Fundamentals of AI in Education

I’m so excited to have completed the Fundamentals of AI in Education (Micro-credential) course with Craig Hansen and to be one of the first certified AI educators in New Zealand! 

The course was an inspiring experience, packed with practical strategies and real-world ideas for using AI in the classroom and beyond. I learned so much about integrating AI into lesson planning, assessment, personalising learning for students and addressing the ethical questions that come with these tools. I’m already putting this knowledge to work by using AI to boost student engagement, provide targeted feedback, analyse data and choose the best approaches for specific learning needs. 

The possibilities and practical applications are endless! 

Monitoring the Effects of Teacher Collaboration in my Team on Learner Outcomes

Identify informal and formal ways you are monitoring the effects of your changed practices/intervention on learner outcomes. Explain the reflections and tweaks you are making along the way.

My Inquiry: Will Teacher Collaboration improve student engagement and raise their achievement?

In my team, we reflected on our collaboration and mid-year results. Have we managed to lift our students' engagement and achievement due to the change we've implemented in our planning? The short answer is yes; however, we also developed a shared understanding of our next steps: bring student agency on board and refine our planning.

Since the beginning of my inquiry, we have developed a habit of ongoing reflections on our practice. It now happens naturally, almost every day when we share what worked well and what needs to be improved. We act faster and are not afraid to give feedback about each others' work. I believe that our professionalism helped us develop a healthy collaborative partnership in our team.

Some tweaks that we did since the beginning of my TAI:

- introduced and unpacked maths matrixes with our learners. This allowed them to take ownership of their independent learning choices. 

- our next step was to provide our students with choices to support their independent meaningful learning. As a result, we designed our maths and literacy choice boards that our students love to use.

- redesigning our planning template to make it easy to use by all stakeholders: team members and our learners. We all now know what to do and when. 

Monitoring the effect: 

- Many of our students developed self-motivation. Many ask for maths homework as they want to improve their results. 

- I let students choose to join different groups to deepen their understanding of current topics (maths) and many of them love having more freedom in their learning. 

- Students across all 3 classes are getting the same consistent programme and are less dependent on individual teachers' knowledge of maths.

- My team appreciates our collaborative approach as it helped them improve their own knowledge of the curriculum. We also bounce ideas from each other, taking and implementing the best of them.

- mid-year Data showed progress and some acceleration in our students' achievements across the syndicate. 

Causal Chain TAI 2022

As identified during my Teacher profiling phase, I decided to focus on improving student achievement and engagement through teacher collaboration.

My own practice - continue to refine my practice (For example, in maths - daily number talk, the use of visualisation and materials, developing fluency and confidence in maths as opposed to memorisation, and practical application of their knowledge.

In my team, we reflected on our collaboration and mid-year results. Have you managed to lift our students' engagement and achievement due to the change we've implemented in our planning? The short answer is yes; however, we developed a shared understanding of our next steps: bring student agency on board and refine our programme. 

School-wide. Support my colleagues to improve their understanding of maths progressions and the effective use of various manipulatives in their classroom programmes by sharing some resources, reviewing school maths matrices, and actively participating and contributing during staff meetings.

Teacher Collaboration will lead to improving Teacher Practice - already visible from our T1-2 work

Collaborative planning - deepens Teachers' subject and pedagogical knowledge - students benefit from consistency/ balanced programme/ content, that in order leads to their increased motivation, engagement and better achievements.

We will employ Student Agency to help students take ownership of their learning: link content to their passions and interests.  When Students set personal goals, the learning becomes theirs. This sense of ownership leads to increased motivation and achievement. We will use the School Matrices with the learners.  ----- Team teachers move from being the deliverer of curriculum to being the co-constructors and experienced learners.

Collaborative teachers reflect on their own practice and are open to colleagues' feedback developing and improving their metacognition and key competencies. At the same time, they model and promote collaboration, metacognition, and personal agency to their learners. 

I believe that this chain will lead to increased teacher and student agency, collaboration, engagement, achievement and success for all syndicate members. 

Fluency Without Fear: Research Evidence on the Best Ways to Learn Math Facts By Jo Boaler

Fluency Without Fear: Research Evidence on the Best Ways to Learn Math Facts by Jo Boaler (2015)

Found a few years ago during my ALiM work, I keep referring back to this article and  https://www.youcubed.org/ website. This work is about developing number sense instead of memorization of facts, it unpacks the idea of learning math facts along with a deep understanding of numbers and the ways they relate to each other.

