Session 5: Collaboration

In session five we begun the day looking at visible learning. When I reflect on how I make the learning visible for my tauira, I think my next step is make it more accessible for my learners. This week I have been teaching my students how to use eyes on text to help them with their fluency with their reading. Watching them increase their confidence with using google docs and becoming self sufficient was really encouraging. I am becoming increasingly aware at how I need to enable my tauira to succeed by providing enough scaffolding in my instruction and on the class site. 

I found this week in reading by taking the time to teach students to read the information on slides, modelling how to complete the activities has helped to increased the detail and quality of the work. Often in teaching I feel short for time and the pressure to ensure all lessons are taught, this gets in the way of providing opportunities to spend quality time with my students. To balance this I would like to provide more scaffolding on my site by providing more audio instructions or videos to help explain activities on the slides.

I also reflected on how collaboration is very important in education. Our ability to work with our colleagues and the students is so important in developing a culture that promotes learning. I am inspired by the ideas shared by the kaiako in my digital bubble on how they apply what they are learning in DFI, it is amazing to see the creativity of educators and their passion for helping their students to do their best. Working in a digital age we are so lucky to have so many resources at our finger tips, I often look to my colleagues and reputable sites to help guide me in my planning. Recently I have been reflecting on how I am contributing to the professional body, I see so much value in what others do, but often do not share how I am teaching with others. I suppose this blog is a good place to start, sharing my thoughts and ideas, it will be a good challenge to continue this after to DFI to reflect on the learning in the classroom and how I am applying what I am learning.

The take away for me from the day was to think about how I am engaging my students in their learning, how is the learning presented to them and how I am deepening their thinking about what they learn. Multimodal learning is something I would like to implement not only in reading but for inquiry learning. I would like to use it to engage students and give them more opportunities to learn at their own pace and to increase their confidence with their learning.