![]() We are all mad! Spoiler Alert: I’ve got a bit of a dry sense of humour. My mates say it’s the Welsh Dragon in me. That, or they were calling me a dragon… Why do I gleefully make that rather fiery statement? Well let’s see if I can take you on a bit of a journey in order to explain it…. I often tell the students that travelling gives you extra lenses with which to see the world. With more lenses, you can see more of the spectrum of the world and understand it better. For instance, an infra-red camera will give you a different understanding of the world as opposed to a UV camera, just as having being brought up in one culture helps you to see the nuances of another culture, which may not be so readily seen by the culture’s own people! Education, travel, languages and work experience helps you gain new lenses with which to see the world. Mostly, my year 13s stare blankly at me and just ask me to continue entertaining them by putting on a thick Welsh accent to describe some science. When I came to teach at OGs my prior work experience had made me understand teaching with certain lenses. I have to say, that OGs has given me so much more of the beautiful spectrum of education and the teaching profession than I ever knew was there. Thank you everyone, especially for teaching me that wellbeing of staff is just as important as the wellbeing of students. Let’s tie that last paragraph in with my initial statement that we are all mad. Well, to qualify that let me explain my teaching lens from the UK… ![]() I worked at a Grammar School which specialised in Science. Great, I thought! I get to play with expensive equipment and have some great PD. Which was true. I did get a great lab to myself and a fantastic interactive white board, with an awesome physics technician, to help me out with setting up the experiments and demonstrations that were mandated for every single lesson! We worked hard, but then, parents were buying second homes in the catchment area (just outside London mind) in order to get their kids into the science specialist school. We had to work hard. But looking back, it was a ridiculous workload:
I am so grateful that OGs gave me an opportunity to return to the practice. Why? Because you are fantastic! You all work tirelessly for your students and your colleagues. You support one another in the practice. You recognise that teaching is a practice, that we are always practicing at getting better at. You have really done well with using technology in your lessons. I’ve yet to see another school using the Google Suite anywhere near the amount that you are! It’s great for training up the students for their futures. Your professional development program has helped me to feel part of a community of professionals and opened my eyes to new ways of improving and playing! Yes, I do think that teaching science is about playing. Obviously I consider it as serious play! But all girls need to know how to play at making electromagnets and zapping people with static electricity, it’s their fundamental right as children! So how then are the students different at OGs? Believe it or not, they seem happier to me. They are well rounded and supported in their non-academic activities. They are encouraged to be individuals! I may be a bit skewed from the classes that I taught here… but I can honestly say that it was a pleasure to be able to see the students as individuals and celebrate their achievements outside of the science lab! Being involved in sports day was a great eye-opener for me! Us science teachers were scared of the PE teachers in my last school! They were the only teachers who could shout louder than us! By understanding students as whole individuals, not just learners of science, I felt more able to bring who they were into the classroom and tailor the science to them. Teaching the classes 4 times a week really helped with this. I think that this respect from the teacher towards the students individuality, helped the students to be happier in class (mostly)! Well done OG’s for supporting your students! In life and the universe there has to be balance. So then what is the pay off for happier students? Well if they have more time to spend on being happy, they have less time to spend on their science education! When I first got to NZ and saw the education system, the first thing I saw was the apparent lack of science that some students do in intermediate school, and so when they come to high school in year 9, it feels as though they are 2 years behind their British counterparts. It’s taken me a few years to see this through a different lens, and that lens now shows me that it is better to have happier students in society. I think… Why then do I think that we are all mad? Well, you know the answer to that! When was the last time that you had a full evening off work? An evening where you didn’t go to bed wondering how you could better teach that topic, or if that student is ok, or if I overstepped the mark by asking (in jest) my HoD for $4000 to buy some new science equipment? Or even, are we mad for putting up with the government’s offer of money when the teachers were striking about conditions and workload models? Madness. :) ![]() So why do we tolerate this madness? Well, I don’t know about you but I have found every other job boring in comparison. I love me a good challenge to relish I do see (Welsh grammar that is). But also, when you look at cute photos, of Ariane for example, I can’t help but want to do my part at making it better for her generation. Are these reasons similar to yours? One last note… Thank you for supporting me through an awful time over the sudden and unexpected loss of my Dad. I can’t begin to comprehend the pain that I feel over it myself yet. Having your support and hugs when I needed them, really helped with my wellbeing, and that of my family’s. Just a week before my Dad died, I skyped him from OG’s tennis courts and showed him the school. I told him how wonderful it was, especially this new sense of how important wellbeing is. My dad was overjoyed that I finally found a good and healthy work environment and that I was teaching again! Then he blinking died before we could take all the grandkids to disneyland. Madness. ![]() One more bit of madness…. I’m doing the LOTR ending thing… it’s appropriate. This is a picture of my Godfather, Rory Taylor. Some of you Dr Who fans may recognise him. Rory was my Dad’s assistant at the BBC. He was also the photographer at my wedding. It wasn’t until the wedding did I find out that Rory was born and bred in DUNEDIN!!!!! I was already living in Dunedin at the time, and I never knew. I just always thought of Rory as my Dad’s friend with the funny accent. Imagine that, ending up in my Godfather’s home town, on the other side of the planet, by complete fluke. It gets more mad, at my Dad’s funeral, I found out that Rory’s mum was an alumni of OGs. 🎵 Link to its a Mad World…. And now for something completely different 🎵 And here’s a cute picture of Ariane and Ben... ~Alex Sims
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This has been something I have written about before in my Trickey Thoughts blog, yes I am unashamedly self-promoting. It was fascinating when I reached out to the community on Facebook around this and software developers and people from large companies were really excited to see schools interested in this way of working. If you want to see how I used it in the classroom, the blog is here. It was great to have a refresher on Agile with Phil Baskerville, it left us questioning how do we put it into practice within the classroom? Many of these conversations started buzzing around the staffroom and continued with me chatting to my sister in law. This part of the blog is going to be a bit of dreamscaping. Imagine a blank canvas on which we could paint a different picture of our education system outside this industrialised model we have inherited. If we were to use some of the Agile methodologies what would it look like? Let us look at Scrum as outlined in the picture above. In this system we would call the product backlog the NZ curriculum. The team would be your group of students - these could possibly be students we mentor. This team would look at the things they have to do in a week, prioritise and plan a two-week sprint. What could this sprint involve? It could involve setting up specific lessons to cover knowledge deficits, it could be using a design thinking process with the aim to produce something or write and produce a play first studying a classic text. The possibilities are endless in essence. Daily Scrum meetings would ensure students know what tasks need to be completed with the use of Kanban boards etc (a 'to-do, doing, done' list). After the 2 weeks, we would have a potentially assessable product with the teacher tailoring assessment to the tasks. We would reflect and celebrate what has been completed what can be improved. Students would be truly empowered to follow their passions. A team would hopefully learn the benefits of brain breaks and could schedule sports into their team time. What if teams were selected around specific Vocational pathways with some fluidity around these movements? Integration and the break down of silos would be easily done. The Amnesty group, for example, could go about organising action and this could be tied into an assessment with them writing for a true purpose. I know that some of our teachers have seen this working in other schools and there are of course pitfalls along the way, but with an agile mindset, these can be addressed and learnt from. ~Duncan Trickey
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June 2019
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