In a critical research project, researchers studied students as they solved number problems (Gray & Tall, 1994). The researchers concluded that low achievers are often low achievers not because they know less but because they don’t use numbers flexibly – they have been set on the wrong path, often from an early age, of trying to memorize methods instead of interacting with numbers flexibly (Boaler, 2009). 

Based on my experience, some teachers want their students to drill in basic facts and times tables as this is 'a good old school that worked well in the past'. Saying that we don't really have any research data to support this statement. I remember a lot of my classmates who hated maths because they didn't understand it or had to sit timed tests. I was one of them and I didn't enjoy that 'good old school' approach. 

I believe that the current decline in student achievement in maths is caused by a lack of maintenance or an unbalanced or inconsistent maths programme. 

• Do we all have a solid maths block every day four or five times a week? 
• Do our students practise and apply the knowledge and concepts taught in class or just do some busy work during their independent activities? 
• How can they develop fluency without mileage and purposefully created and provided opportunities? 

According to the NZC,  'number' should be the focus of 60–80 percent of mathematics teaching time during the first four years at school and 50-70 percent afterwards. 

Here comes a common misunderstanding or misconception. The curriculum requires a lot of time teaching 'number', but modern research talks about reasoning. The answer is simple. The 'old school' is about memorizing facts while the modern school is about developing fluency through making sense and connections, and talking about reasons for the use of different methods. Students need to learn to calculate through number sense, as well as spend time on problem-solving and reasoning. 

One of the great methods for teaching number sense and math facts at the same time is a teaching strategy called ‘number talks’ that many of us have been implementing already. Research tells us that the best mathematics classrooms are those in which students learn number facts and number sense through engaging activities that focus on mathematical understanding rather than rote memorization. (Jo Boaler)

At the end of her article, Jo compiled some great and engaging activities that can be used in any classroom to support your tamariki number sense development. 

Create Staff Meeting - Silhouette Art workshop

Each term the Manaiakalani Kahui Ako hosts staff meetings as an opportunity for Manaiakalani teachers to connect with our COL Kaupapa and Pedagogy.

This time, my school hosted the Create Staff Meeting and I enjoyed the opportunity to share my practice with other wonderful and creative Manaiakalanai teachers. I was privileged to be supported by my team as this was the first workshop that we presented together. Well done Team Kea!

Developing Team Trust during Team Teaching

"Active collaboration is particularly important for creating a growth-based learning environment and for increasing student learning progress. Research shows that teachers who work together and learn from each other are more successful in improving student outcomes than those who work alone." Through growth to achievement: Report of the review to achieve educational excellence in Australian schools, (March 2018)

I completely agree that working together helps to learn from each other in a seamless and practical way, right there at the right moment in time and this makes this learning more successful. What I've noticed is that team teaching also improves trust among the teachers. 

Another important aspect that team teaching brings to the plate is reflecting on the lesson plan. You are not planning just for yourself, you're planning for the team and this adds more responsibility and effort that each team member puts into their planning and... delivery. 

We noticed that our learners benefit from our collaborative teaching because we take collective responsibility for all learners, and we are consistent in our curriculum and experience delivery across the syndicate. We also observed that we (team teachers) model skills of collaboration to our learners.

Hybrid Learning - Creating Inspirational Learning Environments

This year educators faced a number of challenges, including students' poor attendance due to covid, low academic levels of some students as a result of their inconsistent approach to learning during lockdowns,  and general issues with re-engaging when they are back at school.

First, I decided to focus on making learning fun, engaging and inspirational to my team: both students and team members. My perception of the initial step in forming my inquiry was in line with Russell's question: 'How do I have present, happy, healthy and engaged tauira (both students and teachers) who are learning in the Goldilocks Zone?'

I believe that you’ve already heard about the Goldilocks Zone but think it's still worth clarifying its definition. Theo Dawson: 'It’s the range in which a learning task is just challenging enough to support optimal learning by stimulating interest and triggering the dopamine-opioid cycle—the brain’s natural motivational cycle. The brains of babies and young children are wired to learn in the Goldilocks Zone, but formal education often disrupts the dopamine-opioid cycle. As a consequence, many (perhaps most) older children, adolescents, and adults must rediscover the Goldilocks Zone if they want to learn optimally from everyday experience.' 

