Reflect on practice: Reflection entry #4 Apply a Reflection Model to discuss something that has happened in my Inquiry so far, and how it impacts on taking action.

Reflective entry 4:

In Finlay's article it states; ‘while we commonly assume that teaching leads to learning, it is the experiences which teaching helps create that prompt learning, not primarily the acts of the teacher’.”
(Redmond, 2006, p.226)

This is true in my class with reflecting, you can have the “courage to work competently and ethically at the edge of order and chaos” (Ghaye, 2000, p.7). I am therefore using Rolfe’s Model of Reflection (Otago Polytechnic, n.d. ) to reflect on my practice so far.

Step 1 (What): Describe something that is significant and has happened during your Inquiry so far

A notable event that has happened so far is recognising that I needed more ideas to engage the children in my inquiry. Getting ideas and momentum was the most difficult. I realised that to counteract this was attending the lecture on robotics and STEAM at the University of Auckland, Epsom Campus. Chris Rogers is from TUFT's university, Chicago, America and he talked about his philosophy of education as it relates to coding and robotics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DblvNncjR9o

Step 2 (So What): Evaluate the most interesting/important/useful aspects of this event

Attending this event has allowed me to develop my practice as it created a boost in the purpose of coding and the reasons why we do it. He asked us what do we want children to learn, curiosity and challenging exisiting thinking were some outcomes. It made me reflect do I provide in my current classroom climate situations for this to occur? The support therefore was not just from readings but from real life bumping shoulders with other educators and creating robots ourselves serve a need. In working with a other educators we created a robot that could move without wheels, a fridge door that talked to close and shared with other educators their designs.

Chris shared various ideas relating to Music which is my unit, making instruments and having the brief of performing a concert creates more open ended 'tasty' designs and 'experts' in certain areas rather than a status quo 'cheeseburger' scenario.

The affect it had on my future practice or understanding: is that it inspired me to adapt some of these ideas back into the classroom. I developed lego scenarios for students on animals and made them come to 'life' with makey-makey sounds. This proved successful and the levels of engagement fro the students were outstanding. The experts advice worked giving a simplistic brief for children such as to create instruments for a concert, or make a cute animal and allowing children to 'breathe' and create their design meant a variation in the outcomes.

Step 3 (Now What): Analyse the implications from this event to the rest of your Inquiry

In the future I can now adapt these practices of STEAM more and more and create innovative ways to bring them into the classroom. With the new 14th June NZEI negotiations taking place mentioning to relook at the way teachers are 'assessed' through appraisals, can provide a future vision for more risk-taking and learning with students to create innovative projects integrating this with other learning areas. I also have found that not only my target group wants to adapt these practices yet every child in the class wants to give it a go, so I have had to adapt my classroom practice for the last two weeks of term to allow the space to create 'energy projects' for all students, based on the ideas from Chris and also from what I have read on play based learning. I have in my classroom now, boats, submarines, microphones, cars and rocket ships. Six year old students are researching on Ipads how rockets are designed, whanau engagement is up as they mention in the morning their lunch time bands, engagement is up!

You can see the results in my seesaw blog page;

6 year olds coding = Increasing literacy engagement.

https://blog.seesaw.me/room1942019/#!/item/item.c3b3fdf4-42e7-4c41-8e4e-96549a4208aa