Archive for the ‘Instruction’ Category
Sunday, May 19th, 2013
My headline is in lots of ways misleading for there is no one right way to learn to spell efficiently in English.
In the 60's and 70's we made students learn to spell lists of words through repetition or drill with lots of rules thrown in and then in the Donald ...
Posted in Assessment, differentiation, Instruction, Teaching | No Comments »
Friday, October 5th, 2012
Thanks to Greg Whitby for writing about Andy Hargreaves and Michel Fullan's latest work on Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School,
I particularly liked Hargreaves suggestion that it takes around eight years or 10,000 hours to develop expertise in the profession of teaching through practice and concerted effort. I ...
Posted in Instruction, Leadership, Teaching | No Comments »
Sunday, September 16th, 2012
Last week I facilitated an Instructional Round at a neighbouring school and tried to embrace some of the principles of Data Wise into the evidentiary analysis of the observations. The initiative was well received so I thought I would share it.
There were 3 groups of principals who observed students in ...
Posted in Data Wise Program, Feedback, Harvard, Instruction, Instructional Rounds, Observation, school, Teaching, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 4th, 2012
Last month David Rease Jnr from Harvard visited Elsternwick to view our progress in implementing the Data Wise: Inquiry Approach to Improving Instruction in schools. We were quite chuffed at David's visit and recorded this clip to capture some of his initial observations and reflections.
As you will hear he commented on ...
Posted in Accountability, Assessment, Data Wise Program, Harvard, Instruction, Instructional Rounds, school, Video Clips | No Comments »
Sunday, August 26th, 2012
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Recently we held another teacher workshop on the "Words their Way" approach to spelling. I've talked about this approach before, which we have trialled in different year levels for some 18 months. All of our trial results have been positive with all classes recording an average student ...
Posted in Instruction, Teaching | No Comments »
Monday, August 13th, 2012
Context of this post:
This morning I'm teaching a group of year 5/6 students. The WALT (We are learning to...) is join an online discussion via a blog and make a comment.
Post:
An overseas friend made a light-hearted jib about the Aussies performance in these Olympics which got me to thinking is ...
Posted in Instruction, Teaching, Technology | 17 Comments »
Thursday, July 12th, 2012
Thanks to James Nottingham's Facebook page I came across an article by Carol Dweck , author of Mindset, where she talks about how she was influenced by and connected to 5 different published works. People may remember 2 prior posts ( mindsets , James Nottingham ) where I wrote about Carol's work on ...
Posted in Instruction, parenting, Teaching, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, June 10th, 2012
At a recent regional Principal conference I heard Vic Zbar, an educational consultant based in Victoria; speak about personalising teaching and learning. Personalising learning he put it was really an outcome of differentiation.
Vic then made a number of points I thought worth repeating:
There is generally too much whole class teaching ...
Posted in Accountability, Assessment, differentiation, Geelong Conference, Instruction, school, teacher efficacy, Teaching, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, May 13th, 2012
One of the great privileges Penny and I had at Harvard was the allocation of a dedicated coach (Emma) who assisted us in the preparation of our presentation and helped us determine what the next level of work.
Prior to the presentation Emma organised 3 conference call meetings where we used ...
Posted in coaching, Data Wise Program, Harvard, Instruction, Leadership, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, May 10th, 2012
We are at the end of our time at Harvard having had our presentation both acknowledged by the facility and celebrated by our American colleagues.It felt gooood!
Our thinking was then sharpened over the remainder of the course to focus on the next level of work. Our goal to build teacher ...
Posted in Data Wise Program, Harvard, Instruction, Leadership, reflections, school, Teaching, Travel | No Comments »
