Greg’s Blog – principal (le?) learning

I have been physically back at school all this week after a lovely, relaxing break.  The end of the year was nuts and it felt like I only just kept the important bits above the water at times.  But new year now and some focuses continue and some will be new.

We have two new teachers at school and both are going to be great!

The last few days have been heavily focused on planning – for the new year and for Teachers Only Day on Monday in particular.  It is always fun thinking of interesting ways to introduce ideas and challenges to staff in the new year.  We are having a major focus on Written Language this year and there are a lots of resources out there in cyberspace that have been wonderful for ideas and inspiration:

* Scouring Delicious has been a good source of links, particularly Pauls links on writing as he is leading a similar development
* writing exemplars – http://www.tki.org.nz/r/assessment/exemplars/eng/index_e.php
* NC Curriculum/effective practice – dimensions of effective practice in literacy – http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/National-Standards/Reading-and-writing-standards/Effective-literacy-practice
* Purposes and text forms – http://www.tki.org.nz/r/assessment/exemplars/eng/teachers_notes/written_lang_e.php
* AsTTle exemplars matrix (which I eventually had to get from a colleague via email – http://www.tki.org.nz/r/asttle/user/writing-tuhituhi-ex_e.php

I am always looking for other ideas and resources so if you know of any please let me know in the comments!  I particularly like videos to prompt thinking and provide challenges but have struggled to find any nice short, concise ones focused on writing professional learning.

I am hoping to have some fun on Monday too and provoke some deeper thinking, not just compliance with my view of learning and professional practice.  Will share this from Seth Godin as a challenge to be open to new ideas, and this from TED to spark discussion about how we approach our professional learning this year:

We will also continue our ICT PD cluster for the 3rd year and this booklet from BECTA should spark some discussions too …

Welcome to 2010!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Learning and Teaching, Pedagogy, professional learning.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.