Saturday 5 November 2011

Teaching and Learning strategies and sharing in the classroom

The #ukedchat on Thursday night was on the subject of the best teaching and learning strategies you have used in your classroom.  The actual discussion on twitter was incredible - so many good ideas being shared, discussed and suggested that it almost made me feel sad that we as teachers do not do this more often - especially in our own schools.

I think that it is a real shame that we as teachers do not share more often - there is so much that we can learn from each other and so much time that can be saved by not reinventing the wheel each time.  In my school over the past few years we have started MOT training sessions, which stand for Moving On Together.  They are led by staff members (SLT, Teaching staff and support staff) and we can sign up for hte one we feel will be most helpful.  This is a start, but there are only 5 a year.  The discussion on Thursday night was a real eye-opener for what could and should be happening in schools across the country.  There must be some way of staff sharing ideas more regularly - is it that we don't want to share our work as we put the hard work in?

We need to be sharing and piggy'backing on ideas more often.  One of the best bits of the #ukedchat discussion was when an idea was suggested, then other people said 'but what if you add x to this' , or 'have you thought about extending it like this?'  This shared owneership and shared creation needs to become more of a feature of our professionality if we are to keep on moving forward. 

I am thinking about trying to start a discussion board at school for this - will let people know how it works.  Anyone got any other ideas for how we could hsare more effectively? 

Tom Day

2 comments:

  1. Create a forum in your Moodle staffroom area. Start a discussion post by sharing a great resource, say how you have used it. Alternatively ask a question for help via the forum.
    If you post regularly into the staffroom, and force everyone to be subscribed, then each post will get emailed out to staff. Slowly they will catch on!
    You have to be persistent though (which is the hard part) because it's very discouraging when you are persistently ignored!

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  2. Thanks Alex, good idea.

    I am in the process of talking to people about all the social networking that can be supporting people. Singing th epraises of ukedchat every day!

    tom

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