Term 1 2017 reflection

As I am about to embark on the second term for the year, I felt it was a good time to reflect on term 1.
2017 is a year of many new challenges and experiences for me.  For the first time, I have taken on the role of team leader where I have the honour of leading the Year 5 team and have the pleasure of working alongside four amazing teachers.

I am also the Responsive Learning Leader for Literacy across our school.  My role is to oversee the accelerated literacy programme across the school; report to the teams/BOT/Principal on the literacy programme including student progress and achievement; and to support teachers to make cross curricular links in literacy (reading, writing, oral language).

As well as my new roles, I am currently on two PD courses.  First is the Apple Towards Transformation course which sees me working with an Apple facilitator to learn a range of new apps for enhancing learning and teaching practise.  All of my students are using 1-1 ipads.   The second course is the Voyager course run by Dr Vikram Murthy.  This course is about cross-school collaborative inquiry and collective wisdom which uses action science, action learning, and appreciative inquiry methodologies to solve intractable problems and realise organisational opportunities.

Whilst I am really enjoying all my new roles, I have found that I tend to be out of my classroom a lot.  This has made planning trickier as I don't want my professional development to be detrimental to my students because I am not in the classroom.   Trying to set up an effective teaching program that sees my students continuing with their in depth teaching sessions and which focuses on accelerating learning, has been a challenge at times, however by spending most of term 1 ensuring students know how to identify their learning needs based on formative and summative assessments, student rubrics and goal sheets, as well as students learning how to plan their own learning day and book their needs based teaching sessions, the class is starting to run more smoothly and my absences from the classroom aren't so disruptive.  Whilst students are beginning to become self-reflective, independent learners, I am not sure the rate of acceleration is as good as it would be if I was in the classroom the whole time.  Now that routines and expectations are established, going into term 2, my big push is going to be around accelerating learning both within my own class and across the other Year 5 classes.