From the Principal
From the Principal
Bonjour à tous, and Wanju
The honeymoon period with your students will soon be coming to an end. Now the routines, relationships and environment that you, have created/are creating, will be put to the test. Those three components will set up the parameters for your practice. Remember that teaching is a “practice” backed up by science. Therefore, we need to “practise” the skills to get better at it. Much like the skills of any sport.
Every behaviour that you come across in a classroom will have a reason why it is being exhibited. If you can get to the root of that, your capacity to manage it effectively will increase. While it would be nice to do the same thing for every student we know that equal and equality are not the same thing. Some students need more.
We will continue to resource teachers who would like to use our peer observation model to pair up with a colleague to set improvement goals in your practice. Remember, set a SMART goal, pre-observation conversation, complete the observation, feedback and refine/reset your goal. A great starting place to start is by looking at our Best Teacher Posters or the Positive Behaviour Matrix for ideas for your goal.
Have a great week
En Avant
Nuts and Bolts
Positive Behaviour Posters
Ellie will be visiting over the next week or so to bring you a positive behaviour matrix poster. The posters describe how our values are positively exhibited in the classroom. These are a great way for you to frame your behaviour conversations with students from “Please do this…..” / “Thank you for doing this….”, a positive perspective, rather than from a “please don’t do this…..” that focus’ on the negative actions.
Staff Meeting
The staff meeting this afternoon will be outside. I know that it will be warm but we will keep it short. The agenda only contains COVID related matters and has been distributed.
Union Meetings
I meet fortnightly with Nghia, in his Union Rep capacity. This is a great chance to discuss burning issues for staff before the issue becomes a negative vortex. It is also one of the mechanism by which we receive feedback. It is a collaboration to ensure that the students’ needs are placed at the centre of our actions.
Classroom visits
I am trying to get into classrooms as much as possible. Please send an invite to Megan if you have something special going on in your class that you like me to see. Already this week I have been involved in knot tying and fishing casting lesson. Thank you Cam and thank you to all the teachers last week that had me in their classrooms.