Thursday, February 24, 2011

Processes that contribute to improving students’ achievement

In this week’s reflection, I will offer interpretative comments on the description of some of the processes I observed in the school that I think contributed to improving our students’ achievement.

Teachers as Equal

I believe that an environment and culture where teachers feel a sense of working with principals, vice-principals and heads as equals is important. This I think can be done through leadership distribution among teacher leaders such as subject coordinators, discipline coordinator, mentors etc. It is important to provide such collaborative structure where teachers will feel valuable. Already I know of teachers who feel appreciated about the principal asking for their inputs on school matters. What our school has going on right now seems to be in this direction. The principal and vice-principals are all attending department meetings, even the ICT PLC group discussion. They are participating as if everyone is at the same level. I do admit that there is initially a sense of worry about their presence in the meetings. But I think that if we persist with this approach, it will really work well with the teachers. And now in meetings, although heads lead in the meeting, there is always asking for inputs from teachers. Heads provide the initial thrust of discussion and then from that, the teacher leader looks at how the teachers are going to work with the group in order to have that happen. In this way, the teachers are all made to feel important.

Positive Results

Here I will illustrate how important all the school’s initiatives had been for bringing about improvements in students’ achievement. When there is assessment for learning (AfL), everything seemed to start at the same time. I personally cannot tell if it is because of the AfL, or because of the PLC’s, or if it was the structure remedial program (SRP), or it was the staff training and meetings – all these things just happening at once. All of them combined together, I believe has made us more accountable, more productive, and improved students achievement is the end result. Change in the focus on AfL is a huge factor. We now have all teachers focusing on real learning of the students and not just “covering of syllabus”. Also there is this embedment of the PLC in the weekly timetable. On top of the PLCs, there is also staff training on improving English language use for teaching and the facilitation skills and knowledge needed for PLCs. There is also staff meeting once per month. The PLCs is focused on academic teaching and learning. The staff meeting is for “housekeeping” – things we need to meet and talk about as a school. Even the change in focus around SRP (specific groups B3 →A1/2, measurable outcomes and attainable, realistic) goals this year has made a difference. I think all these play an important role in improving student achievement. If I were to attribute success to any one of these things, I will be inclined to think that it is all of them.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Supporting teachers for implementing technology in classrooms Part 2

Last week, I spoke on providing of resources, managing of programs and sharing of information. In this week’s reflection, I will continue to touch on amount and multiple types of support I think are required by teachers for the successful implementation of technology into the classrooms, in addition to formal professional development opportunities.

Building Relationships

I believe in the need to spend considerable energy on the quality of relationships between teachers. In work, there will be strains and tensions at times, especially during hectic short periods like Term 2 and 3. I foresee a need to spend a great deal of time in the initial phrase talking to teachers about proposed changes and getting their buy-in. There is why in the last reflection, I mentioned that the ICT Time was important. I believe what once “if my argument is strong, through constant dialogue and information of sharing, the battle will be won.” And once that argument is won, teachers will be more supportive of the change and agree to try out new ideas with technology. At the same time, I must also be mindful of what an article on "Managing the Leading" called "a case of ‘if we don’t do it, the one in charge will’" symptom. I do believe that our teachers are capable and I must let them "go on with it"

Creating “Achievement” Targets

The main focus of teachers is on students learning and raising achievements. I think there is a constant need to reinforce this idea when speaking of technology. It must be clear that the significant change in teaching and learning was needed, along with the general improvement in instructional performance of teachers with technology. Very often, we should be speaking of the necessity of placing better teaching and learning for our students at the heart of technology implementation. It is also important to remind teachers that this improvement requires a shift in beliefs and adopting a view that all students (who are the native learners) can learn better with technology. All this attention of technology integration is just another way of trying to pay attention to our teachers’ core business of teaching and learning above everything else.

The prime goal with technology integration was to maximize students’ learning and reinforce the core message that all students (regardless of generations Y,YY, Z) can achieve well in our education system. Academic excellence for all becomes the focus this year, and significant investments made in the new approaches (collaborative and independent learning), along with the use of technologies is just to make teaching and learning more interesting, exciting and relevant to the coming generations of students. Observation of teaching then needed to be set up to create a dialogue about pedagogy. How can technology support such pedagogy? Achievement targets are currently the same for everyone, but should not individual achievement targets be set for different teachers (Beginning teachers, less than 5 years, and experienced teachers) on improvement in teaching and learning as well? These individualized targets will then be an important contributor to improvements in teaching and learning.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Supporting teachers for implementing technology in classrooms

In this week’s reflection, I will touch on amount and multiple types of support I think are required by teachers for the successful implementation of technology into the classrooms, in addition to formal professional development opportunities.

