Week 5 #IMMOOC - Mini Blogs

What are the few purposeful areas that we are focused on?

As a staff, we are clear on the revised professional learning programme that the school has implemented this year. The move away from ‘one size fits all’ meetings, where information is disseminated and objectives are misaligned with personal strengths and passions, is welcome. One key area for the staff to focus on has been the revision of the curriculum, particularly in the lower school. This has led to PLN groups of teachers who have a special interest in reading and mathematics in particular, to join together to look at ways learning in these areas can be developed.

The second area is meeting the need for our school community to be able to articulate clearly what we mean when we discuss good learning. Without a good understanding of what good learning looks like, we’ll never move forward as a community. It’s imperative for us to get this right, with the whole community buying into this vision. This makes it a key focus for us.

How do we share openly and regularly to further our own learning and development?

I’m interested if this is as a community or as individual. 250 words is a lot, so I think I can cover both! As a community we utilise a virtual learning platform for all classes. The expectation is that all assignments are listed as tasks within this platform. All class spaces on the platform are open to staff, giving each staff member a window into others’ learning spaces. We have also embedded our school hashtag #bsjbytes in a feed on the dashboard of every user, be it parent, student and staff. The PLN opportunities detailed in the next post also give opportunity for staff to share their own learning in more depth.

As an educator, I rely on my blog posts, my twitter feed and one to one relationships to share what I am up to. As a Learning Technology Coach, I get to interact and talk with all members of our community specifically around learning, and learning with technology. This puts me in a privileged position, and I relish it.

Do our professional learning opportunities mirror the learning we want to create for our students?

Well, we need to have a clear and shared understanding of what learning looks like at our school. That might sound an odd thing to say, but we currently have a task force working on defining what our school agrees is good learning. Even so, our professional learning is evolving this year. Teachers are choosing a focus for them to come together and learn about. They were also able to offer something they were interested in as a focus as long as that related to one of the school focuses for the year, or on learning directly. These were shared, and the teachers signed up to what they were interested in learning more about.

These PLNs are given times to meet, discuss, plan, try out and reflect on new strategies and approaches. In addition, teachers are expected to pursue learning of their own choosing. This could be their masters course, something offered by our Learning Technology team or an externally offered course, such as an MOOC. As these opportunities are driven by passions, interests and strengths I think they are reflective of the direction that we wish our students’ learning to go.