Patsy's story

Transcript

Patsy Richardson-Flood (Social Sciences Teacher): “I walk into the classroom, my movie is already playing. I’ve planned my lesson, I see my lesson, I know how my lesson’s going to go or so I think. I know what I want but what I wanted and what I was getting was two different things. I started to wonder why my teaching wasn’t effective, I was losing my students a lot of the time, my students weren’t, um, engaged in what they were dong. They were getting restless and it was through talking with our Te Kotahitanga staff that I started to really think about what it was I was doing in my classroom. When I took on board some of the observations that were done on my teaching it was a wakeup call. I rethought my lessons, I re-planned my lessons, dissected them and started to chunk them into what was more appropriate for my students. Because I knew my students well but I didn’t know me well. It wasn’t until I knew what I was doing that I could become more effective in what I was doing with the students. I realized that students have a attention span of about seven minutes of listening to a teacher ramble, so I had to watch my timing and it wasn’t until I actually effected that that my students actually started to ask me questions.

“They have the power to think but only when you put forward a question that feeds their mind and starts a little, a little flame, and then the flame will grow bigger. When I question, if I get a yes/no answer I know my question’s no good.

“It’s delving into what they know, first finding out what they know. If they’re lost then I re-phrase my question, if they’re lost with that then I‘ll re-phrase it again. They can ask me what is it that you mean fire, and I can say to them well what do you mean? And then suddenly we both have a click moment and we both go oh I see and they go oh I see, I’ve learned something, they’ve learned something. And I say to them, ‘If an employer came up to you and said what is your strength, what can you say? What is your weakness, what will you say?’ When you, when we’re working we constantly need to look at what we are doing, and we need to appraise what we are doing. We need to reflect on what we’re doing, we need to say what we have done well or what we can do better.

“If you’re pairing and you pair two friends together, sometimes it doesn’t work because the honesty factor falls out. I like to pair out of comfort zones. I have always discovered that when I do the cross gender the honesty factor works. When they can connect to the real world, that’s when you see achievement levels also start to shoot up. When they can see that what they’re doing has a purpose. A lot of the time students have said to me oh why are we learning this? Now that we’ve made connections in our learning they look at the world differently, they watch TV differently, they watch movies differently, they see the wider picture.”

Narrator: “Principal Alan Liddle stops by just in time to see students bringing their own prior knowledge and experiences to their learning of spelling, in the form of the purposeful use of cell phones.

“The student’s expertise with cell phones also provide Patsy an opportunity to become a learner herself.”

Patsy: “Before I even get the second letter out they’ve already done it. When we did the cell phone for spelling, they were not allowed to use predictive text, it had to be the correct spelling.”