Inquiry As A Disposition

Following on from the last post, this talk from Sharon Friesen (Canada) is useful because she talks about the deep learning aspect of Teaching as Inquiry. I explain to new teachers that the reason they are engaging in reflection and recording it as evidence is to build reflection as an automatic behaviour. We all know that teachers who reflect are empowered and no longer feel that they are at the mercy of the students or that they can do nothing to change the situation. So they become agentic (an agent for change). But building inquiry into the psyche as a disposition is even more empowering as you are keeping alive the spirit of inquiry, the mark of a lifelong learner. Sharon talks of challenging and provoking yourself to effect transformative shift in your thinking, your belief systems and assumptions and so have greater influence on student outcomes. If you want the students to become inquirers, you need to model this in your behaviours.
The following image taken from Literacy Online - elearning as inquiry http://elearningasinquiry.tki.org.nz/
is clearer than the one from the curriculum and is using the same process

Modelling eportfolios

My main work for the last 2 years has been with provisionally registered teachers and their mentors. I run workshops, cluster meetings, write resources and provide in-school support for both PRTs and their mentors. I am the only secondary adviser covering Auckland and Northland.
This year has seen a change in the criteria that teachers are measured against for full registration. Since about 1992 we have used The Satisfactory Teacher Dimensions. These have now been replaced by The Registered Teacher Criteria http://www.teacherscouncil.govt.nz/rtc/rtc.stm These are more overtly bicultural in nature, the previous criteria making a brief mention only of The Treaty of Waitangi.







One of the requirements for registration for Year 1 and year 2 teachers is that they must keep a reflective journal as evidence that they have met the criteria. In my experience, this has become a model of compliance where some teachers are keeping fileboxes of stuff without fully reflecting on what the stuff means in relation to their learning journey.
The solution to this, as I see it, is to encourage teachers to use digital formats or eportfolios and the only way for me to explore the use of eportfolios is to have one myself. I have already set one up at edublogs called "Reflective Teacher" http://cherylchristineharvey.edublogs.org/ and am continuing with this one as an alternative so that I have 2 different examples with 2 different purposes.
I have been able to incorporate all of my digital identities into my edublogs blog and so My Delicious (online reading), Twitter (professional learning network), blogroll (blogs I follow) my wikisite http://prtteamsolutions.wikispaces.com/ and Flickr (photographic artefacts) are all integrated into that blog. How I saw this working for beginning teachers was that the blog would be their reflection, using the Teaching as Inquiry NZ curriculum model (see above) and that their artefacts would be found in Flickr, Twitter, My Delicious, Facebook etc. Towards the end of the 2 years, these would be brought together into a final presentation document as in Dr Helen Barrett's 2-sided portfolio ie process and presentation http://blog.helenbarrett.org/p/my-presentation-portfolio.html
I am going to use something of the same process with this blog but this blog will run alongside my wiki. My wiki has become a repository for all of the elearning links, curriculum links, resources etc that I think will be useful for PRTs and their mentors but there is not really a lot of room for discussing the background and thinking for each entry so that will happen in this blog and the 2 will run parallel.
The Teaching As Inquiry Model can be found here http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-documents/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum/Effective-pedagogy

elearning

I started this blog over a year ago in an elearning workshop but got no further with it. It wasn't because I went no further with elearning, but rather that it is such a big field that I couldn't do everything at once. It was a steep learning curve for me and there is still a lot to learn.
I began with a wiki on wikispaces. http://prtteamsolutions.wikispaces.com. My intention was to provide a space where resources could be built up and shared over time.
The first and second year teachers were too busy trying to survive their first years and so I have developed the wikispace myself.
I have enjoyed the learning that has ensued for me but now feel that I need an accompanying blog so that I can explain some of the resources that I put on the wiki and add more depth to the wiki.