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Thinking, Learning, Teaching by @vanweringh

Tag: pd

bookmark_borderTom Sherrington, Barack Rosenshine and ‘CPD’

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Tom Sherrington (@teacherhead) is a good ‘education guru’. I like his straight talking and common sense approach, informed by a realistic approach to teaching and education research that really connects with what I think is important in education.

Since 2018, Tom has been focussing on Barack Rosenshine’s seminal “10 principles”. Here is all Tom’s writing on that: https://teacherhead.com//?s=rosenshine

He recently wrote this post about the PD needs of teachers (Teachers’ CPD needs are massive: it needs more time and more flexibility) which contained a great overview of what we are asking teachers to ‘develop’ in. I am copying the list here so that I remember to return to this, because that is the purpose of this blog for me, a personal and professional notebook about teaching and learning. So here is Tom’s list:

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bookmark_borderEffective Mentoring, VIT

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I attended a VIT refresher course on Thursday the 5th of March 2020, led by Catharine Hydon and Matt Woodley from the VIT. My main take-away was how important it is to have a clearly defined induction and mentorship program with well trained and committed mentors. At my school, we have a lot of good people and great intentions, but we have some way to go towards properly formalising our processes.

What is mentoring?

  • Mentoring is to support and encourage people to manage their own learning in order that they may maximise their potential, develop their skills, improve their performance and become the person they want to be. (Eric Parsloe, The Oxford School of Coaching & Mentoring)
  • As a process, mentoring may be generally described as a dynamic interpersonal relationship involving two or more people. Mentoring in early childhood is often perceived as “a peer relationship” (Nolan, 2007, xvii), where a more experienced practitioner provides professional guidance to one or more novice practitioners, either on a 1:1 basis or as a group. (Wong and Waniganayake 2013) 
  • Need to have a written down protocol or policy to support VIT teachers.

What mentoring isn’t

  • Performance management
  • Training
  • Peer friendship and support
  • Counselling
  • Rescuing

What good mentors do?

The good mentor is:

  • committed to the role of mentoring.
  • accepting of the beginning teacher.
  • skilled at providing instructional support.
  • effective in different interpersonal contexts.
  • a model of a continuous learner.
  • The good mentor communicates hope and optimism. a
  • My notes here

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  1. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may99/vol56/num08/The-Good-Mentor.aspx  (back)

bookmark_borderIB History IA workshop, Day 3

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Work in progress! These are my notes from a three day workshop for the IB History IA (New course), held at Wesley College Melbourne, on June 25, 26, 27, 2016.

Day 3, Session 9, Designing an effective IA process, ideas, skills and strategies.give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the four hours sharpening the axe

No name, no school names, no city name, no student number on the front page, the IA has to be uploaded completely anonymous. Only have the title on the front page.

We discussed our current IA practices and the ways in which we’d like to change those in the future. For me, I’d like to start earlier with finding a good research question. Formulating a good question is very challenging, so as soon as this workshop finalises the online student resource, I will introduce the students to it and will use some lessons to work on the RQ.

PDF version of the poster here: Poster PDF

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bookmark_borderCultures of Thinking PD program, with Ron Ritchhart

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I have become part of a semester long professional development project called “Cultures of Thinking”. It is lead by Visible Thinking and Harvard Project Zero researcher Ron Ritchhart. It focusses on creating an environment where “a group’s collective as well as individual thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted as part of the regular, day-to-day experience of all group members.” a.

One of the key components of this program is class observation – not to evaluate the teacher but to learn and become more aware of your own habits, cultures and teaching strategies. Our first day consisted of two sessions, in the morning we were introduced to the cultures of thinking program and questioning techniques. The second was a plenary session in which teachers from four schools came together to learn about how to objectively and non-judgmentally observe a lesson and how to record data so that it is useful for the person/school being observed.

My notes and relevant resources are below.
Capture

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  1. See more at: http://www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/cultures-of-thinking#sthash.Lw4Gagmy.dpuf  (back)

bookmark_borderIB DP History Workshop Melbourne: the New Guide 2017

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From the 2nd of May to the 4th of May 2015, I attended a three day IB DP History workshop in Melbourne. It was a very busy and well attended event, with over 300 hundred participants in total and 35 history teachers from all over the southern hemisphere in our workshop.
Below are the notes I’ve taken for each day:

  • IB DP Workshop Day 1, A general overview of the changes in the new course. How to construct a course. Big changes to Paper 1: Four instead of five sources, new OPVL, new question specific mark schemes.
  • IB DP Workshop Day 2, overview of changes to Paper 2, new mark bands. We did a lot of trial marking. Grades were often higher than we expected. There is more ‘positive’ marking.
  • IB DP Workshop Day 3, IA has been completely overhauled, three sections now. Also looked at approaches to teaching and learning.

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bookmark_borderIB Workshops

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Capture10I have just finalised Day 3 of my fourth IB workshop. These professional development events never fail to inspire and it’s always informative, as well as exhausting. I have used this blog and Twitter to record my thoughts. Here are the links to my notes from this workshop and others:

MYP Category 3, Humanities (Melbourne), June 2014

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