Activity 5: Professional connection map

Activity 5: Professional connection map

Create a blog post where you draw a map which demonstrates your current and potential professional connections. Based on the map, make goal(s) for extending your professional connections. 

What other professional communities intersect with or lie at the borders of your own profession? 

I have use the dark green colour to represent my own professional community, i.e the BOT, Senior leadership, students and WIS staff. reaching out from each of these areas is a light blue. The light blue represents intersects that are already in place. The green and light blue therefore have already made connections to my professional community in the recent years. The red for parents represents an interaction which will often bypass the other connections if needed but initially is linked o the student for example in the case of a Child youth and family referral or a hospital visit etc.  The recent light green and yellow represent the new additions to the School professional community as they have just approached us in the last year to partner with them. The ministry of Health is in dark blue as a potential connection to our school as we have had significant support shown recently for programmes for dealing with Rheumatic fever within our school. Board member and Senior Leader in the school have not interacted with the Ministry of Health directly as compared with the other ministries. 

What impact do these communities have on your practice and professional community?

One of the main impacts by this community on my practice, is in the way I have to share and lead new projects because of the large scale of the many different interactions and intersects of the various groups. For example when developing the action for PB4L I created a working smarter matrix which I have presented along with an action plan in the previous posts - which shows the many different ways their work needs to be prioritized with the school. The BOT as another example as changed its policy review and workplan in order to effectively govern the schools operational managers i.e the Principal which was introduced by the LSM and suggested in the recent ERO review. 

What are or what would be the benefits and challenges of working in a more interdisciplinary environment?

One of the biggest benefits of interdisciplinary environment is that it reduces the chances of students being left behind or falling through the cracks. It also makes it difficult though to keep the vision aligned when some groups are didactically opposed to the work we might be doing to improve our community of practice. An example of this is changes made by the Ministry of Education through IES which was not accepted by many schools to actually improve learning outcomes. However as this map shows the fact that we have a community already in place than we can spend the many millions of dollars allocated for IES to more evidence based approaches. 

Activity 4: My professional community

My Professional Community

Task -Create a blog post where I define and evaluate the community of my professional context. Provide answers to at least 5 provocations which are most relevant to me. Support my answers with links to research or other external sources.

1. Who are the stakeholders of my professional community?

Within the context of my professional community there are many stakeholders and the influence on my practice needs to be taken into account through the lenses of Bronfenbrenner (2009) ecological systems theory of child development. I have used this model to describe the key stakeholder as the learner in the center and linked this to the term "Ako" with the role of the teacher interchangeable, therefore similar to legitimate peripheral participation as described by Lave and Wenger (1991). The communities are defined as pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information (Wenger-Trayner, 2015) and so the central stake holder to my professional community is evidently the student in the classroom within my school. 

Bronfenbrenner (2009)

The classroom teacher can also be named a Ako and there is in partnership with the learner within the microsytem. Closely followed is the parents of the students within the classroom and the values and cultural beliefs that they bring including religious and the encompassing cultural, social and economic capital (Bourdieu. 1998) that they may bring to the school. The community (Meso and exosystem) needs to be described within its context as shown in the recent local board snapshots below -

COMET (2015)

In what ways do the key stakeholders influences on my practice

The aspect of Domain is linked to goals and values of our BOT and its governance of the school, which I am directly involved in as staff representative on the BOT. I am also heavily involved in the development of a community of practice called project PETER on behalf of my role on the BOT. The parents of students influence the BOT and its decisions along with the impact of the local board and council developments in our community.
The other components of of community of practice include the senior leadership team, curriculum leaders, classroom teachers, and students. The social relationship aspect to the changes made on practice is thus more in lane with Jane and Wenger's (1991) statement that peripheral participation will lead to mastery as the relationship of Ako is internalised within our school context. Thus it can be inferred that to develop a strong and health community of practice alignment in the between the micro to macro systems must be shared in a common domain (Wenger-Trayner. 2015).

What are the current issues in your community? How would you or your community address them?

