Tag Archives: education

Top 5 lessons learnt in 2012

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As the school year of 2012 draws to a close, it is time to look back at the year and reflect on what I have learnt.

Here are the top 5 lessons I have learnt as learner and leader:

Lesson #5 – It’s all about students and learning

I have always put my students’ learning first but this year I had the opportunity to work with a group of amazing year 7 students for 14 hours a week. So instead of the traditional high school way of having students in separate hour blocks, I had the got to learn with my year 7 class for continuous blocks of time. I taught this year 7 class for English, Maths, Science, Geography and History and it has allowed me to explore the following:

  • Project based learning that are all cross-curricular
  • Games based learning
  • Various ways of providing student feedback including Geoff Petty’s goals, medals and missions
  • How learning spaces can be and should be used to complement teacher instruction and student activities
  • How to create an online learning community

Overall this year really allowed me to focus on learning and students as individual learners rather than pushing content. Having to teach year 7 in this way almost killed me and this year has been even harder than my first year of teaching in terms of workload pressures. But I learnt a lot.

Lesson #4 – It’s not enough to be a hard worker with good ideas

To be an effective leader, you need to do more than just work hard. I always knew that, but this year I have implemented quite a few changes in my faculty. Some of it have been really successful while others have not been as successful as I would have liked. From these experiences I have learnt that:

  •  Sometimes it is necessary to move in baby steps
  • Teachers need to be brought into a learning journey for significant change to occur, tailored to their individual professional learning needs.
  • Not everything can be done at once. I’m one of those impatient people who like to just do everything in one go, but that isn’t always feasible and if it was, it might not be productive for others. I learnt that it’s usually better to do one or two things each week that lead to bigger changes.

 

Lesson #3 – Look after yourself

One of the things I struggled with this year was a healthy work-life balance. Year 7 integrated curriculum and other aspects of work took up much more of my time and effort in comparison to previous years that it did affect my physical health. At times I wasn’t eating as well as I should have been or exercising as much as I should have been. While the workload wasn’t forced upon me by anyone except myself. As I write this post, I am recovering from a rather bad case of the flu. It has probably become worse because I knew I was sick but still went to school for two days because there were things “that had to be done”. While the ultimate aim of my work was to improve student learning, I was reminded that we need to look after ourselves in order to look after others when I read this post by Summer Howarth.

 

Lesson #2 – Believe

Believe in yourself! I have learnt this year that my opinions, my gut feelings and my knowledge is just as valid as others with a bigger reputation, more experience, etc. Don’t get me wrong. I value, respect and sought the expertise from these people but in the end I know my students, my team of teachers and my school context best.

 

Lesson #1 – I have the best job in the world 🙂

Not much need to be explained about this lesson. I work in the best school. I work with the best team of teachers in my faculty. I work with very awesome students.

Learning about learning from the London Underground

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I am currently on holidays in London. London is a fairly easy city to get around if you speak English fluently, but I have an extremely bad sense of direction (I sometimes still get lost in my hometown of Sydney). I am just someone who just takes a little longer when getting my bearings with a new place.

I am in London with my partner. He has an extremely good sense of direction and learns his way around new places quickly.In London, he has been the one leading the way from our hotel to the nearest underground station, Southwark. He has been the one figuring out which stations we need to change at and which colour lines we need to go on. I’ve just been daydreaming while following him. Even though I have walked from the hotel to the Southwark station many times, I wouldn’t be able to tell you how to get there. I looked like I knew what I was doing, and I was successful at getting from A to B, but really I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t even bother looking at or carrying a map of the Tube, because I knew I didn’t have to use it. I can just follow my partner.

Today my partner was sick. While he was resting in the hotel room, I ventured out into London city by myself for the first time. The first thing I noticed was that there were orange light poles that pointed to where Southwark station was, telling you when to keep walking straight and when to turn a corner. I never noticed these before. I made it to Southwark station without getting lost at all. I wanted to get to the British Natural History Museum and worked out I needed to change at Westminster station for the green district line. I was much more aware of signs that gave clues to where I was supposed to go. If I was with my partner, I would never have noticed those signs because there was no need to notice them.

This experience has made me reflect on the way I have designed learning for some of my students. Some students generally take more time to do some things (like how I am with learning new directions). This may be team work, a mathematical concept or extended writing. In these situations many teachers, including myself, often hold our students’ hands and lead them from A to B; just like how I was led from A to B. We give our students scaffolds that tell them exactly what to do. We work through questions in worksheets as a whole class so all students have to do is copy the answers from the board or write down what they heard from another student. Students look like they know what they are doing, but really they were like me, just following someone who knows what they are doing.

But what if we just let our students get from A to B by themselves? Why are we so scared of letting them find their own way? They might take a little longer, or take the wrong turn and have to double back. Instead of assigning an extended writing task and giving them a scaffold straight away, why don’t we let students figure it out by themselves, but provide the clues for them. Figuring out something by yourself is one of the most powerful learning experiences. How can we design learning experiences that allow our students to do that? How can we design learning experiences that strike a balance between giving students the freedom to discover things for themselves and enough guidance so that they are set up for success?