Week 32

I will use Rolfe et al’s (2001) Reflective Model and the Cycle of Experiential Learning by Osterman
and Kottkamp (2015, p.70)  to guide my reflection.

Week 32

What?

The journey over the last 32 weeks has been arduous and at times I have questioned my ability to
complete all of my readings and assignments. But as I think about about the tremendous amount
of learning that we as a cohort have undertaken I can’t help but admire our collective tenacity to
complete our journey and really commit to enhancing our own practice. Positioning ourselves as
learners, truly lifelong 21st century learners has helped us to become culturally responsive educators.
We have the confidence to change our pedagogy so that we can develop teacher agency that will affect
change within our school and our profession.  As outlined by Bolstad & MacDonald, (2016) who state,
that teachers changing their practice or even their thinking is important. I certainly couldn’t have
changed my mindset as significantly as I have without being a Mind-lab participate.  Reflecting on a
key change to my practice that helped me met the teaching standard of the Ministry of Education
NZ Teaching Standards (2017) is. “Develop a culture that is focused on learning, and is characterised
by respect, inclusion, empathy, collaboration and safety”.

Now what?

I will use the reflective “practice for educators” model by Osterman and Kottkamp (2015) to evaluate
the change to my practice.

Problem identification

I have often strived to develop a culture that is focused on learning and have looked at student centred
learning in the classroom but I have not being able to successfully implement this throughout the entire
class in all subjects. I sometimes revert back to teacher centred learning. It is important to develop
successful 21st learners and having a collaborative mindset is important.

Observation and analysis

Through the work on the assignments over the year as a student I have worked collaboratively with
my peers and I have found the experience to be enlightening as it exposes you to so many more ideas
and knowledge sharing. I also found that recording students voice about  working collaboratively was
insightful as the children had many positive experiences. When researching my review I looked at
‘How does blended learning improve motivation to collaborate for learners’? Which has really sparked
an interest for me.

Abstract re conceptualization

(Reynolds & Baik, 2013) note  that collaboration is a soft skill that needs to be fostered and this will
help to improve student engagement and motivation especially within a blended learning environment.

Active experimentation

Blended learning can act as a vehicle to support student centred learning and agency. The ability for
the students to share their ideas collaboratively and drive their own learning has been great to watch
flourish, as the locus of control sits more with the student. Power sharing with students is great as
students are engaged with their learning and students have developed a respect and genuine
friendships with one another.  Moving towards integrating see-saw within the whole class is something
that I will be doing next year and I hope to a launch a class blog as well.

References

Bolstad, R. & MacDonald,J.(2016). An analysis of participant blogs supplemented by teacher interviews.
Wellington:New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

Ministry of Education (2017). Our code, our standards. Retrieved from

https://educationcouncil.org.nz/content/our-code-our-standards

Reynolds, R. B., Bailk, E., & Li, X. (2013, November). Collaborative information seeking in the wild:
Middle-schoolers’ self-initiated teamwork strategies to support game design. In Proceedings of the 76th
ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Beyond the Cloud: Rethinking Information Boundaries (p 76). American Society
for Information Science.