One of the main issues that the Wesley Intermediate is a declining role and the changes within the community that impact on the school and inherently the learners as stated by the recent ERO review -

Over the past few years the school roll has declined. Recent motorway and industrial developments have impacted on the size of the school community. Wesley Intermediate continues to offer open entry to all students. The school is exploring a number of ways to stimulate roll growth, including developing e-learning links with local contributing schools. The school has accessed external support from the Ministry of Education’s Student Achievement Function (SAF) to improve outcomes for students. ERO Review (2013 p.3).

One of the first ways we started to address changes to the school charter and also the strategic plans of the school, was to hold new elections for BOT representation, and hence my election to the BOT and also to hold more consultation with our community of practice. We create a Maori and Pasifika education plan as set out in our strategic goals. As a Senior leadership team we have also introduced the staff to more professional development such as the Clarity in the Classroom (Absolum, 2006) resource.

What is the purpose and function of your practice? In what ways do you cater for the community of your practice?

The main function of my practice is to support the management and development of Positive Behaviour for Learning (PB4L) through a community of practice of Tier 1 and Tier 2 team. The function of this practice is well validated as stated by Boyd, Dingle and Herdina (2014). The main ways that I cater for my community of practice (Tier 1 and 2 teams) is by managing the action plan -

I have specifically been trained by the Ministry of education for the last two years in a form of Peripheral participation along with other PB4L practitioners by a psychologist named Ceri Johns at the Ministry of Education. The focus of the learning has been out of school (formal) and in school as behaviour incidents occur (internal) and also in cluster meetings with other Assistant principals.  Lewis and Sugai and their work with Positive Behaviour interventions and supports have underpinned a lot of what I do to cater for my community. The Function is purely related to the cause or antecedence of behaviour concurring and will continue to occur unless interventions are placed with in a wider school context. Recent data collect by the NZCER shows that the wider NZ community of teachers struggle in the classrooms when behavioural issues occur and this has a detrimental impact on learners. 

NZCER (2014)

What are the core values that underpin your profession and how?

The three core values that underpin my profession immediately is Respect for others, self and the environment as shown my our school website and teaching of these values daily within our school. These values came about as a community of practice grew and we were able to work with parents and student leaders to identify what was important to them. 

For example the value of respecting others is a learned skill that we identified that students needed to have to be life long learners and so we went about to systematically create a learning community which fostered this value thus creating mastery and cultural capital of said value for the learner (Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2004).

What changes are occurring in the context of your profession? How would you address them?

One of the main changes that is occurring in the context of my profession is the move towards gamification of learning. Within the context of PB4L and learning within my school context I have found the a lot of students misbehave as its better to gain attention for being naughty than be caught out by the teacher for not grasping a concept and thus being labelled dumb. As reflected by Hsin-Yuan, and Soman (2013) who state:

“gamification serves the purpose of minimising negative emotions that they usually encounter in traditional forms of education. It lets them approach knowledge and skills, using the learn-by-failure technique that is popular in game-like environments, without the embarrassment factor that usually forms a part of classroom education (p.24, 2013).”

I have been directly engaged with communities of practice for gaming (not networks) for a number of years, where shared learning occurs regularly both formally and informally. Recently I have seen the emergence of mastery type gamification through the khan academy and would like to see our school become more of a shared practice approach as shown in the Khan academy portal for teachers. Some teachers at our school are still struggling to keep up with the changes to this pedagogy by evidently its still based on the social relationship between the old and new members (Lave,1991)

References
Absolum, M. (2006). Clarity in the classroom. Hodder Education, Auckland New Zealand.

Boyd, S., Dingle, R., & Herdina, N. (2014). PB4L School-wide Evaluation: Preliminary findings. Wellington: Ministry of Education.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (2009, June 30). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard university press.

Bourdieu, P. (1998), Practical Reason, Polity Press, Cambridge. 

