#MindLabED Week 32 – Changes in Practice

It’s hard to believe that this postgraduate journey is coming to a close – it seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in the Mind Lab for that first Saturday but, at the same time, a lot has happened since!

For me, the whole experience has been eye-opening. Despite only graduating from Teacher’s College in 2012, I have often felt that I was already quite behind the times. The post graduate programme has been a great way to play catch up with what is going on in the sector and gain plenty of new ideas to take back to my school.

I’m not sure it’s possible to put into a blog post all the ways that the past 32ish weeks have impacted on my practice, so I think it best to focus on the two that I feel are most significant.

Engaging with the literature

Corresponds to PTC 4 and PTC 12

John Hattie tells us that teaching is an evidence-based profession (Hattie, 2012). Yet, I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I have consulted the literature prior to starting on my postgrad journey. If I was reading literature, it would have been one of my university textbooks or a short reading given to me in a staff meeting. Occasionally, I might pick up another book, but rarely would I actually finish it.

The literature review process was an eye-opening experience, in the sense that I was not aware that there was academic literature written on the more practical aspects of teaching. I was surprised to find myself enjoying writing it and genuinely wanting to find out more. Now, if I have encountered an issue in the classroom or an aspect I felt needed improvement, my searches have often started with Google Scholar instead of just plain old Google.

In part, this was a result of my lack of access to academic journals and other texts. University library log-ins are amazing things, and I feel it is a strange practice that we don’t keep access to the libraries of institutions we have studied with post graduation. Getting copies of academic journals, legally, is easier said than done when you are no longer enrolled at university.

The wonderful Camilla introduced me to the Ministry of Education Library back in November. That combined with the large number of articles now available online mean that I am able to continue professional reading after postgrad is finished.

Shifting thinking from teaching content to teaching skills

Corresponds to PTC 6 (and also 8, to some extent)

One of the big questions that I think perfectly sums up the postgrad is ‘How do we prepare students for a future that doesn’t exist yet?’ This question has become increasingly relevant in the 21st Century, with technology developments progressing so rapidly that .

At university, we spent far more time learning about how to teach the specific learning areas than we did the key competencies (Ministry of Education, 2007) and, to some extent, I wonder whether or not I was adequately aware of how important those competencies for students when I graduated.

The students I teach now will rarely find themselves in a situation where Google is more than five metres away – many of their questions will be answered with a quick search and, if particularly complicated, a bit of reading. Boldstad et. al. (2012) suggest that if they are to thrive in an uncertain world, it is unlikely to be as a result of their knowledge. Instead, it will be because of the toolkit of skills they have developed over the course of their education. It speaks volumes that a set of competencies – created almost ten years ago now – are still just as relevant today as they were ten years ago.

One of the big changes I am starting to make is thinking about and consciously planning for the development of key competencies in students. Yes, achievement objectives are still important but I also feel that learning should aim for the development of those very important skills. The content is the vehicle for teaching the skills.

 

So, what next?

While this professional development journey is coming to a close, there are plenty more that I wish to embark on.

I have been asked by my school to participate in the Ministry’s Accelerating Literacy Learning programme and I am quite excited to do so. Having seen a colleague take part in Terms 1 and 2, I have been able to come up with some ideas that could form the basis of an inquiry in teaching writing.

Gamification was one of the topic areas I was tossing up for my literature review and teaching as inquiry plan (R&C 1 and 2) – I am thinking that my inquiry will focus around harnessing the power of gamification to improve the learning of students in writing. It’d be interesting to see if the Literacy Learning Progressions can be gamified to make next steps clearer for students and give them the motivation to further develop their writing.

Aside from my participation in ALL, I am hoping to complete Level 2 of the Google Certified Educator qualifications.

The option of the Masters really got me thinking, but I feel that some more experience in the classroom would be a good idea before I travel down that pathway. Something tells me that, in a year’s time, I may reevaluate that stance. This whole experience of taking part in postgraduate study has been really beneficial, both to myself and my students, and I have a feeling I will really miss it now that I am finished.

 

Reference List

Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching – A New Zealand perspective\n. Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/109317/994_Future-oriented-07062012.pdf

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers. Abingdon: Routledge.

Ministry of Education. (2007). The New Zealand Curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media Limited.

This post concludes the eight-week series of blogs I have written as part of my #MindLabEd Postgraduate Certificate.

#MindLabED Week 31 – Interdisciplinary Connections

As a practicing teacher in the primary sector, my teaching is, by nature, interdisciplinary. Unlike my secondary counterparts, we are trained in the pedagogy and content knowledge of all eight of the New Zealand Curriculum Learning Areas, and will likely end up teaching all of them and one point or another.

The primary sector, by nature, is interdisciplinary, although some schools are more so than others. The advent of National Standards has seen the three Rs – Reading, Writing, and Maths – embedded in as many contexts as possible in order to maximise students’ exposure to key teachings.

As a professional, I aim to spend time developing my knowledge in a variety of disciplines. Because of skills and content I teach, I cannot be an expert in everything, so I use a network of connections to help me. You can see my current network below (and view it live here).

It is interesting to analyse this map because it does not reflect what I thought it would. I felt that I was fairly well connected to the outside world and used the resources outside of my school wisely. However, it would appear that, aside from Twitter, I am making very few connections with individuals/organisations that focus on different disciplines. So I feel it is fitting that my goals be to:

• make a least one new connection in a discipline relevant to my students’ next Inquiry unit (sustainability) and invite them to share their knowledge
• take my students on a trip so that they can make a connection with a place and/or group of individuals relevant to their Inquiry unit

Benefits and Challenges of Interdisciplinary Connections

Benefits

• The real world is interdisciplinary – it is very rare that students will ever encounter a scenario where the are able to apply the knowledge they have gained from only one subject area. Teaching with this in mind ties in well with the ‘Future Focused’ principle of the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007)
• Making connections with other sectors allows us to connect with more knowledge and, potentially, a different skill set than we normally apply/ are exposed to in our day to day lives. An example of this would be the adoption of design thinking in the education sector, despite the process very much arising out of the technology sector
• For students, new faces – particularly those of perceived ‘experts’ – legitimise learning and make it more authentic. Being able to bring in experts from other sectors will help students to see purpose and relevance to their learning

Challenges

• Working together requires time for both parties to communicate. In the teaching profession, where time is a scarce resource, this can be off-putting for some
• In order to be able to collaborate to produce a shared outcome, you need to be clear on what that outcome is. When individuals come from different disciplines there are likely to be multiple desired outcomes, and making sure that all those outcomes are achieved could prove tricky. Clear communication is needed to ensure that all parties are achieving what they set out to do or compromise is needed to ensure that needs are still met
• Working collaboratively with others requires a variety of social skills and is more easily done when individuals have things in common. If two people with very different approaches/manners are paired together, you can risk personality clashes or conflicts as a result of differences (Jones, 2009)

 

Reference List

Jones, C. (2009). Interdisciplinary Approach – Advantages, Disadvantages, and the Future Benefits of Interdisciplinary Studies. ESSAI, 7(26), 76–81.

 

 

#MindLabED Week 30 – Professional Online Social Networks

Social Networking has made a substantial impact on my teaching career and, in many ways, has helped shape the path that I am now on.

As a beginning teacher struggling to find my first teaching position, twitter showed me many of the awesome things happening in the teaching community and helped me come to the conclusion that I wanted to be a teacher specialising in the integration of digital tools for learning. In many ways, it was my first community of practice (Wenger, 2000).

Of all the social networks available for professional learning, my favourite would have to be Twitter. It serves as a place where educators can share whatever brilliant things they are doing in their classrooms with anyone watching, whether they be via individual tweets or the sharing of blog links and educational articles.

George Couros (2015) makes an excellent point when he says that you can often tell if a teacher is on twitter because of the innovations evident in their classroom. Teachers on Twitter have greater access to the newer practices in the profession and are more willing to experiment.

The brevity of tweets makes it possible for me to quickly scroll through large numbers of ideas, picking out only the ones that are relevant to my context.  It also serves as a great way to work out which blog posts I should be reading.

The aspect of Twitter I find most beneficial is that it is an application that you open when you need it and/or when you have time for it. I’m just on the other side of the mid-year report writing period and I can tell you that my twitter account has been very inactive these past few weeks. However, as things start to settle again, I will open that tab more and more.

As teachers, we talk a lot about personalized learning for students, yet it is really only just being a conversation we have in the context of teachers. With Twitter, I am able to focus on content coming through that is relevant to my professional learning goals – my personal ones, not the ones on my appraisal – and what I am interested in as an educator. A quick search or a ‘would anyone be willing to share about _____’ is all it takes to gain new information and strategies that are generally tried and true. With the wide variety of hashtags popping up for specific topics and the chats to go with them, it is fairly easy to connect with individuals with similar interests and discuss teaching and learning.

