Activity 2: Your professional community

Activity 2: Your professional community

Risk taking as an challenge:

Looking at and defining the current issues in my professional learning community is a relatively hard concept. In unpacking this, having the ability to risk take - where teachers learn by trying something new is a reality that teachers need to be able to grasp. As teachers we should all have the ability to risk take as by being set in certain ways we can hinder our practice. Stepping out of your comfort zone to try something new is what we should be aiming for. I personally find risk taking as something I enjoy. I enjoy trialling things to see if they work. Our professional learning community is situated around success criteria and learning conversations in writing. I have decided that I am going to take the risk and change my whole writing programme. This programme will encompass individual conferences and giving specific 5 minute workshops to each child's need while they have free choice about what they write. We will unpack what makes a successful piece of writing at the end of year 5 and year 6 and this is what the students in my class will aim to achieve. This is a completely different approach that I am taking to the writing process but by being involved in my professional learning community and being able to have the discussions about successful learning conversations it will hopefully be a success. I have all boys in my classroom and they like to write what they like to write. They enjoy having choice. My community of practice addresses the risk taking process by being supportive and saying "why not try something new". By having the support to try something new it empowers other teachers to try things. It it gives us the opportunity to develop our own reflective processes to see if the learning experiences or classroom program is effective. This almost takes away the challenge.  

The changes that are occurring: 

The changes that are occurring in the teaching profession is the teachers are having a pedagogical shift when it comes to using and implementing technology in the classroom. There are many who say that technology has had a negative effect on teaching. I went to a course that was run by Mike Reading and he said that "a bad lesson with technology is still a bad lesson". Its a mindset shift. Technology is used as a tool to guide lessons and connect the world. By having this implemented in the classroom correctly, students are able to connect with other people all around the world and to have a wider knowledge collection base. This allows for learning conversations to happen any time and anywhere. To address this change as a community we deconstruct how we use technology in the classroom. To find the things people are doing successfully with technology and how we could all use this in our classrooms. By having this open discussion we are able to construct our own new knowledge and make that pedagogical shift to using technology to assist and not the be all and end all.