Skip to main content

Week One Reflections

Reflections from week 1

What did you learn about video editing?

Planning is crucial!  Getting a structure in place before hitting 'record' is very wise. We made this.  Video editing can be a massive time-suck, though, so care must be taken to accept imperfection.

How is your understanding of the purpose of education visible in your classroom?

I regularly refer to the idea that we are equipping ourselves for life beyond school, as active participants in and contributors to society.  I explain to students that I'm in the business of giving them options for how they do this.  I believe that education has the power to give choice, which can then be a lever for change, and I'm careful to ensure students are clear on directly proportional relationship between what they achieve in school and the options they are afforded outside of school.

How might I like to record and share my learning with a wider community?

I could make this blog public, and/or I could become more active on twitter.  However, I have misgivings about presuming that I have anything to contribute!  Sharing for the sake of sharing can often be simply an ego-inflating exercise, but I want publishing to force me to check my own assumptions and conclusions, and to ensure that I have given due consideration to what it is I publish.

How did you lead and follow during the collaborative task?

Successful collaborators must be good at both leading and following.  In this case I did more leading; I'm inclined to take a leading role when I have vision and believe I have the skills to back it up.  In this case I had a vision for the video, and I was able to 'sell' the others on this vision.  We were then able to pool resources in the form of knowledge, expertise, and devices.
When hearing about my vision the other group members listened, made suggestions, and jumped in.  This made me feel supported and empowered.  It fed into a positive feeling among the group that I feel contributed to the great end result.  Once we had a structure and plan, others took a lead role (e.g. when explaining how the filming worked and suggesting how best to approach that challenge) and I was able to switch into 'followership'.  I enjoyed this as the responsibilities were shared, and I could see that others felt empowered in making suggestions and decisions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Responsive Curricula

This is the third in a series of posts in which I will attempt to demonstrate critical reflection with respect to different aspects of life as a teacher.  This post aims to analyse the issue of unresponsive curricula as a barrier to learning,  then to critique and evaluate practice in the context of different audiences (local, national and/or international) and their perspectives. If the reports by the US National Intelligence Council (2012) and KPMG (2014) are to be believed, poverty is set to decline as globalisation sets in and we, as a global community, advance .  While this may be the case globally, I have my doubts about whether we will experience the same shift here in New Zealand.  My skeptical tone stems from our currently increasing inequality; the widening gap between the 'haves' and 'have nots' (Rashbrooke, 2013).  I choose this trend to analyse as a flow-on from last week's post , wherein I identified issues affecting my practice arising from s...
1 comment
Read more

Facebook Groups: Worth the risk?

This is the fifth in a series of posts in which I will attempt to demonstrate critical reflection with respect to different aspects of life as a teacher.  This post aims to explore ethics related to digital/online access and activity within the context of fusing acebook groups for the purpose of organising school sports teams. Facebook groups are widely used at my school to communicate with students and parents, as we often struggle through either traditional methods (e.g. daily notices), or more 21st century methods (e.g. email), and the majority of our students are active on Facebook. Hall (2001, p.5) proposes a guide for ethical decision-making which I will utilise, alongside the Education Council's Code of Ethics for Certificated Teachers (2017).  There are many questions to be asked!  But for the purpose of the exercise I will dig into issues of privacy . What is the problem? Opening up an online, public, forum challenges the teachers' ability to protect ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Collegial Improvement

This is the second in a series of posts in which I will attempt to demonstrate critical reflection with respect to different aspects of life as a teacher.  This post aims to critically analyse issues of socioeconomic factors, school culture and professional environments in relation to my practice.  I will avoid discussing the decile system, only using it as basis for inference regarding the living situations of students at my school. My school is rated as decile 3.  At the time of writing I didn't have access to data regarding the different factors in decile ranking.  However, I can infer from this ranking and the insight I have that a significant number of our students: live in households with income in the lowest 20% nationally have parents in occupations at skill levels 4 or 5 live in households with an equivalised crowding index greater than one have parents with no tertiary or school qualifications have parents who received some form of benefit (Mini...
2 comments
Read more