While I already do a fair bit of professional learning on twitter, one thing I would like to work on as a twitter user is being more participative. When I started out, I was a textbook ‘lurker’, watching what was happening and barely participating. While I have gotten much better now, I still feel that I do not share my thinking enough, especially when thinking about how much I have benefitted from others sharing.  In many ways, this aligns with Karen Melhuish’s (2013) remarks about situations on the VLN – that teachers need to take the step up from participating to actually leading or driving collaboration in the online setting.

 

Reference List

Couros, G. (2015). A Higher Chance of Becoming Great? The “Twitter” Factor. Retrieved June 14, 2016, from http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/5160

Melhuish, K. (2013). Online social networking and its impact on New Zealand educators’ professional learning. University of Waikato. Retrieved from http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/8482/thesis.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

Wenger, E. (2000). Communities of practice andSocial Learning Systems. Organization, 7(2), 225–246. http://doi.org/10.1177/135050840072002

 

 

#MindLabED Week 29 – Legal and Ethical Contexts in my Digital Practice

As a teacher, I am very aware that I hold a public position in my community. Despite living roughly 25km from my school, I can never be 100% certain that I won’t run into someone I know from school. In many ways, this impacts on my decision making when I am in public – I am very aware of the potential of being spotted, so I make sure that I am always acting in a manner that I would be happy for one of my students or a parent to see.

This thinking also extends to my online presence. My Facebook account is well locked down, my Instagram account is well hidden and, frankly, there is nothing particularly exciting on either. Both are intended only for personal use; students know that friend requests to me will be declined, and I choose any colleagues I add very carefully.

Any outward facing accounts I do have are intended for professional use, and their tone, clearly, is professional. This blog, for instance, I would be fine with any one of my students stumbling upon, and my Twitter profile is much the same. To lessen the likelihood, I omit my surname from my profiles.

 

“Home Row.” by Jocelyn Lehman is licensed under CC  BY-ND 2.0

 

One of the ethical dilemmas that have arisen out of increased social media usage is the blurred line between school and parental responsibility with incidences of cyberbullying. As an intermediate school, we find we are faced with this one more than we would like.

Traditionally, schools have dealt with what has happened on the way to, at, and home from school – anything that fell outside those parameters was the parents’ responsibility. With the advent and wide adoption of social media, we feel that, ethically, this is no longer an appropriate stance to take.

 The Education Council Code of Ethics for Certificated Teachers  identifies that teachers have a responsibility to provide “responsible care” (Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, n.d., para. 3), especially to learners. While there is no specific definition for the meaning of these words within this context, I feel that dealing with instances of cyber bullying falls under the first section, “Commitment to learners” (para. 6). As teachers, we are responsible for taking every reasonable step to promote our students’ hauora.

While our school has no specific policy on cyberbullying, incidences can be covered by both our ‘Bullying’ policy and our ‘Incidents Outside of School’ policy, which both fall within NAG 5. These state a clear process of referral up to the Deputy Principal for investigation, identification of the facts, parental contact and appropriate consequences for the student/s carrying out the bullying.

As a school, we are good at dealing with specific instances when they crop up, but our approach to combating cyberbullying is largely reactive. Classes will have learning conversations about the types of communication students should be doing online and how to keep things positive, but there is no formal, school-wide teaching.

My class is well versed in what to do if they feel they are being cyberbullied – I will frequently tell them that the best thing to do is to take screenshots and send them to me so that I can put the issue through the appropriate channels. But I’m not 100% sure all classes would be the same

With the high adoption rate of digital technologies in the school, and the knowledge that we are likely to be flooded with Chromebooks next year as students come in from feeder schools with 1:1 approaches, we know that a unit of some description is needed, and we are working to develop it.

 

Reference List

Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand. n.d. The Education Council Code of Ethics for Certificated Teachers. Retrieved from https://educationcouncil.org.nz/content/code-of-ethics-certificated-teachers-0 

 

#MindLabED Week 28 – Indigenous knowledge & Cultural responsiveness

When I was at Teachers’ College – not that long ago – the Te Kotahitanga Project (Bishop, Berryman, Cavanagh, & Teddy, 2007) was in its heyday, and we spent substantial amounts of time talking about the implications it had for the definition of culturally responsive practice.

