PKE Reflection

In the PKE meeting we closely looked and discussed teacher's practices, and the added benefits both teachers and learners obtain when they work together as a team.  Today's session proved just how true creating a congenial relationships in the work place at all levels allows individuals to share and improve in their practices.  In fact, lots of great discussion took place during the session demonstrating just how important team collaboration and sharing is to the teaching profession. The benefits discussed centered around student learning and measuring success in terms of "student learning" and not in terms of the content and manner in which curriculum is being covered. The idea that when we share with one another versus keeping to ourselves in "our own classroom" with our "own students" and "our own lesson plans "allows us to be better teachers.  All teachers have "golden nuggets" of knowledge and practical experience to bring to a classroom. It is when this knowledge and experience is shared  that everyone wins is something that stood out for me today.  Today was a great learning experience and looking forward to working with everyone.

Reflection:

Nice change to collaborate with colleagues who have the same frame of mind.  Bouncing ideas and positive reinforcement amongst the group encourages everyone to become a better teacher and colleague.

The unplanned activity with Padlet (a la Sisco) was engaging and will definitely be utilized in my classroom. Members had some great insights on Professional Learning Communities followed up with insightful discussions.

The second article Improving Relationships within the Schoolhouse
has some very good suggestions on how to improve a school atmoshpere.  One of the most notable suggestions is the relationship between staff members with each other and administration. "Collegial Relationship" is one of the hardest things to strive towards but is the most effective for school success.

Goals:

• More collaboration amongst the group
• Sharing with other faculty
• Utilizing the game minecraft in the class

Our first meeting: What is a PLC?

We met for the first time today to launch our PKE initiative.  What great discussions we had!  Chad, who has been working on PLC's for years, led us through our first session about the philosophy behind our PLC. We used a great protocol for discussion articles that had us identify our favourite word, our favourite phrase and our favourite sentence.  Here is my favourite passage from "What is a Professional Learning Community" by Richard DuFour.

We also learned to use Padlet.

A shout out Tammy, Lisa and Kristine for blogging for the first time.

I am so excited to work with this great group.  We are awesome.  Now, on to Minecraft . . .

Day 1 - PKE

What I've learned:

- A familiar face (Sean C.) is nice to see when you walk into a large high school and don't know where you are going.  Elementary schools aren't this big.

- I was able to meet a great group of educators with a wide variety of backgrounds.

- We talked about developing a strong PLC and we used two articles as a springboard.

                    i) What is a Professional Learning Community

                    ii) Improving Relationships within the Schoolhouse

- When sharing our thoughts we used a cool tool called Padlet - Favourite Sentence, Thought, Word

- During a lunch time discussion with Joe Sisco I learned about a new Google Ad-on - autoCrat

- I've included a YouTube video explaining autoCrat

- I can't wait to use this as a tool to sharing information with both my students and their parents.

Moving Forward:

I'm looking forward to continuing this journey with this great group.  I've already starting exploring Minecraft on the iPad with my 6 year old son and feel like I have so much to learn.  Can't wait to see what "Dustin" has for us next time we meet.

Messing With Minecraft

I left the world of detentions and suspensions for a day to engage in professional learning with our fellow teachers.  It was great to talk with other staff about the benefits of collaboration.  The article that we discussed that got the most traction was:


http://www.allthingsplc.info/files/uploads/improvingrelationships.pdf

This article discussed how the adult relationships in a school are so big in creating a culture of learning.  The better the  quality of the relationships between the adults the better the learning will be in school.


I loved the quality of the discussions, the teachers are ready to learn a lot about Minecraft and to help each other as we go.  This is going to be good, thanks to Jessica Renaud and Joe Sisco for staying and learning with us.

Building Relationships

Today, we met as a group at Holy Names High School in Liana Côté's classroom, Room D252. Liana inspired trust among us by letting us into her classroom. This was the theme of the day for me as we discussed and shared a lot about how successful PLCs depend mostly on the relationships among their members.

As a participant, I was excited to learn from my colleagues and their unique experiences. We did an exercise where we read an article and then were asked to give a favourite sentence, phrase and word. Some very rich conversation came out of the sharing in this exercise. It was great to learn different perspectives that included John Foglia from St. Angela Elementary, many members of the HNH English Department and Chad Barrette, VP of Holy Names High School.

The padlet below includes some of the ideas shared about "What is a Provincial Learning Community?"

Created with Padlet

messing with minecraft- PKE

-fantastic session- great time sharing teaching practices
-Great article-"Improving Relationships Within the Schoolhouse"- centers on improving the school environment- and how teachers have such an influence and need to focus more on their positive contributions and less on the negative

-"school improvement is impossible when we give nondiscussables such extraordinary power over us"'- how teachers need to speak up about their concerns or share ideas - and how it only benefits the students and the learning environment

-" if one day we educators could only disclose our rich craft knowledge to one another, we could transform our schools overnight"  -- oh, how true this is!!

Reflection

     In the PKE today, I've learned that many of my colleagues have the same concerns that I did about technology.  It's refreshing to know that others struggle as I do with classroom technology!  Through this session, I am more willing to step out of my comfort zone to try to incorporate Mindcraft into one of my classes this semester.  My goal is to use this with other classes in the future.
     I enjoyed discussing ideas about education with others because it helps me to be a better classroom teacher.  I'm looking forward to our next session.

Welcome to our blog.  We will document our journey messing around with the idea of gamifying our classroom.