Week 18: Reflecting on Changes in My Future-Orientated Teaching Practice

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(With reference to Gibbs Reflective Model, 1988)

My journey so far with The Mind Lab is taking me to places I feel that I have been yearning to go.  For a number of years now, I have felt restless within the constructs and complacency of classroom education. I believe that education in New Zealand has been stuck in the days of the village schoolhouse and moving in baby steps towards accepting and embracing change in many ways – from the confines of the learning environment, to the pathways of sharing knowledge/skills and the progressive role of educators. We are far beyond the educational requirements which fueled the Industrial Age… we are fully fledged into a new era – an Information Age, a digital era, a time for technology… innovative, collaborative, creative thinking and action-taking is where our learners now need support to build momentum and best sustain the future of this world.

Several of the themes delved into within Bolstad, Gilbert, McDowall, Bull, Boyd and Hipkins (2012) resonated within me in regards to the changes I have initiated at my school; the idea of personalised learning (as I mentioned before, moving away from the “production line” education of the Industrial Age), the concept of the Knowledge Age (moving away from reproducing existing knowledge and instead creating new knowledge to innovate and problem solve), rethinking the roles of teachers and learners (as we now redefine how teachers and students will work together to build knowledge on our educational journey together (with students no longer being regarded as simply being “the taught”).

The theme that warranted most of my energy however, has been developing a culture of continuous learning for teachers and educational leaders. This is because the paradigm shift in education starts with us. As famously sung by The Carpenters… “We have only just begun” – but as a staff we have now embarked on a PD mission together to understand the New Digital Curriculum and integrate this into our student's learning.  It feels very empowering to be at the helm of leading this at my school.  I am going on maternity leave in November and time is of the essence – so I feel proud to be able to guide and support my fellow teachers on their own digital and collaborative journeys, with the aim of instilling enthusiasm about the potential ahead for themselves and their students.

Leading my staff into PD around the New Digital Curriculum has been a significant learning curve. First, figuring out where to start… and then deciding where to go from there, all the while trying to cater to a variety of adoption and technology confidence levels. As I followed Robinson’s Changeology Model (2012) I felt anxious approaching a guest speaker to introduce the New Digital Technologies Curriculum, as I was not sure how engaging they would be at a staff meeting.  There is nothing worse than delivering something dry at the end of a full-on day of teaching, but I need not have worried as the staff responded with an eagerness to know more. I also felt somewhat nervous (at whether my apps would stall or fail) when I decided to excite my team with a few examples of new digital technology apps to use with their students – I introduced holographics using Quiver and student story-telling using HP Reveal. Both succeeded in encouraging my peers that there were some very exciting digital avenues already out there and easily accessible (on already available devices) to explore with their students. But there is just so much more I would like to do before the baby comes...

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