About Me

I’ve been a teacher for seven years now. In that time I’ve learned to manage my time, student curriculum, student behaviour, emotional care and parental expectation. I’ve worked with committed teams, developed collaborative curriculum, dabbled in leadership, and been exposed to two technology rich schools with tech savvy leadership teams. I’ve been part of advancing learning through technology since my teaching career began. I’ve never used a blackboard.

I like change, and I like feedback about change. I like being supported when I try and change things, too. I’ve studied my pedagogy, worked in PLC’s to change my practice, taken feedback from staff, teachers, leadership AND students. I work in a team with dedicated teachers and the support we give each other improves us all.

After seven years I think I’m getting there.

But in seven years the goalposts have changed a fair bit too. Curriculum has gone national. New subjects have been added, some subjects removed, new content has been a focus. The technology has changed almost constantly. One-to-one laptops were going to be the future, then ipads would revolutionise teaching, then it was BYO devices. The cloud. Next week something else will probably be in the frame.

And in amongst all this change, we’re tasked with delivering content, and creating flexible, creative, collaborative learners.

And that’s fine, because our learners will have to cope with that next thing that comes along too. And the thing after that. And it’s our job to not only keep up with that, but be ahead of it.

I went to a conference recently and realised that many of the speakers I heard reinforced my views, made me feel comfortable and smug in my teaching practice. If we hadn’t implemented the changes they advocated, we were at least on the way. All except for one. And that speaker made me stop and think about being complacent, about feeling on top of teaching. But I’m going to blog about that separately soon.

Suffice to say it made me think about the constant review we need to be doing in regards to practice. And it made me want to set up a blog to help me have that discussion.

This is a space for me to scratch my head and figure out where I go next. I’m hoping to hear from other educators as to the best and latest directions, and have some professional discussions about the next seven years.. If there’s one thing I’ve figured out this year, it’s that the education community worldwide is having these discussions almost constantly, and having a place to sort it all out is something I am going to need.

Welcome to that space.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *