Bringing it home

Fun and games are rife at the moment as we have just had the call ‘advising’ us that Ofsted are in this week to do a full inspection over Wed & Thur. A document circulating internally to calm everyone down opens with this:

“Outstanding teachers continuously reflect on their teaching, they analyse particular aspects of their work and find ways to develop. The main purpose of lesson observation is to provide a focusing tool for reflection and improvement.”

This struck a chord with me and really highlited the value of what were all learning here. I know we are not all working in education, but does that really make a difference?

Focus Focus Focus

Since having such a long summer break away from monitoring the learning of others (and also myself), its now time to fire up the brain again and get straight in the thick of it. At my academy, we have an approaching Ofsted inspection and I have spent a fair bit of time with an advisor as have many of my colleagues. What is astonishing is how much of a fuss people are making over something they should be doing every day, after all, the new rules (1st Sep 09) are fair right…? But there was one shining piece of advice that kept coming through the acronyms, statistics and all manner of other jargon and that was:

“Teach Well”

Bottom line, do the day job and the rest will come. Another sound piece of data / research is the recall rate of students. I have subsequently pinned the following on my desk and always challenge what I am doing on this scale, its quite interesting and enlightening I have to tell you!

‘The Purpose of Reflective Practice’

Now being used by the Universal College of Learning in New Zealand for an undergraduate course on Nursing, this is one of my assignments from the Reflection in the Work Setting module.

Thought I would share as I have not posted this here as yet.

One down, two to go…

So thats it, my first year of University study complete. It has been a real journey for me and i hope that my marks from the second semester of this year are okay. Now going to give myself a break for a week or two on the academic front, but we will see.

Phew!!!

Back to the West

So that was an amazing trip… I’ll let the video do the talking.

Millwood’s Visuals

In one of my LO’s, I shamelessly used Richard Millwoods graphic from his blog as an image for the title page as it was a great shot of an AI planning session and looked very pleasing to the eye (well mine anyway). This was a LO looking at Action Inquiry from a research perspective.

A latter LO is now the workplace application. I have since become fond of this image and had the brain child of transposing it into my work setting. Below is the result. Its a little more imitation than transposition, but it is in my workplace all the same. My colleagues thought it was my world domination plan and were reluctant to remove it before lessons began. A great way to start the day at 7:27 in the morning!!!

UAI LO3 Conclusions

Above is my conclusion of LO3 of UAI hopefully explaining:

• Genre selection
• Issues encountered
• Strengths / weakness’ identified

Made in iMovie 09 and my first real attempt of creating a ‘vid-cast’

Basic principals of my study

Here is a bit of an off-beat post to outline the components that I am so thankful for and could not imagine doing my studying / researching / learning without. First up its the underpinning element:

This is the framework on which I do 90% of my work (the other 10% is my learning journal which is a blue lined book, nothing special.) I have been involved in the IT industry for a while and without (hopefully) sounding like a bit of a bandwagon tag-along, Mac OS X has really facilitated the work I have produced so far with its simplistic file management, redundancy and time machine.

I suppose the enclosure for the previous (and all to follow) would be my fantastic laptop the MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 15″ The best laptop I have ever had. It keeps on surprising me with most things, could not recommend a brand/model as much as this!

This little gem would have to be the secondary framework. Doing a research / distance learning degree would be rather difficult without web access and Firefox allows me to access all I need to on the web with the ability to support plugins such as Zotero.

The common room / lecture theatre / tutorial space and everything else, FirstClass is the University. It brings the Cohort together to engage in a communal learning environment and also allows students to connect with other cohorts, past and present.

Another Apple product now, still not a fan-boy, iWork 09. I have only been using it really in Semester 2, really to try it out. I have had all versions previous to 09 (through site license) but never really ran with it. 09 has really been a saviour for me, alleviating the need for buggy, slow, putrid Office:mac 2008 that I am only using for my reference page for each module as it has interoperability with Zotero, a feature iWork has yet to support.

Oh, now my favourite, Spotify is a service like iTunes that provides all music in its database (around 2-3 million) for free, streaming and instant. See my previous post to see the love!

I suppose this would be another component of the mix. Zotero is a FANTASTIC premise, but not fully developed in my opinion, head over to their website to read all about it and see how it can help you.

Oh come on, not everything is good with hiher education, this is how the descrepancies are dealt with!

What could you not do without???

Research Question

“How can I drive a sense of urgency and engagement in my students at both KS4 and 5?”

This is the question i will be using in the majority of my studies from this point forward until the end of the semester. I will apply an action inquiry to this question and perform reflective analysis. Im quite excited at this point, as this is so true to life and i have already started making progress with the area of engagement but hoping that studies will provide me assistance in formulating a plan. Will go nicely in the CPD evidence folder too!

Workload increment

Okay, so im not feeling too bad about this but looking at the prospect of researching three learning objectives and producing 3500 words conclusively on them all is pretty daunting. Im trying to stay on top of it all and not falling behind and im feeling okay about it. To be honest im really enjoying doing this work as i truly feel that my mind is really being exercised and im learning so much all the time. Lets see how the posts pan out over the next 14 days…

Models, cycles and all sorts

Looking over many a research article and journal, it is becoming clear to me that the best way that i can actually demonstrate ideas is through the use of models. Below is my depiction of how i believe artefacts play a part in the process of reflective practice. What i was also trying to demonstrate was that artefacts can be captured during or after the critical incident.

Next up is the way i have concluded an artefact would then fit within Schön’s model of reflective practice.

And lastly, my ‘brain dump’ of how i can see the Action Enquiry module panning out with my model of its place in reflective practice

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Whether these are correct or not is another thing, but this is just me putting my own learning style into my work.

RIA / ROA

Okay, so here are some reflections from a reflective task on reflective cycles… thank science that it is nearly half term, MY BRAIN!!! Anyway, lets try and approach this post with some form of educational direction. Upon consuming sizeable amounts of materials on reflective practice and reflective models, one thing has been coming up constantly, and that’s the concept of RIA and ROA. Both stand for Reflection In Action and Reflection On Action respectively. What these mean is where we look to perform reflection and where it takes place in the cycle of a practice.

I feel that to achieve true reflective practice, you should try to incorporate both. Why and how? Coming up next is a my assignment submission on reflective practice, stay tuned…

Finishing off IOCT and Semester 1

And the last word has pretty much been written. All that is left on the aegenda is a bit of self moderation and polish to interject into the mix and to do the wonderful refferencing that i have been putting off untill now. Heres to the 16th at 11:59!!!

Done, done and DONE!!!

Hurrah! I had the final task of compressing my work and finally uploading my final submission last night after a very long and very good Post 16 induction evening. The reaction from prospective and current students was amazing, i have never been so impressed in my life!

But anyway, 1/12th of the degree is now out of the way, and 1/6th will be on the 16th with IOCT on the way. Lets see how we do with that one!

IWS: Rounding it up

Not quite over the finishing line just yet, but most certainly on the home straight. My IWS module is now complete in (very) first draft form. Tweaking, word counts and citations are all now on the list to do over the next three days. Its encouraging to now think that I have 1/12 of my degree done!

Roll on the 28th!!!