Teaching and Learning

Pity The Plight http://youtu.be/YuEb04HcJFM Pity the fate of young fellows Too long a bed with no sleep With their complex romantic attachments All look on their sorrows and weep They dont get a moments reflection Theres always a crowd in their eye Pity the plight of young fellows Regard all their worries and cry Their crusty young mothers were lazy perhaps Leaving it up to the school Where the moral perspective is hazy perhaps And the climate; oppressively cool Give me some acre of cellos Pitched at some distant regret Pity the plight of young fellows And their anxious attempts to forget These are the tears of a thug like murky water Crying tears as clear as mud for his fathers daughter His half-sister; he felt obliged to support her Since her mum was poor and his dad died even poorer Separated until she was 8 years old He knew as soon as he saw her That he adored her, so hes baying for blood with a borer And an automatic weapon; Smith & Weston T...

My name's Jono Broom, I'm going into my fourth year of teaching, and this is my story of change. In 2010 I went to teachers college in New Zealand. I did a one year diploma. I learnt all the usual things, how to plan lessons, how to manage a class full of bright eyed learners, how to be a good team member, how to use curriculum and progression documents, basically, how to teach. I graduated at the end of the year, and in 2011 started my new job, at the brand new Te Karaka Area School. Our induction week was intense. I was overwhelmed with things that I'd never seen before, school charters, annual plans, school values. Things that I'd never actually seen before out in the open, but I was finding out existed behind the scenes. I was assigned my first class of 30 6-7 year olds and, to be perfectly honest with you, I struggled. My classroom was a mess, my reading programme was atrocious and my maths programme was almost non-existent. The one thing in that year that I'm ...

During the industrial revolution, factories were revolutionised by the assembly line. Each person in the line would have responsibility for a certain part of the product, and when they all worked together, the finished product would come together as a tank. Or a plane. Or a machine gun. This was seen as a great boon for the war effort. Rather than one person making a product, a whole lot of people working together could get it done much, much faster. Schools were based on this assembly line model. Children were grouped into batches (year groups) and were moved through the process with a whole lot of different people contributing to the overall product. The children would have a different subject every hour and those hours would be separated by bells. Efficiency was valued over everything else. As long as the children were sitting in neat rows and absorbing information from the 'bosses' then all would be well. This model gave children a great introduction to the assembly line, f...

There are lots of inquiry models out there, and a lot of them require you to follow a step by step process from finding a question, researching that question, and then spitting out a presentation showing what you've learnt. 'Doing' research isn't that straight forward though, we know that simply from our own lives. Example. I was at the Louvre in Paris today, and being artistically and historically incompetent, I was looking at all the statues and thinking "how did they make those? What tools did they use? How long did they practice?" But the overwhelming urge for me was just to have a go at doing one. Just to have a go... Then I might do some research on better ways to do it... and then I might have another go... Then I might show someone, do some more research and maybe have another go. Some models try to cover for this kind of fluidity of research projects, and as they do, get extremely complex and confusing for both adults and students. In fact, people wor...

When I was younger, I played a lot of computer games.  Most of my days would go like this; struggle out of bed at 8am, get dropped off at school, go through the motions of school until 3:30pm, walk home as fast as I could, go on the computer, eat dinner, go back on the computer, go to bed. My dad used to say to me things like: "you're wasting your life" "get outside and enjoy the weather" "go and hang out with some real people" "you'll regret wasting all these years later in your life!" I think Dad eventually moved on from these things, whether he saw the benefit of games, or just gave up hope I can't be sure. All those years of playing computer, if they didn't give me anything else, gave me a interesting insight into teaching and learning... Runescape is a MMORPG - a massively multiplayer online role playing game - which started in 2001, which was when I started playing it. Runescape was an interesting, ground breaking game becau...

So I quit my job. I couldn't go on doing what I was doing, it was so against everything I believe in. I learnt a lot from it though; I learnt that doing the wrong thing because you have to can be soul destroying. I learnt that I am actually a very strong person. I can stand up for what I believe in, even in the face of people who have been there longer, or have a higher education. I learnt that I have some very strong beliefs about teaching. I learnt that I can't just go to any school, I need the right school for me. So I decided to write a new cover letter with all my philosophies on it, and decided that if the school doesn't want me from this cover letter then I don't actually want them, because they won't stand for what I stand for and it just won't work. My coverletter version 3.0: My name is Jonathan Broom and first and foremost I am an educator.  I have very specific philosophies in my teaching that are very progressive, innovative and i...

So I've been up on my mums parters farm for the last few days, and helped out a bit doing some fencing. I've never done any fencing before but I somewhat knew the process so I sort of knew what to expect. What I got though, was a reflection on teaching and learning that was pretty powerful and pretty inspiring. I use the word inspire because that's what Te Karaka Area School call it when kids head out for a day a week to experience authentic learning in the field.  While I was fencing I had to count out the distance between two strainers, divide it by the amount of gaps (not the number of posts) that we wanted between them, and then mark it out for Colin to drive them in. We had to make sure that the fence posts were 90 degrees to the ground, not vertical as first thought. They had to be half an inch away from the fencing, and they had have the flat to the wire, not skewed around. It was all pretty technical but I got more and more into it as we went along. When we'd fi...