The Knackered Teacher

Week 19 - Community of Practice Descriptive Stage For this task I have chosen two topics which I feel go hand in hand and that I feel quite inspired about. Implementing Technology innovation in the classroom. 21st Century Skills What is a Community of Practice (COP)? According to Cultivating communities of practice: Making them grow (Knox, B. 2009), a COP is ‘a group of people who share a passion for something they know how to do, who interact regularly in order to learn how to do it better.’ This allows people in the COP to create, expand and exchange knowledge, allowing individual capabilities to be further developed. There are three underlying elements that contribute to the definition of a COP as defined by Wenger (2000); joint enterprise (domain), mutual agreement (community) and shared repertoire (practice). By engaging in a COP with fellow teaching peers, this would allow me another avenue to follow and share technology innovations and tap int...

L ooking back on the past 17 weeks of Mindlab and with changing my year level this year, I realise I have made a number of changes to my teaching practice and re-thought my role as a Teacher in the classroom, content, content delivery and the learners role. I have used various digital technologies and apps to not only teach my lessons,  but to make them purposeful, authentic and engaging. I have been ‘training’ my learners how to use different apps for different purposes so that eventually they can take the lead in their learning and decide how they present their work. W e adopted a more blended and collaborative learning approach in the classroom which resulted in more student engagement and ownership from the students.  I have stepped back from being the Teacher who teaches to the learners, to becoming the ‘facilitator’ of their learning - this is not something I had done before having come from teaching 5 years olds for the past 4 years and always being at the ...

Descriptive Stage In my current reflective practice I tend to reflect through two main mediums - the first being face-to-face reflection with my peers, and the second being on my planning sheet daily as things work well, or need adapting depending on the students needs. I used to have a third reflective practice in which I typed into a Google doc.  weekly, however I stopped doing this as I felt I wasn’t getting anything from it and it was more a task I ‘had to do’ as it was part of my BT mentoring - I didn’t understand the purpose of it then. Looking at the online survey responses from week 17 from my peers, it appears that the majority also reflect on their practice on their own or with a peer. Had I had a reflection model such as Jay and Johnson’s (2002) reflective model to base my reflections on, I could have seen the purpose of reflecting on my own practice. Comparative Stage The thought of sharing my reflections ‘out loud’ makes me feel uncomfortable...