The project itself was focused on Māori students in the initial years of secondary education, and worked with teachers to reform practices for the benefits of students. Many of the practices have since informed documents such as Tātaiako (Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, 2011) and Ka Hikitia (Ministry of Education, 2013), and are reflected in the Practicing Teacher Criteria (Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, n.d.) all teachers have to maintain for registration.

In essence, culturally responsive practice is about welcoming and making room for a student’s cultural identity in the classroom, and leveraging them to drive teaching and learning (Gay, 2002). This means creating teaching and learning programmes that allow for students to bring their own cultural practices and perspectives to their learning, and treating those contributions as valid and important.

In my classroom this has looks/has looked like, but was not limited to:

• Researching family histories and how our families used to live
• Talking about Māori ideas alongside Pākeha ideas, and adding any other ideas my students bring to the table
• Learning NZ Sign in support of one of my students, and being aware of deaf culture
• Incorporating humour into daily classroom routines

As a teacher of adolescents, culturally responsive practice has a second dimension – acknowledging the culture of adolescent youth in South Auckland.

In my classroom, this means having an awareness of the daily experiences of my students, the current trends appear in YouTube viewing before school, the topics that pop up in conversation.  Weaving these into teaching and learning within my classroom helps my students to make further connections and see its relevance.

As a school, we are fairly good at creating culturally responsive learning activities. Our Inquiry units are largely designed with addressing multiple perspectives in mind, and students are encouraged to share their ‘cultural capital’ – the resource that is their culture – with their fellow classmates. Every second year, we start the year with a unit focusing on Identity and invite the students to research their ancestors, looking at ways that they live their lives and comparing them with how we live now.  We have just done away with the only unit that cannot really be connected to

Every second year, we start the year with a unit focusing on Identity and invite the students to research their ancestors, looking at ways that they live their lives and comparing them with how we live now.  We have just done away with the only unit that cannot really be connected to student identities – fair trade – and are in the process of replacing it with focusing on sustainability, which allows for many different perspectives.

One thing we need to work on is communicating with our community, particularly our Māori and Pasifika parents. We hold many meetings targeted at getting input from these communities, but they are rarely well attended, and we are somewhat puzzled as to why.

I remember very vividly a particular university lecturer, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, talking about the implications of the schooling experiences of parents on how they felt entering into a school. She spoke of individuals who would, upon entering the classroom, appear to lose all sense of identity and retreat to the ‘yes Miss, no Miss’ type responses we often get from our students. I suspect there may be an element of this at play with our community.

I have no hard data to endorse this theory, but what I do know if that what we are doing at the moment isn’t quite a partnership, and I think that the best way to improve our communication with the Māori community, in particular, is to enact the principles of the Treaty in our communications with them, and ensure that we are working together to support our learners.

 

Reference List

Bishop, R., Berryman, M., Cavanagh, T., & Teddy, L. (2007). Te Kōtahitanga Phase 3 Whānaungatanga : Establishing a Culturally Responsive Pedagogy of Relations in Mainstream Secondary School Classrooms Report to the Ministry of Education.

Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand. (n.d.). Practising Teacher Criteria. Retrieved June 19, 2016, from https://educationcouncil.org.nz/content/practising-teacher-criteria-0

Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand. (2011). Cultural competencies for teachers of Māori learners: Tātaiako.

Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for Culturally Responsive Teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(2), 106–116. http://doi.org/10.1177/0022487108328485

Ministry of Education. (2013). Ka Hikitia – Accelerating Success 2013–2017. Wellington. Retrieved from http://www.education.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Ministry/Strategies-and-policies/Ka-Hikitia/KaHikitiaAcceleratingSuccessEnglish.pdf

#MindLabED Week 27 – Contemporary Trends in Education

There seem to be more trends in education, today, than there have ever been before and the toughest part of being a teacher is choosing which ones are worth having a go with (all while trying to anticipate which ones will just be fads). If I had to name the two biggest, here would be my choices:

Student-Centred Learning

In Future State 2030 (KPMG International, 2014), KPMG consultants list the “Rise of the Individual” as the second global megatrend. In many ways, this is evident in education also.

The words “differentiated” and “personalised” are common in most staff rooms – my school included – and their meanings are well understood by most within the teaching profession. Rather than the whole class focus of fifty years ago, today’s classrooms aim to deliver programmes of instruction that are tailored to individual students needs. The rise of technology in education has certainly made this more possible than it used to be.

