Aug 10, 2023 | For Mentors to Share
When preacher and poet John Donne proclaimed in the 17th Century that, “No man is an island”, he might just as easily have been talking about teaching in the 21st Century. An older and wiser teacher once said to me: “It is possible to teach (and to thrive...
Aug 10, 2023 | For Mentors to Share
Data should shape our practice to strengthen learning. Using student data as feedback for our teaching is not an optional extra, but fundamental to practice. Like most aspects of teaching, data-informed practice is a skill that teachers will refine throughout their...
Aug 10, 2023 | For Mentors to Share
If we say Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a living document, then what will it look like embodied in my classroom? What role does Te Tiriti have in a maths or PE class? Figure 1 shows a very truncated timeline of the influence of Te Tiriti on educational policy. Figure 1: Te...
Aug 4, 2023 | For Mentors to Share, Supporting Mentoring
By the time they leave school, the ‘average’ student in Aotearoa has spent 14,000 hours observing teachers. As a result, most of us begin our teacher education with a sense that we know what teaching is and what it entails, (Lortie, 1975). This can have an impact on...
Aug 4, 2023 | For Mentors to Share
Do these scenarios sound familiar … Students are enthusiastically finishing up the final activity on your lesson plan. They’ve been engaged and keen for 45 minutes. You look at your watch, there are still 12 minutes left in the lesson, you look at your...
Aug 4, 2023 | For Mentors to Share
Differentiation is one of those things that is hard to talk about in a forum like this because the whole point of differentiation is that it is highly contextual. With that in mind, what follows are some thoughts on good principles to keep in mind as you approach your...
