First meetings for real...

One of the interesting things about working in the teaching profession is that, by and large, most people are pretty accommodating. My own Professional Learning team were brilliant - open, honest and willing to give it a go. This despite the fact that the main focus of our team (CELT) lacked focus - at this stage. (CELT is a Learning Management Tool much like Moodle).

This first meeting was designed to give teachers time to meet and think. I my experience it doesn't happen much. We meet a lot but generally we react - we don't think deeply. Certainly we don't reflect much on our work. There is always too much to do!

So it was good to say, "We have set aside time for you to think about an area of interest and plan some action research on the area". In some ways it was a pity we had to say - "We have allocated 2 hours to do this and you need to stay for the whole 2 hours".

Anyway, our team came up with some really good areas:

H - how the CELT might be used to aid the learning of a range of students - from Middle schoolers to seniors and from students who struggle at school to students who have university ambitions.

N - as a first year teacher, he saw the CELT as an opportunity to sit down and thoroughly plan a unit of work, plan and create assessment tasks, mark the work online and resubmit back to students.

K - is trying to build up resources so that students have help about learning independently. He is already thinking of developing videos to demonstrate what to do and how to do it when you find yourself at home having to prepare for an assignment.

T - wants to develop an understanding of how to help teachers develop online units of work. He will work with a teacher who does not use it a lot and then take them through the process with CELT and try to spot the difficulties.

G (me) - I came up with three questions: Can I develop a more coherent unit of work for students if I use this process? Can I give students more feedback to help them raise their standards? Can I use CELT to work with other teachers in moderating student work.

All very interesting and exciting really. My job is to help people through this initial process and make sure they remember that our goal is improved student learning. I think once we get these plans done, it should be fairly easy.

Anyway, onward...