Clayton+South+Primary+School

Reflective Journal: Day 1: We need to get students to take responsibility for their learning. This improves the engagement of the students and gives them a purpose to their learning. It is important to work with students to enable them to set goals. They need to see value in what they are doing and be able to articulate their understanding. Future Directions for our school. Teaching children how to set goals. SMART goals: Specific, Measureable, Actions, Realistic, Timeframe Set 3 academic goals, a personal goal and a social goal. WALT: What Are we Learning Today? WILF: What am I Looking For? Remembering oral language precedes reading and writing and we need to value the culture of our students as to why and how they express themselves. Day 2: Cross grade coaching- we already do some of this but we could expand this further. Questions for our school: Are we including and developing multi-literacies enough? Do we give our students a large enough variety of texts and give them opportunities to develop their critical thinking? What approach to coaching will be most effective in our context? We currently have a Department appointed Literacy Coach, we need to work with her to get staff on board so staff do not feel it has all been imposed from above. However staff need to understand why this appointment has been made. I really like the Name Game we played and I would like to use this on one of our first 3 days in 2011 as we will have 3 -4 new staff in a small school. Day 3: I was absent and have read items on the wiki space. Day 4: I really liked the metaphor activity and by coincidence our coach used this with our staff for them to reflect in groups, where we are at and how they think they are coping with changes that are being implemented in reading at our school. The pictures staff drew gave a powerful insight into who was coping and who was not and where we are all at. They reflect that we need to acknowledge and take into consideration that all the staff are at different stages and have varying views of new approaches that are being implemented to improve reading and writing. I reflected on my past roles as English co-ordinator, Junior School and a Level Coordinator and I feel in the past I have been more of a service provider rather than a leader and now at a different school the staff look at the coach as more of a supervisor. My aim is to do more in a professional development role. To develop my competencies I need to listen, paraphrase and improve my questioning skills. We need to start 2011 with shared common goals. What do we want for our students? We are beginning to reflect on our assessment practices at the school but we are facing a lot of resistance and reluctance to include more detailed assessment data.

What I Used to think

What I think Now My critical reflection