So, we needed some fun to improve our tamariki learning experiences, hook them up and motivate them to be present and engaged. Magic and collaboration formed my response to the situation: as a team, we dived into the world of magical learning and teaching. We’ve been busy designing our magic wands, using them and sharing our creative stories. It looks like we managed to sprinkle some magic over other students as this definitely improved their attendance and engagement.

The results were rewarding:

• students' engagement was very high - including the students who worked from home and participated in our activities via Google meets.
• improved reading and writing outcomes
• creating a positive and collaborative learning environment
• improving and taking my team's collaboration (teachers) to the next level
• increased attendance!

TAI - Critical Thinking and Mixed-ability grouping in Reading - #19

Class on Air - Episode 9: Critical thinking and mixed-ability

The Learning Intention for this lesson was to think critically about the text and the topic; actively participate in a sense-making conversation by discussing different points of view, supporting our thinking by evidence from the text, other sources of information and our prior knowledge.

I often work with mixed-ability groups as I believe that holding high expectations for my learners and creating an equitable learning environment empower them to be successful. The way I structured the lesson encouraged a lot of discussions, but also argumentation and provocations.

Boys in Literacy - Professional Development with Marshall Diggs

If I was to summarise the key things I took away from this Professional Development what would they be and why?

Marshall's inspiring presentation was aiming to empower teachers to understand boys as learners and equip them with skills and strategies to enable boys to achieve and succeed in literacy and in their learning in general. As we know every child is different but boys do learn differently to girls, and it was great to listen to his ideas and reflect on my own practice. These are some of the points I found most interesting:

• Being CLEAR means being KIND to the boys
• Competition gets them excited
• Boys learn best with short and sharp exercises (active games, PE breaks, brain breaks, etc)
• Who are their male role models? Do they see men writing for fun?
• Are there spaces where boys like to learn?
• What topics do they prefer to read about? What will engage them?
• Be firm, fair and fun
• How much talking is happening in a lesson? More reading/writing, less talking (teacher talk)
• Relationships with our students is a priority
• Learning is more important than the result
• Align the curriculum with the child and put the child at the centre.

How has this professional development challenged my thinking?

I haven't changed my thinking, this PLD just confirmed that the use of the LCS pedagogy helps empower my male students to succeed in their learning. This year, I was impressed by the enthusiasm and engagement shown by the boys during our LCS projects. I'm very glad that I managed to involve more junior syndicate teachers in our LCS projects and see our boys' growing engagement and love of learning!

What aspects of my practice would I consider changing as a result of this professional development and why?

There are some pretty amazing things happening in our school but we can always be reflective and look at ways of improving. My plan is to have this conversation during our next team meeting and develop a plan to support our male learners:

• introduce short breaks and include them in our daily planning: 

- Word association game (president = Trump, Fruit = orange etc.)
- Give a fist pump to 4 people/elbow bump, touch 4 walls, find 4 green objects, etc
- Ninja punctuation activity: Capital letters - fist pump, Full stops - turn, Comma - twist,     Number - signal, Paragraph - yee hah
- Summary (in 3 words). Turn to your buddy and tell him/her what are you going to do this holiday? Then the buddy has to summarise in 3 words. Other students are to guess:-)
- Catch hand/finger game (activate both hemispheres of the brain - brain exercises)
- Word scrabble: how many words can you make from this one word (give time frame).

• Literacy - inspiring topics: Factual/ Competition/ Humour/ Survival/ Conflict/ Adventure
• Shared reading - big books - align with their interest and our LCS Term 4 plan
• S. Cameron and L.Dempsey activities
• LCS project - our learners have to be active participants
• Art - collect student voice! Differentiation.
• Maths - problem-solving and hands-on learning vs drilling
• Inclusiveness - identity and connections 
• Digital curriculum and digital tools to support boys' learning/ engagement

CyberSmart and the Purposeful Use of Google Meet Chat for Distance Learning

In this post, I'd like to focus on the purposeful use of Google Meet Chat and being Cybersmart during online meets. 

My students felt confident and comfortable during our online meets and, and at some stage, I noticed that my students started to take initiative in our online learning by sharing their ideas and experiences and inspiring each other to try new activities. I was very proud of my learners but also realised that talking ONE-At-A- TIME was a challenge for my young learners. It looks and feels different in class as I always use Think-Pair-Share and other strategies for my students to talk and share. During our 2 x 45 minutes long daily online sessions, it was a bit challenging for my young learners to stay muted. Soon, we decided to use the Google Meet CHAT! 

