Mark Osborne

Why??

DPS has been going through a series of PL with Mark Osborne, this is to develop our collaborative teaching, and look deeper into our core beliefs. These core beliefs are Collaboration, critical thinking, agency and creativity.

The Future of Education

Mark talks a lot about the ways education has been and needs to continue to change. This is in relation to the way that the world and the job market is continuously changing with the introduction of new technologies. We look at the types of jobs that are beginning to be phased out or could completely gone in the next few years (20ish). This kind of jobs are ones that are/can be easily automated.

We are looking at this as a stepping stone for looking at how we are teaching our students and the skills they are developing.

Core Beliefs

Our schools core beliefs are; Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Creativity and Agency. These core beliefs underpin a lot of the teaching that we do. In Kahikatea we are making an attempt to include these more often by having a core belief in our planning set-up alongside the WALT and SC. Having this reminder in our planning means that we are referencing these during the lessons and drawing our own and the students attention back to these core beliefs more often.

During our staff sessions with Mark we have been unpacking our core beliefs in order to create a succinct description/meaning for each alongside the ways that our students can show these core beliefs.

Each session has been dedicated to an individual core belief, as a staff we have brainstormed in small groups what the most important bits are and added them to a shared doc. Each teaching team creates their own copy of this doc in order to change, add and/or delete parts to make it our ideal definition etc. These team docs are then consolidated by the leadership team to create our school wide models.

Reflections

These sessions with Mark have been a great opportunity to see how the things we are doing already are leading our students towards a positive and productive future. While DPS as a whole has some great things happening already alongside these core belief there is still a lot of discrepancies between the different teaching teams which we hope to resolve. Working as a whole staff to create the definitions and observations of these core beliefs has been a struggle at times due to these differences in opinions.

Collaborative Teaching

Mark has also delivered some sessions which are built to help us make the best use of our collaborative spaces rather than being multiple teachers working individually within a big space. A big part of this was the co-teaching strategies. These strategies showed multiple ways that we can teach together rather than alongside. Having multiple different co-teaching strategies to look into means that we can look at the strategies that work well in our space and for our team. I enjoyed trying these strategies during the inquiry time in the afternoon with Amy Williams.