Teacher Only Day

Today is teacher only day and we spent the morning doing school-wide writing moderation. 

Firstly we discussed why moderation is important, and looked up what the MoE says about it as well. 

We then went through the E-asttle marking rubric and conversion charts so establish where we are marking FROM. 

In groups, we went through a few writing samples from different year/age students and marked them. This was very helpful as you had to discuss WHY you think that child deserves that level in that particular area, and having to justify why made me think more critically about the judgements I was making. 

After lunch we talked about our PB4L goals for this term, and planned lessons we could do to explicitly teach students the behaviour we want from them. 

(Rather than telling them what NOT to do, we are going to SHOW them what to do!)

This was a helpful reminder of what the school-wide expectations are for our students. As a school, we also discussed how some of these things need to explicitly explained. We need to call the spade a spade, and just get over it. The main example of this is teaching students what appropriate behaviour is when using the toilets. Some of our younger students for example, do not know they have to lift up the toilet seat to pee, or how to wash their hands properly, or even why they should wash their hands. For older students, this same principle then includes using the toilet products in the right way - not peeing in the sink, putting sanitary products inside the bins provided and not flushing them, using toilet paper to wipe with, and not throwing it around or wetting it and getting it stuck to the ceiling. It was an interesting conversation to have, as I hadn't really thought we would NEED to explicitly teach these things, but apparently we do.

Over the next 4 weeks we should complete three lessons based on the image above - teaching students how to act in the corridor, toilets and office spaces.