It became our new opportunity to cooperate and communicate with each other simultaneously. For example, when we solved each other's riddles, brainstormed rhyming words or answered Maths questions, all student could text their answers/ guesses to our Meet Chat and we all could see and respond to individual ideas, discuss, talk, give reasons and explain our thoughts. 

For me, it was a great opportunity to monitor my students' knowledge, skills, progress and gaps and then address their learning needs by assigning individualized tasks and/or giving timely feedback.

Maths:                                                                                               Rhymes:

Answering our Riddles:

From time to time, I had to remind my students to be Cybersmart. Reflecting on some of their comments (digital footprints), we also went over our School Values: Fun, Integrity, Respect and Excellence to support our Cybersmart learning and smart relationships.

Post-lockdown reflection:

When we finally returned back to school, I shared some of our Meet chat comments with my learners on a big screen and asked them to reflect on their online behaviours and digital footprints. It was a huge surprise for some of my learners who had obviously thought that their chat comments would have disappeared after we finished our calls. 

I hope this will have a big impact on their future online behaviours because I have provided my learners with real evidence and proof that everything that they send online stays there forever! 

It was a great CyberSmart life lesson!

Being CyberSmart - Smart Blog Comments

In class and during our Home Learning I promoted SMART commenting on peers' blogs. The students enjoyed expressing their opinions and communicating with their friends in a positive manner. I believe that blogging and commenting helped engage learners in good conversations about their learning and experiences.

Whanau Engagement during Home Learning

Learn-Create-Share culture, Whanau engagement and Smart Footprint

The students were very active during our online meets and on their blogs because they felt proud of their learning. They knew that all of them were important and their contributions greatly appreciated! Every day we had our Talanoa time when my students had opportunities to share what they did independently pursuing their personal interests or passions. Sometimes I was blown away by my students' abilities and creativity! Ka Pai, Room 5!

Our home learning was great and we will take on board the best of our new experiences. But we are looking forward to coming back to school on Monday!

The Importance of Teacher and Peer Feedback during Remote Learning

I believe that we all know that giving feedback to students can be the bulk of the workload. Is the payoff worth the immense effort and time? In Visible Learning, John Hattie noted that feedback is “one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement”, so if you’d like to increase student achievement in your classroom, feedback can be the key to making it happen.

Blog commenting is a great and powerful teaching and learning tool which cannot be disregarded. Reflecting on my own experience,  I believe that online feedback helped promote good communication and build stronger positive relationships within our Room 5's classroom community.  Blogging and commenting provides authentic experiences to purposefully utilize students' reading and writing skills. I always encourage my learners to check out their peers' blogs, give, receive and respond to feedback. 

My 2020 lockdown experiences proved that promoting peer blog commenting helps connect students with their friends, teachers and wider communities. Moreover, according to research, through exposure to a multitude of opinions and through awareness of writing for a wider audience, blogs also foster cognitive engagement and critical thinking because learners need to reflect on the possible reactions of others to their postings.

Examples of my Y2-3 learners' comments: 

Home Learning Round 2

Here we go again... Home Learning round 2! Level 3 caught us in the middle of our exciting LCS Book Week project! The children were disappointed as they were so keen to write a script and perform their new play! I know that some of them continued working on the script during the first days of Level 3. It clearly shows their engagement and genuine interest in their learning.

I'm grateful to our school management as they decided to distribute free loan devices to our Year 2-3 students. It definitely reflected in an increased number of children that I've been seeing online during our Google Meets or working on their learning programmes. Out of 20 children in my Y2-3 class, I normally see 12-14 students twice a day and 18 are actively busy working on their programmes. What a success!

This sudden change in learning environment made me stop and rethink my professional inquiry again. After some consideration, I am determined to continue with my focus on promoting deep learning that requires students to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking across the curriculum using Learn-Create-Share.

When designing my lessons, I try to ensure that activities are personally meaningful for my students. Last week, we focused on making inferences and sharing our experiences. I believe it helped connect the online learning tasks with students' previous knowledge and experiences in personally relevant ways.

During our google meets I usually focus on questions that encourage deeper reflection and personal responses from my learners and stimulate real, authentic conversations, for example: 'Why do Zebras have stripes?' or ' Are dolphins smart? Why?' I also use these conversations to develop active use of specific vocabulary, collaborative and questioning skills and foster their confidence and curiosity. 

