Helen Timperley, Professor of Education at The University of Auckland, talks about professional development that makes a difference to student learning. Helen talks about the importance of combining careful assessment and analysis with pedagogical content knowledge, and ways teachers can gain this knowledge through cycles of inquiry into their practice.
Website for Future Ready Leaders. This Office of Educational Technology site provides upcoming dates for learning opportunities, assessments, video library and research to support implementation. Worth taking some time to look through.
If we ask high level questions having students "google search" the answers to cut and paste becomes less of an issue. Author Stephanie Sholtis provides suggestions and charts to support the skills of high level questioning.
Lisa Dovey, year 7-8 team leader at Halswell School, discusses the benefits of collaborative teaching. Her team uses Google Docs and Google Hangouts to support collaborative planning, teaching, and assessment. She explains, "We do a lot of planning together, which is really fantastic. It means that all of our strengths are put together."
Visible Learningplus is a professional development program for teachers that explores how evidence can be used to create innovation in the learning environment. Our work is focused on John Hattie's research and the principles of Visible Learning and visible teaching.
To inquire effectively, we have to be open-minded, persistent, self-critical, reflective, and empathetic to the positions of others; we have to allow ourselves to be uncertain, to stand back and examine our own practice, and then use what we find as a basis for change.