Bourdieu, P. & Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Polity Press, Cambridge

Hodkinson, P., & Hodkinson, H. (2004, May 11th). A constructive critique of communities of practice: Moving beyond Lave and Wenger. Paper presented at “Integrating Work and Learning- Contemporary Issues’ seminar series. OVAL 
Research

Huang, W. & Soman, D. (2013) A Practitioner’s Guide To Gamification Of Education. Rotman School of Management

Lave, J. (1991). Situating learning in communities of practice. In L. Resnick, J. Levine, and S. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition.[ E-reader version](page 63-82).  Retrieved from http://www.ecologyofdesigninhumansystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Lave-Situating-learning-in-communities-of-practice.pdf

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991), Situated Learning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Team BE. ( Dec 28, 2011). Communities versus networks? [ Web blog post].Retrieved from http://wenger-trayner.com/resources/communities-versus-networks/

Wenger-trayner.com. (2015). Introduction to communities of practice | Wenger-Trayner. Retrieved from http://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/

APC Activity 3 review of Finlay's (2008) article on reflective practice.

Reflecting on reflective practice - Finlay (2008).

The following questions, along with other links will guide my response to the article stated.

• What is/are the points in the article that captivate your attention? In which way?
• What reflective model(s) do you find most suitable to use? Explain why?

What are the points in the article that captivated my attention? 

Reflective practice - It's not easy!

One of the first points that Finlay makes is that reflective practices is not easy to put into practice, Finlay states that it is-

"both complex and situated and that it cannot work if applied mechanically or simplistically" Finlay (2008, p 2)

The fact that the mechanical and procedural aspects of reflection is highlighted throughout the review, makes it clear that critical reflection cannot occur within the context of education without careful facilitation. Finlay repeatedly mentions that professionals, practitioners and educators are busy and find reflective practice time consuming  Finlay (2008, p.1). 

Reflective Practice the dark side-

Another aspect which captivated my attention was the fact that there is a dark side to reflective practice that I had not thought about. Student teachers are often encouraged to create a Symth reflection (Smyth, J. 1989), whilst on practicums, especially when something goes wrong which as stated by Schon (1983) is a "reflection on practice". The reason it could go wrong is when the reflection is not facilitated positively and constructively as stated by Quinn who suggests:

"that the inappropriate use of reflective models may actually devalue practitioners’ professional work instead of promoting it" Quinn, F.M (1988/200)

Lastly the idea that really stands out in Finlay's article is that as an educator I must be continuing on the journey to constantly be in a cycle as I can be conducting reflection before action takes place,  reflection within an action and reflection after action takes place. 

Where are the NZ links? 

The article lacked any links to current forms of reflective practice within the context of New Zealand which is understandable as it was written for an American Open University. Finlay (2008, p.2) asserts early in the article that most professionals and practitioners have an external requirement to have reflective practice inherent in the profession and similarly we also have such requirement in New Zealand. I believe that in New Zealand there are also strong links made to reflective practice within the Graduating Teacher standards and Registered Teacher criteria 5 which states-

"systematically and critically engage with evidence to reflect on and refine their practice" Teachers Council (2014)

It is very important for educators to reflect on their practice and further engage in our own learning pathways. It is pertinent to life long learning and also modelling to our students the metacognitive skills that they may need to be a successful learner. 

“The most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking.” Barrack Obama in conversation with British Conservative leader David Cameron, 2008 in presentations by Evaluation Associates

Which reflective model/s do I find most suitable to use?

Smyth's Reflection model (Smyth, 1989)

Within my teaching career and practicum's, I have completed a large number of Smyth reflections. The model is very simple and technocratic as stated by Finlay (2008) and often reflected on the action or incident. During practicums that I have led as an Associate teacher, it has been clearly stated in the brief that the Graduating teacher standards (Teachers Council, 2014) must be evidenced during the practicum. Standard five in particular makes mention of the need to reflect critically on pedagogy and helps new teaching students aware of how to unpack actions or an incident. 

