aschreibermindlabreflections

Reflection 8: Changes in my practice I think it is fair to say that the past 32 weeks of this course have gone incredibly quickly. I had a very limited understanding as to what I had signed up for at the start of this course. I hadn’t gone to the first meet-and-greet session of what Mindlab was about. My flatmate came home after she had gone and she described what this postgraduate diploma entails. I thought why not. I will be honest, most of the topics that were covered in the first 16 weeks of the course were not new to me or my school’s context. However, what was new was how these topics could be integrated at an earlier year level. What this course has provided me with is a chance for me to be confident in justifying how and why I do different things in my classroom. This course has made me critically think about they way in which I conduct different learning practices, contexts and styles within my classroom. Collaborative learning is an aspect that I have spent a great amoun...

“The interdisciplinary approach synthesizes more than one discipline and creates teams of teachers and students that enrich the overall educational experience” (Jones, 2009). Through numerous approaches with different agencies and individuals, we are able to learn different pedagogies that we may not necessarily think of ourselves. As a primary educator, we are constantly in discussions and meetings with different agencies to support a specific child’s learning. In order for us to be successful as an educator, we have to be able to also know who to go to when particular issues arise and for that to happen, those relationships with outside agencies need to occur and be fostered. For the purpose of this assignment, I will be centering this journal around the relationship I have with our Speech and Language Therapy (SLT). For me, I have never had children in my classroom with learning difficulties, nor have I really had the opportunity to learn more about different learning issues...

Our school used Blogger for two years. Every classroom had a blog and we were expected to do a minimum of 2-3 posts each week. This was implemented so our staff could engage with classrooms overseas and our learners would have a context for learning outside our own school context. Towards the end of last year, questions started to arose around what is the actual benefit of a blog, who is benefitting and what are the learners achieving from this? We could see the impact blogs had upon the senior students as each one of them had their own personal blog and they did understand a few of the benefits and purposes of having one, as they could engage with people within their own guided terms and be in control of their own blog. However, for our junior classrooms, we soon began to realise that these reasons were inapplicable to us. Our blogs were not meaningful nor relevant for our learners so because of this, we changed to Seesaw. Half of our parents weren’t checking the classroom blogs ...