Project reflections - Week 11 Term 4

I feel that I have been enriched by my involvement in this project. I feel privileged to have been involved in this learning partnership and community of practice, with my students.
In challenging their thinking about what learning is, how we know if we are learning and what to do to improve our learning, I feel that my thinking on learning has been challenged. Teachers assume that students are learning in their class because they are present. I now know that this is not the necessarily the case.
I feel ashamed to a certain extent, that as an experienced teacher, I have not addressed the importance of and implemented the explicit teaching of thinking skills, the collaborative development of rubrics to guide self-directed learning and tools to support reflective practice.

This project has shown me that through the implementation of SOLO Taxonomy and the Differentiated Learning Model, that reflective, self-directed learning practice can be developed in learners. Introducing a common language of learning based on SOLO Taxonomy, aligned with differentiated learning outcomes, learning experiences, and assessment of learning, has enabled the students to know themselves as learners.

This project has confirmed for me that the use of SOLO Taxonomy, HOT maps and collaboratively developed rubrics can support the development of creative thinking, the development and extension of the metalanguage of learning and self-directing, reflective learning practice, as the students use all of these to determine WTN (where to next learning steps).

This project provided the evidence required to show that the skills, thinking and actions that support reflective, self-directed learning practice can be taught to young students and that e-tools and the development of e-Portfolios can be effective in supporting, developing and demonstrating reflective, self-directed learning by providing a platform that supports ways of demonstrating the learning process and inclusion of learning that is based on sight, sound and motion.

I am looking forward to implementing all that I have learnt from this project at the very start of the new school year. What has also been encouraging is that my teaching partner wants to be involved in this implementation.

Professional practice project - Week 5 and 6 Term 4

These two weeks will be hectic as we are going away on camp to the Virginia Park Cattle Station, we have visiting performers, special assemblies and awards ceremonies. School finishes for us in 2 weeks time.
This term has just flown. As I write about my progress with my project and continuing changes that I am making to my practice, I will add to my final writing as time allows.

Solo Taxonomy Week 5 & 6

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Trying Read the Words at school

This is a test to see if we can run this text to voice option at school.

Another text to voice option

This site is Read the Words. It is a free option but the voice recording only lasts for 30 seconds with this free option. If you would like an upgrade, then there is a fee involved.

vozMe - From text to speech

vozMe - From text to speech

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New audio recrding tool

I have just located this new audio recording tool. You can use it for text to speech or to record directly. I am trying this at home so I hope that it works at school.
The tool is AudioPal. This is my test trial to see if I can embed my recording.

Professional Practice project Week 4 Term 4

Yesterday we continued with our poetry writing, introducing metaphors.
Prior to this, we did a reflection on similes. The students did another circle map and wrote down everything they new about similes. They then looked back at their initial circle map and then used their definition rubric to assess their progress in their thinking and knowledge and understanding of similes. They had to choose a symbol to indicate their present level of thinking, knowledge and understanding of what a simile is. They had to give a justification for their choice.
We then had the opportunity to discuss these justifications.
I will post some pictures of the initial circle maps and the present ones. I will also post recordings of our discussions.

We then watched a You Tube video on metaphors, with a view to establishing a compare and contrast HOT map on similes and metaphors.

Today I conducted a quick survey to see how the children felt about their learning, thinking about their learning, reflection of their learning and determining next learning steps.. I asked them to think about how using Solo Taxonomy, the HOT maps and the rubrics may be helping with these aspects of their learning.
To put this survey in context, it is something I do every morning.
Each day when I call the roll, I always have a survey about some aspect of our life at school. It may be something like how are you feeling about going on camp or how are you managing with your home study this week. The children have a scale of 1-5 to indicate how they are feeling or how they are managing.
Because we have done this every day, the children feel safe enough to be absolutely honest. Their responses give me a quick indication of how they are sitting or feeling about a particular issue, task or area of learning.
For the survey today 5 indicated that they felt that using the HOT maps, rubrics and thinking tool was most helpful for them, in helping them identify criteria or skills required to develop their thinking, reflect on a specific piece of work, self and peer assess and decide what to do to improve that work. 3 would indicate that they felt that it was assisting them in all of the above mentioned areas but they wanted to develop their use of all the aspects further. 0/1 would indicate that they had no idea how these tools were helping them at all to develop as reflective, self-directed learners.
23 out of the 25 children in my class were present at school today.
The results were as follows:
2 said 5
9 said 4
6 said 3/4
3 said 3
2 said 2
1 said 0/1
This was an encouraging indication of how the children view the use of this initiative at present.
Some of the children also did an e-Portfolio reflection based on the same criteria today.
CK
BM
These children are 9 years old. These reflections were totally unassisted writing. I can see that there is still work to be done in the helping the children to articulate their thinking in terms of the developmental stages using Solo Taxonomy but I feel that they are becoming reflective about their learning. I think that they also feel far more empowered. This observation is qualitative and there is no quantitative measure.
Another development is that my teaching colleague is now asking questions about what we are doing and she want to know about Solo Taxonomy, the HOT maps and how we are developing and using rubrics to direct our thinking, learning and deciding on next steps to learning.