Developing an Initial Understanding

Once ERO had departed in Week 4  of Term 1 I started to think about how I was going to develop an understanding of Teaching as Inquiry with our teachers. I had initially talked about it very briefly at our staff retreat before the school year started. Our whole school focuses this year are e-learning and Science/Thinking (PRT 1s Reading and Writing and PRT 2s Maths). I thought we would start  our TIA with a focus on e-learning, teachers were already starting to take risks in this area and there was a much stronger focus than ever before at CSNS. I thought that once teachers had their e-learning inquiry gaining traction they could then develop a Science/Thinking one.

I shared my thinking for the staff meeting with our SLT prior to the meeting and got a fairly positive response (Quite a bit of this nutting out I have done on my own and then shared it with the leadership team before rolling it out). The staff meeting was two pronged 1. Trying to develop an understanding of TAI and 2. Getting teachers to start framing their own inquiries. The staff meeting started with re-visiting the Inquiry focuses for CSNS in 2015 and the Teaching as Inquiry model.  We only really looked at the 'Focusing Inquiry' stage in depth during this meeting. We watched some clips from the enabling e-learning TKI website from Karen Melhuish-Spencer, mainly for the teachers to understand the importance of  the 'Learning' as the focus for their inquiry and the e-learning is the 'how'.

I shared some possible examples, but was hesitant to do this as I wanted the teachers to go away and think about the children in their class this year, to look at the assessment data and identify what learning they wanted to enhance through e-learning. At the end of the meeting I shared some milestones that I wanted the teachers to work towards.

Here are the Slides I used during this first staff meeting.