School+-+Echuca+East+PS+-+Jodie

Jodie Maiden
===Echuca East Primary School (EEPS) is located on the banks of the Murray River about 3 hours drive from Melbourne. We have about 380 students enrolled across 16 classes. As part of our whole school literacy approach we have an uninterrupted literacy block for the first two hours across the whole school every morning. During this time additional support is available and teacher are required to participate in peer observations across the school. __About me...__ ===

 Before teaching at Echuca East Primary School I taught as a Preschool teacher for over 5 years. I am now in the my third year teaching as a classroom Prep teacher and have recently taken on the position as Level Leader. Our 3 Prep classes operate as 'neighbourhood', which means that we work in a team teaching situation in one big room with our own 'home group' area.

 __**My 'first' thinking...**__

 As my leadership skills and experience are very limited within a primary school setting, I am very excited (and nervous) to have this opportunity to be involved in this area of professional learning. I am still unsure about what my role will be within the school as we have a literacy coach and leading teacher (literacy) who are responsible for staff coaching...so hopefully with time I will be able to narrow my focus and role in the area of literacy coaching with EEPS.

Wow.. my head is spinning?? I feel like I am way in over my head actually...however I don't think that I am the only one (thank goodness) :)
After having a chat with my principal (to help me try and get some direction/focus) I have established that this is a personal learning journey to develop my own professional knowledge and confidence rather than a 'whole school' approach to literacy coaching. This has helped me realise that it is OK to take one step at a time, at my own pace, until I am ready to begin coaching other peers. To support my own professional learning my focus will be on developing the language and skills I need to develop coaching conversations between:


 * student/teacher
 * student/student

When I feel confident enough, I aim to share my new learning through our peer observation program we have running during our daily literacy block and with my fellow prep teachers.


 * __Day 5 & 6__**

After engaging in our triads today it has been suggest that I purchase a book called 'The CAFE Book" as this may support me in my journey to develop teacher/student coaching conversations/conferences .... I have decided to purchase it with the intention of using some of the concepts/strategies outlined by the authors....

__5th August__
I am looking forward to Joan coming to visit tomorrow...it will be great to reflect on information we covered last week when in Melbourne. My intentions are still to continue working towards establishing student-student conferencing (coaching) within my the Prep Neighbourhood at East Primary. Hopefully after tomorrow I will have a clearer idea about how I am going to go about achieving this and how I can share my achievements/failures/successes with other staff and students.

__23rd August__
It was great to catch up with Joan and show her my progress so far...


 * __11th November__**

Recording my ongoing learning is clearly something I am going to need to get better at... I have learnt many things about literacy, coaching and myself as both a teacher and learner. To really value and appreciate the full capacity and impact of my learning I really need to be more vigilant about documenting this as it happens. I have travelled a little of the way with my understandings about how I can establish literacy coaching within my classroom and believe I can build on this. Of course as with most things, developing a deep understanding takes time along with lots of reflecting, not to mention trial and error, along the way.

I have included my evidence of impact below, which is presented in the form of a power point presentation, and any other resources that are relevant to the program I have been working implementing within my classroom.