GENESIS - IN THE BEGINNING

Well, well, well here we are sharing a hot beverage and some thoughts with our team. I am still unsure of exactly what it is I wish to achieve with my learners. I have so many thoughts racing through my mind that it is difficult to decide which of these thoughts and ideas I want to go with.
FOCUS - FOCUS - FOCUS.
I think my main FOCUS is going to be the engagement of the children - that is I want their learning to be meaningful - connected to their own life. I want to create a learning environment that allows children and myself to be committed to, interested in, responsible for and reflective of our learning. If I create learning experiences that are engaging I am hopeful that the achievement of learning outcomes for the children will be enhanced.
FOCUS-FOCUS-FOCUS
We all need to reflect on our learning - so I think the idea of a reflective learning log is worthwhile - I need to be careful though that the log itself does not represent just another TASK to be completed because the teacher said so. Even the log needs to presented in a way which encourages and interests the children.
FOCUS-FOCUS-FOCUS
So now I am back to beginning how do we engage children in their learning - what is it they need and want to know????? Learning needs to be connected to their lives outside of our little classroom at HF. Learning needs to inspire thinking - meaningful, useful and COOL thinking.

I'm so confused - too many thoughts too few neurons.

FOCUS-FOCUS-FOCUS

Janine

My thoughts about "team thoughts"

A great discussion starting with 'engagement' and what that could mean to our students at HFS. We talked about the sense of ownwership students need to have to engage a lot like we are attempting with our Professional Learning groups. How can we implement and embed Higher Order thinking in to our learning? The use of Learning Logs as a vehicle to engage students in thinking was discussed. We also need to then;

• model for the students by 'thinking out loud' and drafting a Learning Log
• Provide a number of opportunities to attempt this reflection
• Provide Higher order thinking questions ones that encourage students to analyse, explain etc

Great discussion team.. Looking forward to our next meeting!!

Engagement and Higher Order Thinking

I am currently interested in focussing on mathematics - how can I make mathematics more relevant to the learners, how am I achieving the "connectedness" for them, building a relationship between mathematics and real life?
In planning my units I think I need to address the issue of higher order thinking - how can I use higher order thinking questions to enable students to become effective self evaluators? I am very interested to explore the scvience and tech model show to us by Gary. This model has 5 phases to consider when planning a series of learning experiences - engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate. With the system we have in place for programming I feel that I am not devoting enough time to developing meaningful learning experiences. I am going to revert back to the old system of writing specific lesson plans for a mathematical unit using these 5 phases of the model. I will then teach the unit for 5 weeks and provide children with a way of being self-reflective by providing them with a series of questions that will promote higher order thinking. These questions can be in the form of blog entries.

I also offered to collect a variety of questions that promote higher order thinking when reflecting on learning and I will give these to the group at our next meeting.

year 4 learning logs

well, after chatting this morning about the direction we will take im thinking that some kind of learning log will be beneficial to my childrens learning and my evaluation of my teaching and their learning. hopefully i can pinpoint what lessons were most 'value adding' to their learning and also, probably more importantly - what they want to know. that way, i can steer their learning to make it CONNECTED to their own life.
a weekly journal in which they can reflect on the weeks lessons and experiences about the theme unit will let me achieve this.

thanks for the hot choc janine :)

Luke's First Post!!!

Hmmmmmm. Well I don't know what to write but it's my planning day for the term today so everything is Sweeeeet! I reckon I might focus on the theme of 'taking resonsibility for our own learning' and trying to develop reflective opportunities for the kids, so that along the way, they can evaluate what and how they have learnt and what they might do differently next time. Yeah, that sounds like it might go alright....................

Starting the conversation

Team,
Found a sentence in an article which was a summary of what we were trying to achieve and investigate.. see what you think... ' to support each other to create innovative units of work which engage and challenge students by making thoughtful use of digital resources...' The big questions are 'how do we engage & challenge'? ... 'How do we make learning relevant to 21century students?' A while back I started a blog for myself. I have posted 2 great videos to get us thinking. The one to watch is called Pay Attention. Go to http://www.principalville.blogspot.com/ and see what you think.
Gary