I am a recent convert to blogs. I know the despair when one vanishes. I know the time commitment required. But it opens the window to a world of your thoughts that I have not had before and I am grateful for this new way of seeing how we can move forward to achieve our vision. We do share the same vision, don’t we? Our BIG 4 are only there because we are trying to educate our students so that they can live in a contemporary world successfully. To do that we want to have children who are factive Christians, independent, responsible, reflective, confident life-long learners who value their own gifts and talents. There are other skills we want them to have but generally speaking ,I think that might be that is a good overview.
So here is a dilemma that I have. I have listened to everyone talking about their PARTS projects and I hear that :
Its too hard to align WLA, AusVELS and Lane Clark’s tools.
There isn’t enough time in the day to do everything.
Its easier to go back to working independently and control our homegroup than find new ways to assess and plan for a learning community .
Now, that might just be venting and frustration because you are all on the brink of moving forward to finding new solutions. That happens! I know this as a pattern. It has happened before when we get into this stage of a research project like the PARTS questions and the messiness of new learning overwhelms us.
1) First and foremost, push on and move through it and trust in your learnings and knowledge as top educators that you will find new ways to manage together. COLLABORATION is the only way forward. You will not achieve our goals by retreating.
2) Understand what you have to LET GO of to bring new learning in.` News’ is a nonsense when you have Focus Children and Class meeetings. Can you justify 1 hour of news as Oral Language when you do Investigations? Where is the time coming from. Oral language is addressed in Investigations and Class meetings so you are taking time from all other areas to do News.
3 ) You can only teach to students needs adequately if you share the teaching load in your community. If that means we have to change the report format so each teacher in a community signs off on all comments for all the chn they teach, so be it! Lets do it.
Can we make sure we speak our mind on our blogs (as opposed to just going through the motions) so that we get real dialogue happening. Then we can all move towards our vison together, supporting each other in the pain and mess of the learning process. I trust that you will understand that I share the pain of the journey but I also TRUST you can teach these students for their future and that means doing it differently and living with uncertainty.
I truly hope that blogging allows us to vent as well as learn, share in the mess and the positives. We have much to celebrate but we cannot, for the sake of these children, go backwards.
Hi Christine,
I’ve just caught up to date on all the entries on staff blogs so far and from what I am reading, many have pushed through that barrier and are starting to see light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel may have been further away than first thought and may not be reached by the end of the formal PARTs time but that is exciting. To me it says that what we are researching is addressing the needs that staff have expressed. The answer may not be what is trialled here in this process, it might be something that hasn’t been considered but until we trial something we don’t know for sure how it will go.
The 5/6 team discussed last night what we believe contemporary learning and community teaching to be. It was quite timely as we then looked at where everything we are doing ‘fits’. There was some valuable discussion arising from this. Just like we’ve learnt through LAP and the Web2.0 course it is the dialogue that we need to learn from each other. Of course, ensuring that the dialogue is positive and solution focussed is important!
Regards,
Rebecca
Hi Bec. I am continually amazed at how the blogs is helping me to understand the processes required to challenge ourselves out of the known and into the unknown. As you so wisely comment, the answers to our questions may not be found in the processes we are engaged in but isn’t that what Deb P was always saying. What is important is the journey that must inevitably change the seeker along the way. We become more insightful as we embrace the knowledge and skills that it takes to delve into the question.The questions we pose in themselves are really moving targets anyway. As we get closer to answering them, they will morph into new questions and we are challenged to renew the search. The ability to be open to the search and in the searching is becoming the hallmark of a real educator.
It is a different mindset from the security of being the source of constant and consistent authority and wisdom. That was the traditional understanding of teachers. That appears to me how teachers were seen in society and how teachers saw themselves. I think moving from that mindset to being the explorer in a new world where society is unsure of how we need to prepare for the future and where teachers are unsure of how to find meaning for both themselves and their students in the now, never mnd the future is a huge challenge. I love a good challenge and it is a great joy to me to be working with a team that is trying to find ways to make this changing world meaningful for both students and parents.The staff of St E’s are really giving so much effort to the process of transforming the way we teach and the way we learn.Cheers, Christine