TPL+Reflections

= Julie: Numeracy = Teacher Professional leave has give me the time to explore my role as numeracy coach. I was able to spend time visiting other schools and observing their numeracy resources and how they taught numeracy. The most valuable part of TPL was the time it gave me to "coach" in my school. All teachers have looked at time- tabling of maths sessions and all classes are now before noon. I have modelled lessons in all classes and all classroom teachers use the lesson structure that I have mentioned. All staff are familiar with the warm -ups and are now active with their students and offer 1-1 assistance in Task time. All teachers see the value of sharing time at the end of the task and are now adding this to their lesson plans. Our next focus is unit planning which will begin in 2011. This will happen after more staff p.d and will be planned in teams around our unit of inquiry. TPL has also given me the opportunity to attend regular Western Metropolitan Professional Development sessions both as a school based numeracy coach and year 5/6 teacher. I have been able to share this knowledge with colleagues at school and offer P.D. to staff after school. TPL has also given me an understanding of e5 and its language and employment in my teaching. This knowledge will also be imparted to staff in 2011. I have concentrated on the engage domain this year as a numeracy coach and will look at other domains in the future.

= Alex: ICT = I have found the the Teacher Professional Leave process to be very interesting and beneficial to me as a teacher. The time allowed me to focus on one area of education in detail. I was able to spend time visiting other schools which showed me how other schools operate and in particular how they manage their ICT resources. At Bentleigh West I saw ICT and media students involved in a variety of tasks within the school. Local students work at the school on a volunteer basis, gaining valuable experience, honing their skills and helping out the school by proivding expertise. The student volunteers were involved in tasks such as film making and helping run the school radio station. As a result of this visit I was encouraged to seek out similar contacts in our area who might be able to assist us in coming years with our ever increasing ICT resources. I contacted Victoria Unitversity to see if they had any students suited to some volunteer work in a school and learned that in one of the ICT courses students are required to do 150 hours of work placement and that this could be done at our school. This has been followed up and hopefully next year we will have one or two students helping out within the school. My TPL time also allowed me to focus on the Ultranet. I have been a lead user within the school this year and have attended several training sessions. I was able to spend time organising staff, student and parent implementation of Ultranet. This was an advantage to the school and to me as a teacher because I increased my knowledge of this key ICT tool for the future. I was able to introduce Ultranet to the students within my class with some confidence. Being involved in Teacher Professional Leave this year has also allowed me to learn more about e5. I learned about all of the e5 domains and capabilities through the PLATO workshops. Our team focussed on the 'Engage' and 'Evaluate' domains so I learned more about these two than any other. I discovered that ICT supports the two domains we focussed upon well. Within the engage domain ICT can assist teachers to 'stimulate interest and curiousity'. The Ultranet in particular can assist teachers in 'determining challenging learning goals' and to 'identify processes that will support the achievement of the learning goals.' The Ultranet can also assist teachers to make 'assesment and performance requirements clear'. The Ultranet can assist teachers wihtin the 'evaluate' domain also. It supports 'recording students progress against learning goals' and providing feedback. The task of guiding students "to identify future learning goals". = = =** Michael: Assessment ** = I have enjoyed and benefitted from the learning that we as a team have undertaken this year. The professional dialogue as well as interaction between like schools and the other TPL schools has been supportive and given us the From using the e5 observation model, we have seen the teachers reflect more on behaviours required in the classroom, to think deeper about what is happening in the classroom. I have noticed an increased in the ‘professional’ dialogue taking place at AVPS. Examples of how we did this are included in the Teacher's best practise session. Our school now has an agreed and valuable assessment process in place.