Community of Practice and Situated Learning


"School culture is one of the most complex and important concepts in education" (Stoll, 1998)

If there has been any light in the grimness and devastation of the Christchurch earthquake of 2011, I believe it could be in the education system. In a time where schools have merged, rebuilt or are being rebuilt there has been a forced shift in the organisational culture of many schools. These schools are changing the way they educate in order to help graduates compete in a changing world.

The 'structure' (Stoll, 1998) of our school has changed significantly as we have moved into new premises. The days of our single unit classrooms have gone and we now educate and learn from within collaborative hubs. These changes mean we are forced to work collaboratively, and for some staff this has been a learning curve.

However, if it wasn't for the management's push for us to think about what we want our school to be and where we are going, our educators would not be making the best use of our innovative learning environment. We are re-culturing (Stoll, 1998) our school in how we work together as a team and how we can best use our strengths and passions to aid our own and other teams within the school.

As educators, we need to be constantly reflecting on who we are and what we are trying to achieve. If you ask most educators why they teach, they are earnestly trying to help their students succeed. Without actively reflecting on how you teach and whether students need to change what they are learning to meet today's needs, many educators will struggle to change how they educate or even if there is a need to alter any aspect of their programme. Working collaboratively gives these educators a differing point of view and can perhaps reinvigorate some of the tired ways of doing things. Obviously a big part of this is the giving and receiving of respect and support between colleagues.

Some of the most practical ways in which we have 're-cultured' is the use of 'mates agreements' between hubs and our whole school development of our inquiry model. The mates agreements were done in our smaller teams to outline areas of responsibility, soft systems in how the hub was run and so on. Much of this work was done in professional development time before we had even shifted into our new premises.

The whole school development of our inquiry model has been developed as a collective staff. This
inquiry model can be used throughout the school and will lead to the development of a vision for describing a graduate of our school. Surprisingly this was such an easy thing to develop but gave us such a clear view of what we needed to change in our school to help students succeed. Technology and project based learning became a real focus for many of us, not just the die-hard tech enthusiasts!

 Doing this kind of professional development as a school has meant we are collaboratively influencing the cultural norms in our school (Stoll & Fink, 1996. Cited in Stoll, 1998). We have shared goals and are therefore responsible for the success of these goals. Because we are involved in this re-culturing there is a sense of transparency as to how our school develops.

Putting the school culture in the forefront of how we educate and learn has to be a continuing work in progress so it doesn't become stagnant. Our next steps as a school are to get pupil and whanau involvement in our shared vision so we have a whole school sense of purpose and community.

References
Stoll (1998). School Culture. School Improvement Network’s Bulletin 9. Institute of Education, University of London. Retrieved fromhttp://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Understanding-school-cultures/School-Culture







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dealing with Data

Image
This week in our DFI we learned all about Google Forms, Google Maps and Google Sheets. Google Forms are a great way to gather student pre and post data about a topic or gather feedback about an area you have taught. I like the idea of using Forms to collect student names and year levels for extracurricular activities or workshops and then having the Form collate the responses into a Google Sheet. What a time saver! In Google Maps we learned how to layer different locations, even using the information gathered in a Google spreadsheet to do this. I can see advantages to using Maps in Maths, particularly for area and also it could be used in a lot in Inquiry or Reading so students can think about context.  The Google Sheets aspect of today's session was particularly useful for analysing blog posts and is something I hope to use this week in class as a challenge to students. Can they better their number of 2018 blog posts by halfway through this year? Today we foc...
Read more

Changes in Practice

A good educator will change and adapt their practice to suit the needs of their individual learners. They will also keep up with changes in the educational sector at a global level. They will continue their professional development actively, knowing that they need themselves to be life-long learners, in order to teach this to their students. They know that their students need to be 21st century learners in order to succeed in the world beyond school, therefore they adapted their teaching before 21st century skills even came up for debate. Most importantly, good educators reflect upon their teaching and their learning and they are self-aware. Self-awareness is the key to being a good educator, a great educator in fact.  Over the last 8 weeks, I have reflected over different topics within the educational sector and I have found that it has not only consolidated my ideas and opinions but given me the keys to being able to describe my thoughts and views in a clearer way....
Read more

Ubiquitous Learning

Image
Ubiquitous Learning allows students to learn anywhere, anytime and at any pace. Making learning visible and connected allows for this. Ubiquitous allows students that are absent or need extra support to access their learning through rewindable learning. This could be a video, a site, a slide etc, that children can access any time. I was really excited to see the Woolf Fisher data from the Summer Learning Journey. My school has signed up to do this after the slump we saw last Summer holidays.  The gains were incredible. I will be using some of these infographics to share with parents on the 'why' of encouraging their children to do this. Today was the last day of the DFI course. I have thoroughly enjoyed moving my own teaching and learning towards being more visible for my students and their whānau.
Read more