This is something that I feel my school community of practice has done well in adopting/adapting to. My classroom, like many others in my school, features a wide range of abilities. I run our day so that each of those students gets learning that marries up with the areas that they need to work on, whether or not it be through using group teaching or simply using the digital tools available to me to discretely give students the best activity for their particular needs.

One thing my community is only beginning to address is the ‘student driven’ aspect of personalised learning. Bolstad et.al. (2012) describe authentic personalised learning as learning that is developed with the student; where the direction of the learning follows the direction of student questions and areas of interest. While we are starting to think about this, it is not yet ready to be put into practice. This is the area of personalisation I am most interested in focusing on.

Adapting Education to Meet the Needs of 21st Century Learners

When I went to school – not that long ago – we knew, to some extent, what the world we would walk out into would look like. There were some elements that we could not predict, like the Global Financial Crisis, but much of it was still relatively standard. The same cannot be said for students going through schooling today. For an education system specifically created to ensure that individuals were well prepared for jobs (RSA, 2010), this fact is problematic.

Google has rendered much of the 20th Century’s model of education obsolete. There is no longer any need for students to memorise large amounts of content – a few keywords in the Omnibox is all you need to find a wealth of information on any given topic, most of which will be current and useful.

Instead, today’s learners face the challenge of what to do with the huge volume of information available to them and how to interact in the digital setting that is still fairly new.

One challenge my school is currently confronting is the shift from teaching content to teaching 21st Century Skills. Partnership for 21st Century Skills (n.d.) identifies the following skills as capabilities students will need for the future; creativity and innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, collaboration, and literacy with information, media, and ICT.

In Literacy and Numeracy, skills are far more evident than anywhere else – it is hard to teach Reading without focusing on the skills of Reading, and very similar statements can be made for Maths and Writing.

However, in some areas we are still adapting.  I don’t teach critical thinking as much as I’d like to, even though I try and sneak it in wherever possible. And I really do worry about how many opportunities my students get to be creative in a day. At the end of the day, these are most likely the two things that will stop my students from being replaced by robots.

 

Reference List

Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching – A New Zealand perspective\n. Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/109317/994_Future-oriented-07062012.pdf

KPMG International. (2014). Future State 2030: The global megatrends shaping governments. Retrieved from http://www.kpmg.com/Global/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/future-state-government/Documents/future-state-2030-v3.pdf

P21. (n.d.). Framework for 21st Century Learning. Retrieved June 1, 2016, from http://www.p21.org/our-work/p21-framework

RSA. (2010). RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms. Retrieved June 1, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

#MindLabED Week 26 – Current Issues in my Professional Context

I would like to preface this blog post by saying that I am fortunate to work in a fantastic school and that we work very hard to ensure the success of our students. I have a tendency to focus on the negative when I reflect, which is something I am really working on. As always, all views are my own.

Current Issues

My community of practice at my school, like many others around the world, is currently grappling with the pedagogy that supports the effective use of digital technology in the classroom. We are fortunate to be a fairly well-resourced school; our device ratios are good and are likely to get even better with the first students’ from our area’ Manaiakalani-type cluster arriving next year.

Alongside our quest for digital literacy and using digital devices to enhance learning, we are also starting to look at how fine-tuning our curriculum could impact on our students. Currently, our teaching is broken down into specific subjects each subject is allocated a certain amount of time per week. While this, generally, ensures that all subjects are covered, it does not necessarily allow for the most in-depth or authentic learning (Kramer, Eskett, & Morrow, 2011). My aim is to be the boundary input (Wenger, 2000) – the member of the community sharing new ideas with the community – to encourage others to critique our current practices, in a respectful manner.

Outside of my school’s community of practice, the Twittersphere of teachers is focused on broader topics. Conversations around preparing students for an unknown future and future-focused learning are common. We are looking for ways to make global connections and for students to experience the world around them without having to leave the classroom. Many are questioning the value of exisiting traditional schooling structures, and whether or not changes need to be made in order to improve student experiences within schools – I have watched, with envy, many of the conversations around ‘hackschooling’ and innovating the way students learn in order to better meet the needs of the wide variety of learners.

Challenges

The biggest challenge faced in my community of practice (all three of them) is time. As teachers, we are busy individuals, with some impressive to-do lists. It is very easy to get stuck into a routine because the routine works, it is comfortable, and it becomes automatic.

To change anything takes time; time to plan how we will go about making the change, time to actually make the change, time to maintain the change, and time to reflect on whether or not the change is actually working.

Grant Lichtman’s keynote at ULearn gave me hope that we can find ways to make time, so long as doing things differently is prioritised.

