On Friday mornings it is a pleasure and a privilege to join our junior school teachers and children for 'discovery time' and so now about this time every week I find myself having to plan my teaching for the next session. The big question in my head is "how can I address the focus on key competencies and also honour our school values (specifically about learning being about knowledge and having substance)?"
Adding to my thinking process came an email from Lynda (which also reminded me what a talented teaching staff we have at Waimairi). The killer line in her email is "...help keep us all focused and to prevent our time becoming just an activity time?"
I believe the focus which Lynda calls for in her email needs to be our school-wide learning theme, which this term is a bit of a watery affair. So what has floated into my head is a memory of the Learning in Science Project (LISP). This is why I am off to the pool. Floating and sinking, making boats and rafts with all sorts of different materials, questioning to find out the children's pre-conceptions and basing the next teaching steps on their pre-conceptions.
It will be lots of fun but also powerful learning for the children and for me.
Looking back at the old LISP documents I am wondering how lots of the 'old' findings link to the new ideas in the revised NZ Curriculum. I am looking forward to discovering this. If you want to get right into this in a big way you can read the 270 page long Literature Review into Science Education. Or you could just read this post on Bruce Hammond's blog
I will post an update to let you know how things turn out because 'teaching is inquiry' and we need to try things out and be learners alongside our pupils.
Yes, this is another jargon-filled posting but by following the links on this entry you can try to dig deeper if you are interested or curious.
No comments:
Post a Comment