Mia's Teaching Journey

After our second CoL meeting yesterday, I wanted to review my Inquiry thus far this term, I feel I need to have a look at my initial problem, re word my Inquiry question, officially identify my target group and come up with a way of how I am going to MEASURE my students progress. What is my problem: My children lack the mathematical language, needed to explain how they work out a problem. In addition, this means they find it difficult to understand what many word problems are asking them to do in the first place. What is my inquiry question: Would the everyday, explicit and rich teaching of mathematical language, coupled with step by step techniques of unpacking word problems, help my learners to better understand mathematical concepts, and better answer questions and explain how they got their answer? I feel like this has been more of the direction my inquiry has gone this term, although I am integrating a lot more strand I feel like it has become very clear that there ...

Gems from second CoL Meeting, March, 2018 Russell’s Opening All around the country teacher’s are doing inquiries, mostly towards their attestations. In our context, if teachers can’t find the stuff that works and share it with others, our kids will continue to fail. The reason we have Jannie in this year is because all of you guys expressed that we have a language acquisition problem. To get out of poverty, you have to be able to speak the right way. You can’t shift into a different echelon in society if you can’t speak the kind of way that is accepted in our society. Teaching absolutely is an intervention. Your inquiry is part of forming the intervention. There is a difference between teaching, and guiding and supporting. This is teaching as inquiry. What Rebecca said, is that if it’s just development, if we are just letting kids develop, it’s not teaching. Teachers need to take learners beyond development. Part of teaching as inquiry, it is our job it identify the ‘good’...

Community of Adult Learners  Visible, connected, empowered, ubiquitous “How can we come together and integrate our expertise and our knowledge to address significant problems?” Graeme Aitken Superficial Collaboration .. its knowing about each other passing through each others' lives but no deeply knowing each other. We are building on the amazing stuff that teachers are doing and collaborating in a way that is made possible through our ability to share what we are doing - Go Us! Manaiakalani - Using meta-analysis to identify what works If teachers are going to have a pedagogy thats going to make a difference to children, you need to understand what your goals are, and what difference you are going to make. If one of the things you want to achieve for example, is that  you want all of your learners to be interested in what they are doing in class, how are you going to show evidence that they are actually more engaged? 3 things you need to do as a...

I am going to be on camp this Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, so before I go to camp I wanted to do a blog post explaining what I did in class on Friday to help with my research into my inquiry.    Would integrating the teaching of strand maths with number, help kids to better acquire key mathematical language, raising their achievement? I wanted to get a general idea where my class was at in terms of their understanding of key mathematical vocabulary. I as the teacher, from observations on a day to day basis know that the understanding and use of mathematical vocabulary in my class is poor, however doing a CoL inquiry this year I needed to have more sound data to prove this. I found a very simple vocabulary activity online and got my learners to complete it. It looked like this: The front of the sheet had a bank of words. They were: add, difference, divided by, combined, per, subtract, sum, times, minus, multiple, shared, increased by, plus, take away rat...

Kia Ora!! Happy Friday, it's been a busy week 5, gearing up for camp next week. I am looking forward to the weekend, and super excited about going on my first camp in my teaching career. Firstly I want to reflect on this week's first DMIC lesson I tried out with my learners. Please read my previous blog post if you haven't already, this gives you an intro into this lesson, and the pedagogy behind the DIMC maths Bobbi Hunter is guiding us through, with the goal of implementing this in our classes this year.  The question was:  On the weekend Mr Goodwin, Miss Parrant and Miss Szymanik practised putting up a tent. They started at 10:15 a.m. They each took one 7 minute turn.  How long did it take them to put up the tent? If they started putting up the tent at 10:15 a.m, what time did they finish? What did I consider when forming this question.  Is it relevant to the learner's lives?  YES, we are all going to camp next week, a lot of the childre...