Providing Resources

I believe that the most helpful resource of all is the time set aside for teachers to meet during the school day to discuss students’ achievement and improving pedagogy with technology. We may have the money for material resources (laptops, wireless, storage spaces) but the more valuable one is the human resources and time. Providing opportunities for teachers to meet once a week during PLC time to reflect, to set out agenda, to share ideas that are successful, and focus on students learning issues is critical. Like what was mentioned during today's training session with Mr Peter Seah on Facilitation, with the shared goals and responsibilities together with active participation, the learning will then be more fruitful.

I also believe that I need to work at staying knowledgeable about external resources which are of potential value to the school. Take for example, the need to read articles on technology use in classroom, and in tune with what is going on, and what works locally and what has failed. With such knowledge, I can then pass on and bring in the resources to address our teachers greatest need. This resource room should, however, not be me alone but our ICT PLC team, where teachers can go down to get one-on-one help, and its available all day long.

Through this substantial increase in support from within (ICT PLC team, ICT Trainers, TAs) and external (ETD, others schools, vendors), I hope to be successful in bringing resources to the teachers.

Managing Programs

I hope to stimulate many technology integrated programs into the classrooms during this “early adoption” period, coming up with technology integration ideas, running them by the ICT PLC team and making up the school wide projects. I think the big change should be in the delivery of the pedagogy for students’ learning. We are already preparing our students to use the technology (Baseline standards) on a weekly basis. At the same time, there is also a need to manage everything required to implement such programs as well as, a time-consuming set of activities that engaged many people at all levels (teachers, heads, and students).

Sharing Information

Sharing news, as we had done during staff meetings (ICT Time) I believe is important. To share information and talk about what was good and what would help our students and how it would align us with our goals – success for the students (collaborative, independent) learning. There is lots of opportunity to chat – Principal gets regular updates on technology. He passes it on to departments, I pass it on to my team, ICT PLC team passes it to other teachers, and teachers pass to students. All of these new responsibilities served only to sharpen our focus on achieving our goal.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Data Use in School

In this week’s reflection, I will touch on data usage in teaching and learning and my thoughts on how such practice may be implemented.

I describe myself as a new teacher “keen on understanding use of data to facilitate instructional changes in the classroom.” I regularly collect data from tests after intervention and then used the results for planning and evaluating instruction. Last year, when I worked together with a group of teachers to develop a learning plan for our students and the goal for example is to improve “students’ clarity of thinking of concepts.” We did the intervention (mind-mapping) and track it through a period of time. At the end, it was wonderful to look at where we were at, what we actually wanted to be and what we actually achieved. That really reinforced to everyone that this is important. The results even helped raised questions which we now know required our attention. The teachers when presented accepted the collection and use of student data. They see it as positive (some even asking if this practices can be done for the graduating levels), because they see the results and then they celebrate success.

I hope that because we had seen the benefits of using data to track progress, we will be more aware of how important the information can be for guiding our instructions. In addition, having all of that data to look at, there will be a lot more emphasis on accountability and coming up with the data to show what we are doing.

There are a lot of things which we teachers are or will be doing in a year. Take some example, there are CA1, SA1, CA2 and SA2, twice for formative assessment, twice for summative assessment. I think even though we were doing this four times a year, there is no continuation. I did it once, I leave it alone; I did it the second time, I leave it alone. I did it the third time, I again leave it alone. I think after we have done it once, let us look at the students’ responses, let’s make meaning to what the data is telling us, work through them, see how we can improve based on that. Take for example, not the whole SA1 but part of SA1-style questions or the content which most of the students have difficulties in. We start to look at what we did, how we can improve upon it, and work that into day-to-day teaching. It would be tempting to say that we are teaching to the test, but I disagree. What we are looking at some of the markers that the test indicates and then working at improving.

I believe that the majority of initiatives which we teachers take have positive effects on learning. Improving notes, team teaching, SRP, computer-assisted learning can all have a positive effect on learning. But if we do not have the time to do them all, which will have the greatest effect? Can we guess which ones? Likewise in strategies to improve things for our students, so the question is not “Will this strategy work?” but “Which?” The use of data will then help to tell us how the average student (based on our school students’ profile, and the problems these students have) learns best.