Teaching as Inquiry model (Ministry of Education, 2007)

In the article Finlay (2008) describes that Jay and Johnson's (2002) model has a 

typology of reflective questions involving three intertwined dimensions: descriptive, comparative 

and critical reflection. This model is the most suitable to current practices inherent in the "Teaching as Inquiry model" of reflective practice within my school's context. Jay and Johnson have 

a typology of reflective practice for teacher education and similarly stated by the New Zealand Curriculum  Teaching as Inquiry model-

"Inquiry into the teaching–learning relationship can be visualised as a cyclical process that goes on moment by moment (as teaching takes place), day by day, and over the longer term. In this process, the teacher asks:What is important (and therefore worth spending time on), given where my students are at?, What strategies (evidence-based) are most likely to help my students learn this?, What happened as a result of the teaching, and what are the implications for future teaching?"  Ministry of Education (2007)

Ministry of Education (2007)

The Teaching as Inquiry model is also holistic in its application being that Finlay (2008) infers that critical reflection needs to be shared with colleagues and developed upon rather than introspective and isolated. T

his model is very clear and its aims to help educators become more critically reflective as the NZC states-

"Reflective learners assimilate new learning, relate it to what they already know, adapt it for their own purposes, and translate thought into action. Over time, they develop their creativity, their ability to think critically about information and ideas, and their metacognitive ability (that is, their ability to think about their own thinking). Effective Pedagogy, NZ Curriculum p. 34

Links to Active Reflection model (Absolum, 2006)

Within the context of my own professional reflection in development and learning, our school staff and principals have been taking part in the Assessment for Learning PLD contract. One of the recent training sessions focused on a concept called "Active Reflection" within the book - Clarity in the Classroom by Michael Absolum (2006). I believe in order to combat the dark and problematic side to reflecting, all educators need to provide adequate support, time, resources, opportunities and tools for reflection (Finlay 2008). Within Active Reflection a structured framework is created for educators to facilitate critical reflective practice -

Getting started with Reflection: Display reflective questions in the room and have a second set of questions available at your teaching station (reflection time 5-10 mins in individual,pairs, group conferences) 

What were you learning and why? How did the learning go? What were the tricky bits and why?What new learning can we celebrate? What helped the learning to happen?Who needs more help and what needs to be re-taught?  Summarized from - Clarity in the Classroom, Absolum (2006) presentation by Evaluation Associates facilitator. 

Example of Active Reflection tools in presentation by Evaluation Associates

References
Absolum, M. (2006). Clarity in the classroom. Hodder Education, Auckland New Zealand.

Finlay, L. (2008) Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/opencetl/files/opencetl/file/ecms/web-content/Finlay-%282008%29-Reflecting-on-reflective-practice-PBPL-paper-52.pdf

Jay, J.K. and Johnson, K.L. (2002) Capturing complexity: a typology of reflective practice for teacher
education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18, 73-85. In Finlay, L. (2008) Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL.

Ministry of Education. (2007) Kia ora - NZ Curriculum Online. Retrieved June 21, 2015, from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/.

Quinn, F.M. (1988/2000) Reflection and reflective practice. In C.Davies, L.Finlay and A. Bullman (eds.) Changing practice in health and social care. London: Sage. (Original work published in 1988 and reproduced in 2000). In Finlay, L. (2008) Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL.

Schon, D.A. (1983) The reflective practitioner. New York: Basic Books. In Finlay, L. (2008) Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. 

Smyth, J. (1989) A critical pedagogy of classroom practice. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 21(6), 483-502. In Finlay, L. (2008) Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL.

Smyth, J. (1989). Developing and sustaining critical reflection in teacher education. Journal of teacher education, 40(2), 2-9.

Teachers Council. (2014) Graduating Teacher Standards | The New Zealand. Retrieved June 21, 2015, from https://www.teacherscouncil.govt.nz/content/graduating-teacher-standards.

APC Activity 2 - the last 24 weeks of study have been.....

A reflection of the last 24 weeks of study. 

