My 2016 Inquiry

At the Stopwork Meeting

Here to support the move against Global funding - which is of course just bulk funding! A detrimental move for equity and quality of teaching and learning for everyone in NZ.

Bloom's and Digital Technology

An excellent video on how digital technology relates to Bloom's and higher order thinking.

It would be great to see more on which tools support which cognitive levels. . .

First Prize!

Well done to Dayna, Laura, Anita and Marissa for winning the first prize in the Matariki poster competition run by the Rotorua Public Library. You are awesome - gorgeous poster too!

First Aid Refresher

We spent a very fruitful hour or so at our staff meeting on Wednesday going over First Aid issues in our school. . . how do we cope with children who have a bleed, break a limb, have a fit . .. and indeed what do we do on Camp when not near hospitals and ambulance services?
These issues are huge especially as so many more children have health challenges. Food allergies are of course also an increasingly huge challenge. Many thanks to Nick from Peak Safety and Emergency Management for answering our many questions and upskilling us.

The-7-habits-for-kids

Values education for children? 

Is this the option for us to replace Go Bananas and our values education?

Love the names of the 7 habits and seems very practical for kids . 

. . watch this space!!

The Leader in Me   by Stephen Covey

Most Likely to Succeed

A movie set in America about a High School that has changed their whole way of learning to increase student agency, motivation and achievement.

No teacher standing at the front of a room talking but a cooperative, learner centred, student directed environment where the teacher is a facilitator, guide, mentor, in the background.

The change in the students was remarkable - disengagement suddenly changed and the learning achieved was remarkable as students were able to take over the direction of the learning.

Can we do this in New Zealand? Can we do this in a Primary School setting? Can we do this within the National Standards context, with a focus on standardisation?

but  . . . wouldn't it be a great way to operate in our classrooms? - and in an increasingly changing world, shouldn't we be focussing on developing those Key Competencies and core values in authentic contexts?