration will generate important social learning and life skills for young people
• Research evidence suggests that collaboration learning is associated with higher performance right from the earliest years in schooling
• Collaboration aims to promote dialogue
• The crucial element is designing tasks to allow for collaboration
• Tasks must not be 'decomposable' - not able to be complete by one person in the group
• The task must require the contribution of all members of the group
• Tasks should create an interdependence which is reciprocal: each student is dependent of the contributions of all others
• The task can not be a 'right answer' task.  Instead it must require higher-order thinking and negotiation of meaning.

I believe this links to Practicing Teacher Criteria in the following ways:

Criteria 8. demonstrate in practice their knowledge and understanding of how ākonga learn
because I will be enabling ākonga to make connections between their prior experiences and learning and their current learning activities.  I will also be providing opportunities and support for ākonga to engage with, practice and apply new learning to different contexts.

and

Criteria 12. demonstrate commitment to critical inquiry and problem-solving in their professional practice because  I have systematically and critically engaged with evidence and professional literature to reflect on and refine my practice.