As a K-5 international educator it’s not often that we’re discussing ways to promote safe spaces for LGBTQ members of the community. It’s almost as though it’s a taboo subject for elementary educators and you only start to see Rainbow flags appearing when students enter middle school. Where does the teaching of Diverse Family Structures…
How can we minimise mid-year teacher burnout? Every teacher can articulate at least one moment in the year where it all feels like too much. Typically, it hits us sometime in November (near report-writing time) and/or in March/April (when we’ve passed the halfway point but there is still so much left to do!). A few weeks…
How can we build more play into our literacy units? In preparation for our Grade 1 Arts Festival students were exposed to familiar stories. We are fortunate that our narrative reading and writing unit also align with this performance & arts-based Unit of Study, so I structured this literacy project to include a lot of…
[This post is an excerpt from my EDURO: Coaching from Theory to Practice certificate course from 2015] Every year our school picks a whole-school goal. Last year (my first year at ISZL), we were fortunate as the goal was ‘Technology’. The two PD days in February were designated to the EdTech Team to design and facilitate, and…
Part 3 follow up from: Coaching Collaboratively This week I had my first post-observation meeting with Mrs. H and it went really well. During her lesson last week, I sat off to the side and documented the lesson in a google doc. I simply made observations, noting what the teacher said as well as the…
Part 2 follow up from: Coaching a Self-Proclaimed “Dinosaur” This week, as part of my Eduro Course Challenge, I observed Mrs.H introducing blogs to her grade 1 class. I was so pleased she chose to do this lesson, as last year it was an area of tension for her: whether blogs would enhance the community…
EDURO Coaching Challenge 1: Identify a colleague at your school that you feel comfortable working with. Initiate a dialogue with that person to see if they would feel comfortable with you practicing your coaching skills with them. [This post is an excerpt from my EDURO: Coaching from Theory to Practice certificate from 2015] I’m really…
Mrs.H and I had our second meeting this week and referring back to our original Google Doc meeting minutes was an effective way to start. Before meeting, I went over some of the topics we’d covered and also the action we’d agreed to take. We both realised many of the tasks are more long-term and…
As I was reflecting on my coaching practice, I thought about some of the points mentioned by Jill Jackson in her article “4 Steps to Your Successful Coaching Model“. Her advice definitely resonates with my experience in my first year of coaching. However, I do disagree somewhat with her second point: Know Your Content. While…
Where do math and technology fit with play-based learning? As the EdTech Coach at ISZL, Switzerland I decided to explore this question further. Arming myself with the new resource book Technology and Digital Media in the Early Years (Edited by Chip Donohue), I embarked on an 3 month journey exploring the benefits of different new tech…
Innovative Learning 