It is so rewarding to see that my students initiate authentic conversations by sharing their topics of interest. They ask questions and give feedback to each other and even plan for the next activities that we could do together during the home learning period.

Examples of student-driven collaborative activities:

- Creating our class digital library (students created read-aloud).

- Creating and playing Kahoots of their interest (rugby, Te Reo, maths, rhymes and alliterations, etc)

- Blogging. Sharing their personal presentations like cooking,  dances and songs, art, stories etc)

- Commenting on each other blogs leaving smart and specific comments.

Learning, Creating and Sharing - week 2

During the week following our first collaborative session, we continued to talk about our favourite books. One of my inquiry focuses is on making students' learning experiences authentic by designing LCS projects based on their interests and taking into account their identities. During this project, we put students' interests at the centre of their learning and I believe this approach inspired our young learners to create many wonderful written texts, art and digital objects.

Reflecting on our class identities, It was very interesting to observe how different classes focused on different aspects of LCS. One of the classes discussed the story elements and created their own characters and settings in response to the book they'd selected. I believe they now aim for rewriting the 'model text' and creating their own book! The students started to work on some illustrations. How exciting was to see such creative writers and artists! 

Another class focused on descriptive writing, unpacked new vocabulary and dug even deeper talking about characters' feelings in the book. The students presented their descriptions to the audience and received well-deserved Pakipaki!

My class decided to use one of the famous book characters and completely change the settings of the story! We brainstormed a lot of problems and solutions, wrote a number of short plays, acted them out and performed to the other classes last Friday. I promote the use of drama techniques to support literacy learning. I believe it makes reading and writing activities more engaging and meaningful for students,  enhances critical and creative thinking skills, thus I hope it will help my students to formulate and express ideas and opinions. 

Our Y2-3 students were highly engaged and motivated. They were proud to present what they had created and tried their best sharing authentic learning experiences. Our next step is to do some blog posts sharing our project with a wider audience and connecting our learners online.  Teachers will plan for shared writing lessons to write smart comments on the other class blogs and then allow our students to leave more smart positive personal comments.

Year 2-3 Collaborative Learn-Create-Share Book Week project

My personal goals:

Engage and collaborate with my team by involving them in the cross-curricular LCS project from the planning stage to the celebration of the school Book Day in 3 weeks

Provide our students with meaningful and exciting experiences based on their interests.

Day #1 

• Collecting student voice/ interests - Learner Identity

• Oral language 

• Vocabulary 

• Critical thinking

• Collecting and analysing data

• Love of learning 

• Creativity (Drama, Visual arts including modern visual arts which use technology: photography, video, filmmaking, etc)

• Cybersmart across the curriculum

• Learn-Create-Share!!!

What a day we had! Full of fun, reading, learning, creating and sharing our reading preferences and favourite books. We had to work together in a respectful manner and give our opinions. We, teachers, were blown away by our students' ideas and thinking! It was a long day but our young learners were absolutely enthusiastic to participate in this project. They took ownership of their learning and were proud to express their learner identities.

Our students' ideas:

The feedback from my colleagues after the beginning of this project was very rewarding. They found that their students were highly engaged and motivated during various follow-up writing and reading activities.  The outcomes were impressive quantity- and quality-wise. Even the reluctant writers asked to extend their writing time to complete their work.

We will meet and share our wonderful learning next Friday! The students are very excited to share with other students and find out what the other classes created during the week.

Planning my Intervention to Raise Student Achievement in Literacy

Inquiry: How can I change my practice to raise student achievement in literacy by promoting deep learning that requires students to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking across the curriculum using Learn-Create-Share?

I am a great believer that if a person genuinely wants to learn something, he/she will be successful. My job is to help my students find their interests, support and scaffold them during their learning process. I think about all the wonderful LCS opportunities that my learners and I can plan together to fully engage and explore in learning that is exciting and meaningful growing their learner identity as enthusiastic explorers and creators. 

This year, I’ve started to implement drama activities ‘giving students the chance to use all skills in decoding meaning, understanding the feelings of others, expanding vocabulary, making appropriate use of syntax, analyzing discourse, generating feedback within context, and building metacognitive knowledge’ (McMaster, 1998; Urian, 2000).

After analysing students voice and research findings, reading blog posts of my COL colleagues and reflecting on my teaching practice, I finalised my intervention that I have started to implement and already see clear signs of students successes.