During the last 24 weeks of study, I have learned three key aspects about myself as a learner:

• My first learning point as a learner is that I learn in a divergent manner, and that I struggle to converge my ideas at the appropriate time, especially during assignments. I captured a lot of ideas about Positive Behavior for Learning (PB4L) in the digital and collaborative assignment but initially struggled to find a solution within my LEAN canvas. There was magnitude of information needed to be shared with my collaborators and so a blog was an excellent way to converge all our ideas in one place. An example of this convergence is the app currently in development as shown by PB4L app blog. 



Kapp. 2013

• The second aspect is that I have realized is that I learn far quicker when learning is gamified and challenging more than recall or rote based learning. Gamification is not necessarily learning by playing games but specific facets of gaming which enhances learning and allows greater adaptation to challenges and problems solving.

• Lastly,I learn the most when I am engaged with the learning, either visual or tactile learning activities . An example of this was when I took my students to the Mindlab, so that we could learn how to programme and make robots. Along with my students I learnt programming fairly quickly using a graphic user interface.

Three changes that I have made within my practice in the last 24 weeks of study. 

• One of the key changes is that I have started to unpack the learning that I am doing not just from a Teaching as inquiry point of view but also as student in the course. Rolfe's model of reflection in the practice of blogging is a clear application of this new change that I have made in my practice. 
  

• The second point of change in practice is that I can now include digital and collaborative practice in the application of devices. An example of this change can be seen by the use of the PB4L application that I am currently developing, which seeks to effectively manage behavioral incentives via a digital and gamified manner. In the recent months I have seen a distinction from merely using digital devices (phones, laptops) for procedural tasks to actively engage learners as stated by Gouseti (2014) and Kapp (2013)
• Lastly I have become more aware and able to adapt to the changes that are about to occur in regards to digital learning in schools. I feel as though I am more confident to problem solve using google, youtube or search blogs for ways around problems regarding digital technical issues. I recall that during the DCL assignments, I worked out how to edit my videos for my assignments. Ultimately this awareness has led to increased self efficacy as a learner by working with new applications, software and user interfaces like blogs. 

References

Hudson's Divergent learning theory.( 21 June 2015). retrieved from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/converge.ht
Gouseti, A. (2014). Digital Technologies for School Collaboration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Karl Kapp." 2013. The Gamification of learning and instruction. 21 Jun. 2015 retrieved from <http://karlkapp.com/category/gamification/>
Ministry of Education. 2015. Teaching as Inquiry. Retrieved from http://assessment.tki.org.nz/Assessment-in-the-classroom/Teaching-as-inquiry

APC Activity 1- Introduction to APC blog

Introducing a Reflective Journal
Welcome to the first post in the Applied practice in context (APC) blog by Lou Reddy.
The course overview will underpin much of this blog's development and share the journey of writing a blog and documenting the learning with APC.

Applied Practice in Context
Course aim: To critically examine and contextualise practice and develop a critical understanding of how indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness, society, ethics, environment and law inform practice.Learning Outcomes

• Demonstrate a critical understanding of how indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness inform practice.

• Critique and evaluate practice in the context of different audiences (local, national and/or international) and their perspectives.

• Critically analyse issues of ethics, society, culture and professional environments in relation to practice.

• Critique and address issues of law, regulations and policy in practice.

Brief introduction by the author:
My name is Lou Reddy and I am the Assistant Principal at Wesley Intermediate School. I have been attending the Mindlab postgraduate study since November 2014 and aim to continue research in the leadership and digital fields within education. Although my time as a school teacher is limited (5 years), I have come from a sales and marketing background within the NGO sector. I am really keen to see schools grow in their capacity to actively use digital and collaborative practices to increase student learning outcomes.

My approach to teaching and learning is simply based on two aspects- engagement and fun, whereby learners and teachers will achieve greater outcomes if the learning experience is both engaging and fun. I have shown an example of this application in my previous blog for developing a behaviour management tool called the the PB4L app. I believe that I am most interested in developing behaviour based interventions in order to make learning both fun and engaging.

I am also heavily involved with community and Local board initiatives which use digital and collaborative practices as well. Recently Wesley Intermediate School partnered with Project PETER in order to create more jobs, education services and space to develop employment opportunities for our youth.