ConnectEd session August

Collaborative Planning Session

For the first session at our ConnectED session I decided to attend the Collaborative Planning session.  I really wanted to hear what others do in, and what they use for planning.  We currently plan collaboratively for our big idea planning and our unit plan for mathematics, but wondered when others are planning in a team, what does that actually look like? I have visions of teachers either working in an online doc or site planning together based on their learners needs and then linking off to other docs as they get more into the detail of what they are teaching. 

It was great to hear from Mike who shared what they are doing down in Nga Whatakauri as I haven't really had the chance to talk to the three of them about how they run their classroom programme down there.  It sounds like it is full on for them, and most of the day is dedicated to reading, writing, and maths.  He also said there isn't much time for things such as the big idea focus, sports or game time.  After listening to others share and discussing in the circle, he concluded that he felt the three of them could be collaborative better as at the moment they are still doing separate reading, writing and maths planning for groups and that it still took such a long time for planning each week.

A teacher explained that she went through a similar 'panic' about how to plan when her and a colleague went to an open plan room - 44 Yr5 and 6 pupils. She couldn't find anything she liked much, despite trawling the internet, so she created my own Google Sheets planning template. This looks like a regular timetable but uses hyperlinks to the curriculum and other online content, and to her own Google Docs. She also shares the relevant weekly plan with the class, via their email so they an access the links themselves. Seems to be working well.  She is wondering how next year will work though as they are going from 2 teachers to 4 next year, as she thought the larger the amount of students and teachers the more difficult she thinks it might be.  She also commented on the importance of having a great relationship with the colleagues you are working with the open plan environment in order for it to work.

After the session, I did a little bit of searching online to find other examples of what other teachers are doing in terms of collaborative planning with others and found this site which contains a range of resources and examples from other teachers and how they plan:
https://docs.google.com/a/core-ed.ac.nz/presentation/d/1Q7isbPcO8_V8_Cm8vrZLqRKKvTbBSCqA5E5Rk6SVvg0/edit#slide=id.g486d3ebd0_099