My intervention is based on:

• Putting my students at the very centre of their learning and making their learning experiences authentic by designing LCS projects based on their interests and taking into account their identities.
• Scaffolding my learners during their projects by implementing and consistently using the tasks designed to improve their vocabulary and reading comprehension.
• Utilizing drama to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking and raise students achievement in reading and writing.

Adapting to Remote Teaching and Learning

In my last post, I wrote that our school's Year 0-3 students are not part of the 1:1 Manaiakalani programme. My challenge was to establish accessible remote teaching and learning for my team and all junior students. Glen Taylor school decided not to change the term dates and we had to quickly adapt to the new teaching environment.

Emergent Stage: establishing online connections.
I decided to start small and assess what we had in place.  Our junior school had been using Seesaw and some families were connected to their children's blogs. During our Term 1 Talanoa time, we had updated the contact details of our parents and now we had to e-mail and/or call them to explain how they could access their child's Seesaw blog.
Tools used: 
-Seesaw blogs - to establish connections
-hard copy learning packs

Beginning Stage: implementing whole-class remote instructional teaching
My class was the only class from our junior school that had the class site. I also used the class site to reach other families of our Junior school and promote their Seesaw class blogs, Google Hangouts and other available online learning apps.
At the same time, we started to run daily Google Hangouts, engaging more and more learners.
It was a short period of whole-class teaching and I felt that it was not structured and engaging enough.
Tools used:
-Seesaw blogs - whole-class instructions (recorded videos of teacher morning greetings and daily instructions)
-hard copy learning packs (now with recorded video instructions on how to use some of the activities)
-Google Hangouts (3 daily sessions)
-My class site for the entire Junior school

Developing Stage: leading a change to improve remote teaching practices.

Reflecting on my remote teaching, I noticed that the change of my planning format and the constant use of my class site was a great tool to connect with my students and their families. It helped achieve a more structured programme and engage more learners. I felt that our junior school would benefit from having individual class sites and called for the syndicate meeting. I was very impressed by the GTS management and my team's dedication. However, some of my team members had no experience with Google class sites. I created a template of their class sites and ran a few online sessions on how to use their sites and implement our new planning format to improve our remote teaching practices.
In less than 2 days, our class sites were up and running! Well done, Team!

Current Stage: differentiated teaching, increasing student engagement and motivation
Everything described above happened within less than 5 days of our distance teaching.

My next step was making sure that my learners were engaged at the right level (differentiation) and motivated to keep learning.

The tools that I use now are:

• New daily planning format using Google Slides - easy to follow differentiated tasks.
• Google Hangouts - daily communication, oral language, feedforward and feedback, brainstorming ideas, students voice, sharing news and learning. A special thank you to Mrs Logan who was co-teaching during our online Meets and via Seesaw.
• Class site - design for learning - making learning differentiated, accessible, rewindable and visible.
• Seesaw - assigned individualised tasks based on their learning needs, ongoing feedback and feedforward, private messaging to improve individual learning outcomes.
• Hard copy learning packs - allowing more time for purposeful non-screen learning, providing video ideas of how to use some of the hard material.
• Learning apps - assigning group and individualised tasks, checking their progress, giving feedback and planning next learning goals. (ixl, SunshineClassics, Reading eggs, Hit the Button, Story Online, Matific)
• Class points based on their visible learning - drawing on my students' motivation and competitive nature. Constant reminders to bring all of their other work (on paper) after the lockdown to earn more class points.
• Learn-Create-Share pedagogy and the integrated curriculum have been utilised to keep my learners engaged, motivated and feel successful during these uncertain times.
• Students have been encouraged to pursue their own interests as I believe that this fosters the development of life-long learning.

By the end of Term 1,  my team prepared online holiday activities. We tried to select fun but educational activities that our students can do by themselves or with their families.

Please check out my class site and Seesaw blog.   Today is the 2nd day of the school holidays but my learners keep sharing their learning on our class blog. I believe it proves their engagement and motivation. 

I would like to acknowledge and thank the GTS leaders and teachers who have been working together to quickly adapt to the new learning environment.                                     

Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

I would like to share this Nathan Wallis's video interview that we watched during our staff meeting at Glen Taylor School. Nathan Wallis is a Neuroscience Educator & Director of X-Factor Education.

I believe that setting up positive and respectful classroom norms, creating feelings of trust and safety for students are extremely important and definitely worth teachers' time and effort. The high-quality relationships are at the foundation of students' deeper thinking and engagement.