At my school, we are starting to reflect on the effectiveness of whole-school professional development and a number of our after school meetings are being cancelled in favour of giving teachers time to get other things done.

On Twitter, sharing is caring, and tweeps are more than willing to tell you about how they made the awesome things they share happen. This means that trying something that you have seen on Twitter becomes much easier – half the figuring out is done for you. I try very hard to return the favour.

It makes me very happy to see that my school is starting to move towards a more collaborative school culture after a period of contrived-collegiality (Warren-Little, 1990). The more authentic sharing in schools, the better. We understand our students, we know where they come from and where they are at, which really is the first half of effective teaching (Hattie, 2012).

 

Reference List

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers. Abingdon: Routledge.

Kramer, F., Eskett, P., & Morrow, S. (2011, January 31). Pulling down silos enhances inquiry learning. Education Gazette. Retrieved from http://www.edgazette.govt.nz/Articles/Article.aspx?ArticleId=8267

Warren-Little, J. (1990). The Persistence of Privacy : Autonomy and Initiative in Teachers ’ Professional Relations. Teachers College Record, 91(4), 509–536. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247944039_The_persistence_of_privacy_Autonomy_and_initiative_in_teachers’_professional_lives

Wenger, E. (2000). Communities of practice andSocial Learning Systems. Organization, 7(2), 225–246. http://doi.org/10.1177/135050840072002

#MindLabED Week 25 – My Community of Practice

This blog is part of an eight-week series of blogs I will be writing to conclude my #MindLabEd Postgraduate Certificate.

Etinne Wenger (2000) uses the term ‘community of practice’ to describe groups of individuals with a shared interest who develop their ability by interacting with other members of the community.

My Communities

I have several communities I belong to. The obvious starting point is my school; our shared goal is seeing our students progress and develop, and I have regular interaction with colleagues, discussing methods for achieving results for students and sharing resources. While a whole school community is created by senior management and maintained with regular professional development, many of the staff have created their own little communities with colleagues they trust to share their practice with. These communities, however, are certainly not the only communities I belong too.

My second community is the #MindLabED community – while I have only been with them since November last year, I have drawn inspiration from the pathways they have taken toward digital and collaborative learning and discussed difficulties I was having in order to get suggestions for possible alternative routes.

The last community I identified is the twitter community, although my belonging at times is more out of alignment – building on the great ideas of others and implementing them in my situation – than engagement – conversing and sharing. I would argue that this is the community that I get the most benefit from; the boundary interaction (new ideas coming from outside the community; non-members, conferences etc) challenges on a daily basis and has allowed me to imagine new ways of doing things.

Wenger (2000) emphasises that a key feature of communities of practice is that shared interest or goal. It is interesting to note that each of the communities I belong to have a slightly different focus, although they do all fall under the umbrella bettering ourselves so that we can be better teachers for our students. My school places the focus on student achievement, particularly in Literacy and Numeracy, while the Mind Lab and Twitter communities exist for the development of progressive pedagogy and 21st Century practice.

I will openly admit that my purpose and function of practice (a.k.a. why I teach) aligns more closely with the goals of the Twitter and Mind Lab communities – pedagogy for success in Literacy and Numeracy can be easily integrated into 21st Century practice that gives students the tools they need for the world they are living in. Focusing solely on ‘the three R’s’ is a bit like teaching only to the achievement objective and not worrying about the skills students need to achieve that AO. The community at my school is starting to see this.

While there are very few formal specialisations in primary teaching, I could still be considered a specialist teacher. For the first part, I teach in an intermediate school; the curriculum we teach is specifically targeted in order to bridge our students’ transition from primary to secondary school. As a community, intermediate teachers understand that in order to be effective we need to focus on more than just the academics of the Year 7-8 period. Our students also face significant changes during the time they are with us. As a result, pastoral guidance is just as crucial as the academic focus.

Another area I could also be considered a specialist of is e-Learning, although I’m not sure I feel I meet the level of competence required to declare myself to be one. Within my school, I am recognised as someone who brings new ideas to the community and challenges teachers to try new things.

The communities I belong to shape who I am as a teacher and encourage me to do better than I already do. I know I find energy in the passion within my respective communities, which can certainly help to keep me going, even in the toughest of weeks.

 

Reference List

Wenger, E. (2000). Communities of practice andSocial Learning Systems. Organization, 7(2), 225–246. http://doi.org/10.1177/135050840072002