Today Professor Jenny Gore came to our school to teach us about the Quality Teacher Model she has developed.  The QT model emphasises  “the importance of a strong pedagogical framework and adherence to effective professional development principles in systematically improving the quality of teaching”. ^a

It was interesting to listen to Jenny and I am in no doubt that the QT model is very effective. The QT model provides 18 (!) elements of “quality teaching” and provides a method of scoring/ quantifying these. It means that a teacher’s practice is observed by other teachers and the lesson is then scored using the QT model’s coding scale. Continue reading “The Quality Teaching Model, Jenny Gore”

1. http://education.unimelb.edu.au/news_and_activities/events/upcoming_events/dean_lecture_series/dls-past-2015/improving_teaching_professional_development_with_impact_on_quality  (back)

• My trip to India
• Pivot PL
• Cultures of Thinking
• Visible Classroom
• Jenny Gore, Quality Teaching Rounds / Instructional Rounds

I listened to a great podcast about organising yourself: Note to Self, A Neuroscientist’s Guide to Getting Organized. It’s only 16 minutes long and it’s a must-listen for any busy person.

I have tried many ways of staying organised, many efforts not to drown, to cope, to manage, to keep everything going, to meet all my targets/requirements, to not go insane etc. There is no foolproof method, and each human being needs their own tailored system. I’ve tried Evernote, I’ve tried Pomodoro, I’ve tried pen and paper, the “4 hour workweek” and quite a few other ‘systems’ that people wrote books about but I’ve forgotten what they were called.

My current system is using the full power of Outlook and Outlook tasks. It’s been working pretty well for the last 3 years, but I still get side-tracked, overwhelmed, distracted, snowed-under etc. I’ll keep on plugging on though, and will slowly try to get better.

Things I do in Outlook:

• I have my timetable in Outlook
• As soon as I get an email with a due date, a meeting time or some other time in it, I make it into a meeting and put it in my diary.
• I use categories for Calendar appointments and Emails
• I use email rules, great tool.
• I use Outlook tasks and prioritise by using those little flags (today, tomorrow etc etc)

Below are the key take-aways from the Note to Self, A Neuroscientist’s Guide to Getting Organized podcast website:

1. Write down everything you need to do. Everything! Then prioritize what really needs to be first. Basically: brain dump with bullet points, then go through and number in order of importance. ^a Continue reading “Coping or staying organised”

1. http://www.wnyc.org/story/neuroscientists-guide-getting-organized-plus-survey/  (back)

We all have those times in the term where the marking starts stacking up, either because of badly timed assignments, imminent reports or extra tasks like the IB Internal Assessments or Extended Essays etc etc. I had let my marking get out of hand. The pressure was on last weekend. I had four full sets of marking and all were quite time consuming to mark. I’m at my most efficient and do my best marking just before a deadline. So, faced with a massive box of essays and assignments, I decided to go on a marking retreat to Philip Island where there is no internet, no oven/bathroom/garage/sock-drawer to be cleaned and no family or friends to distract me.

It was just me, the island and my box full of marking:

Continue reading “A marking retreat”

Thanks to my students and our REE teacher, I have learnt about a different strategy to read a large text with a group. I have called it “hive mind reading”. One of my students suggested this technique after having done this in an REE class. It was fun and successful. I think in small doses, this is a nice way to change-up the sometimes necessary evil of group reading.  I did this with a boisterous group of Year 10s and they read out the whole text in perfect harmony and concentration.

This is how it works: Continue reading “Hivemind reading; a different way to share texts”