Gretchen's learning

Notes from Cognition Events wellbeing webinar - Transitioning Back to School: Dwell in Possibility presented by Rebecca Thomas and Steve Saville. What is the best environment for the students to come back to? Key message is the need to create a calm environment . Students and families might be anxious about what they've missed out on. It would be a mistake to think we need to 'catch them up'.  Teacher credibility is key ( research paper here ), as is the importance of routine, clarity of message and competent and trustworthy adults. Actively teach tolerance (this was brought up in context of high school setting - it was recorded by presenter prior to mask wearing in high schools being mandated, how will teacher manage transition back in terms of mask wearing and potential conflict) Tips: disconnect from devices for part of day - teachers and students. Engage in conversation, genuine connection, responsive interactions with others. caring for things - class pet, plant etc. ...

 Last week I attended a couple more sessions of maths PLD with Rob. The first was an 'open invite' zoom hui session - he's run a series of these. This one was looking at engagement and diversity . 1. using ARB s (Assessment Resource Banks). Rob's first guest was Jonathan Fisher from NZCER. He explained that ARBs support evidence-based teaching and learning practices. They are targeted assessment tasks and many suggest ideas for next teaching steps. For more info you can go ' about the arbs '. Arbs are flexible assessment tools - e.g we might use some of the multi-choice questions for a diagnostic move'n'prove activity, use them for small group explicit instruction or use for consolidating learning. Many can be done online or  on paper. They support teachers build pedagogical and content knowledge. Also - the researchers working on these tools really appreciate any feedback. A next step for me is to explore the  conceptual maps  within the arbs platform w...

 I've had Read&Write hanging out on my browser for quite a while now (it's free for educators) and more recently our school got funding to install it on all of our students' chromebooks (it's the little purple puzzle piece with 'rw' inside it). As far as I'm aware it gets little use.  I attended a webinar for parents yesterday run by Ben Dyer at Texthelp and was reminded what an amazing tool it is and how it can support our students. We can use it to increase reading accuracy, improve comprehension, improve vocabulary and improve writing quality and quantity. You can use Read&Write with google docs, PDFs and websites. You can even use it if you have a screenshot of some text - it can work on the text within the image. Some reading tools   Ben shared: Text to speech  (the play button) - this reads the text on the page to you - either highlighted text, the whole doc or text you have masked with the masking tool. This will assist many of our students a...

I'm exploring how I can use Mantle of the Expert (or imaginative inquiry) to teach social skills within small group circle time sessions. It is inspiring seeing videos such as this one below to see what learning using this pedagogy can be like. The first step will be carefully planning the sessions including scripting key parts of the lesson to ensure my language is inductive rather than instructive. I need to plan for and practise using this inductive language so it becomes fluent and natural. Learning notes below for inductive language copied from Tim Taylor's Mantle of the Expert online course: Inductive language: - Invitational – it invites students to participate: “If you were...” “Perhaps we might...” “Shall we try...”   - Collaborative – this is something we are doing together: “How shall we start...” “Can we all agree...” “What do you suppose...”  - Questioning – there is something under investigation: “Did you notice...” “How could that happen...” “What might be wron...