Week 32 A Key Change in my Practice

A key Change in my Professional Practice

Based on Rolfe’s reflective model.

What?

The MindLab journey has been an interesting one which has given me so much insight into my own thinking and practice by making me stop and evaluate and to look at what has changed in my ways of working.

So What?

Taking the Professional Learning Standard in the Our Code Our Standards (2017, p.18), I will try and answer each segment with what I have tried to do this year in changing my practice.

“Use inquiry, collaborative problem solving and professional learning to improve professional capability to impact on the learning and achievement of all learners.”

I have worked with my Mindlab colleagues to collaborate, discuss, debate and construct many differing concepts and theories and even musical videos to engage in new ideas to take back to the classroom and staffroom to enrich our students experiences in my subjects. My professional capability has been enhanced by the critical friends I have worked with in my group in # Porirua. I have learned so much from the wise and wide cultural and practical knowledge of those who work in schools with strong Maori and Pasifika cultures which for this English girl is a wonderful enrichment of my understanding! It has helped me to see through a different lens into how my Maori and Pasifika students learn and react to my approach as the white middle class foreigner. I hope I am bridging the gap by personalising their projects for their needs.

“Inquire into and reflect on the effectiveness of practice in an ongoing way, using evidence from a range of sources.”

I have read the theories, learned the frameworks and put into practice a range of ideas to enhance my pedagogical approach to delivering the new ideas and then reflected on my practice to move forward into the next cycle of inquiry to keep making a change, taking into account what my students are saying about their learning and giving them agency in what they do.

Taking the blended learning into a practical classroom and flipping the content knowledge to enhance engagement and redefine their learning in producing their own content to help others. “While we teach, we learn,” said the Roman philosopher Seneca. I have had some wonderfully dramatic and funny videos of how not to use the iron and not to run with scissors! All we needed was the fake blood! Yet, they all know the safety in the workroom now.

“Critically examine how my own assumptions and beliefs, including cultural beliefs, impact on practice and the achievement of learners with different abilities and needs, backgrounds, genders, identities, languages and cultures.”

My fundamental belief in working with all students in a relational way no matter what their background, has proven to be my sustaining focus and my own pedagogy in individualising the learning for all the students is the way I make this work. My critical reflection has been that it is not always good for wellbeing, it’s exhausting, but so uplifting when a student who is failing elsewhere can succeed in completing a special project they have undertaken. When an international student learning English can work with me through language barriers to construct a ball gown for graduation in Japan, or a scholarship student weaves a Korowai and teaches me the cultural aspects of this then Ako is truly happening.  It does take its toll and I am tired as the energy to sustain this level of individualised teaching is vast. I need to recharge and do something different for a while.

“Be informed by research and innovations related to: content disciplines; pedagogy; teaching for diverse learners, including learners with disabilities and learning support needs; and wider education matters.”

The MindLab has given me the many different areas of research to engage my brain into how I can use the content of my subject and present it to all students like the ‘Special Needs’ students who have made dog blankets for the SPCA and used the embroidery machine to make their labels. I have worked with students who have English as a second language and we have come together by using the video library I am making to video the “How to” techniques. The video is bridging the language gap in understanding.

“Engage in professional learning and adaptively apply this learning in practice.”

My involvement in my school’s TLIF project along with the Mindlab learning has allowed us to identify markers of personalisation which we can use as a school based framework to make that individualised approach happen in our place in our school environment.  The blend of this professional learning has helped me so much in the focus of my inquiry and pinpoint my difficulties in a class of twenty five students who all need individual help to acquire skills. How I change this has been my inquiry and how I can make them more independent has been the goal, videoing and using in classroom flipped tutorials is beginning to make some impact.

“Seek and respond to feedback from learners, colleagues and other education professionals, and engage in collaborative problem solving and learning focused collegial discussions.”

My critical friend and colleague who has travelled this journey with me this year in the MindLab has been my life support. We talked all the way to the MindLab venue and all the way back with so many ideas and thoughts about how what we have just learned, could be used. I have been very fortunate to have such an intelligent critical friend and I have benefitted so much from her wit, wisdom and perception when I couldn’t see the ‘wood for the trees’.  My TLIF colleagues have given me help from a different perspective and this has been so useful as they are not Mindlabbers so can see through a different viewpoint which is so useful when we talk Mindlab ‘speak’ to have someone to ask what we mean!

What next?

Big journeys forward for next year and onwards. I have a study award for 32 weeks study with the Mindlab Masters and start in April. I have a new job which I have been so fortunate in achieving the dream of developing a Technology department and implementing the new Digital Curriculum. It will be so exciting to blend the Mindlab knowledge with the authentic opportunity to make the Mindlab utopia happen in a school where they certainly have big picture thinking! I am going to work more with Maori and Pasifika students so my cultural journey and bridging the gap from my white foreign roots will be even more exposed and it’s so exciting and it will be the injection of energy I need to keep me going. Without undertaking the Mindlab course I don’t think I would have done any of this, and I don’t think I would be embarking on a Masters, I had no real interest in this before. It has been a year of change.

 Paul. A. M (2011), The protégé Effect.  Retrieved from:  http://ideas.time.com/2011/11/30/the-protege-effect/

Education Council. (2017). Our Code Our Standards.Retrieved from: https://educationcouncil.org.nz/sites/default/files/Our%20Code%20Our%20Standards%20web%20booklet%20FINAL.pdf