I worked with Ms Swastika to work on the presentation about teaching Arts. We use several resources to prepare the presentation and get some work samples from around the school to be shown to the participant during the event. Below is the presentation that I use during the workshop.
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This year I got a chance to work with other teachers at school in the School to School commitee. I'm excited to be involved in this event as it's my first experience in School to school to share my knowledge about current educational practices to other teachers who might need it. This platform is the right place for me to gain more experience and skills in sharing and presenting. I worked with Ms Swastika to work on the presentation about teaching Arts. We use several resources to prepare the presentation and get some work samples from around the school to be shown to the participant during the event. Below is the presentation that I use during the workshop.
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As part of action plan we need to review how we see action element in the IBPYP and how we empower school community to put more attention to this important aspect of the IB PYP curriculum. Therefore we conduct a workshop about Action in IB by reviewing of what the school have done and plan for what we can do in the future regarding with Action. Below is the description of the workshop and also the powerpoint presentation that I use for the workshop. Aims: 1. To reinforce action in the PYP Sekolah Ciputra 2. To evaluate the implementation of this program across the PYP levels 3. To know the continuum of Action programme across the year level 4. To share some sample strategies for action empowerment from the school community Process
Below is the presentation slides that I use Our school is currently working on the review of POI for next school year. We’ve been through several steps to accomplish this and currently in the final stage of the process. Through this post, I would like to share some steps to do in the POI review seeing both from each year level (horizontal review) and analyzing the balance of POI based on each transdisciplinary theme (vertical review). I try to apply my current understanding of concept based learning as part of this review. POI Horizontal Review Here are some steps that can be done to review the POI by each year level team members. More details input will be more visible, especially regarding with subject specific coverage. 1. Evaluate the central idea using the pyramid suggested by Lynn Eriksson in her paper about concept based learning. 2. Each team may propose one completely new unit. They can include the propose unit in the note part.
3. Consider about the international or local events, timing of the year, period (how long it takes) when placing the units into sequence. 4. Evaluate each unit against the standard Significant, Engaging, Challenging, Relevant. Please see the evaluation questions underneath the review table. 5. Include subject related units. Please see the curriculum mapping from this year to complete this and consider about collaborative planning with single subjects 6. Cross reference with subject specific scope and sequence It’s suggested to the team to divide job for each team member to be responsible to see certain units and then come back to team to share and discuss and make last decision as team. POI Vertical Review When analyzing the POI from the lens of each transdisciplinary theme, this process should be done by leadership team and middle manager (year level coordinator / team leader). Below are certain things that you could consider when doing this process. ● On each theme descriptors - have we explored everything for the whole year. ● Have we included these relevant global concepts? See below taken from learners without borders:
● Is it concept driven or fact based? ● Age readiness? ● Is there any repetition of central idea and lines of inquiry? ● Is the key concepts are used in balance within each transdisciplinary theme? i.e. All 8 key concepts in Who We are To improve the delivery of IB PYP curriculum at our school, I’m doing analysis on how the school can improve the way we plan for assessment and learning engagement. I use thinking hats to analyze our current practices and hopefully find solution for future improvement. I hope this post could be useful for others who also concern about assessment aspect of the school and probably interested in the use of WALT and WILF. Facts ● Since being introduced in the assessment workshop WALT and WILF became a familiar term used by teachers to help them to design assessment task by using backward by design approach. ● Throughout the time, this is being used to drive the teaching learning and also the design of the assessment of the units. ● The WALT and WILF used in PYP planner cover knowledge, skills, concepts and attitudes; therefore in each of those element, teacher easily design learning engagement as well as assessment task based on learning objective (WALT) and success criteria or (WILF) ● Furthermore, we decide to split the WALT and WILF table (what so called) and PYP Planner. and due to this issue, we got recommendation on how we use the planner especially in terms of assessment (Stage 3) and learning engagement (stage 4) Positive: ● it’s been helpful to design the assessment task ● it’s familiar terms and easy to use for teachers and students ● it can be used to design comprehensive assessment task for knowledge, skills, concepts, or even attitudes ● it drives teaching learning in the classroom. Teachers used it as their lesson plan and somehow it makes the lesson more structured. Negative: ● The use of it is being misunderstood. Based on certain research WALT and WILF actually used for daily teaching learning, where teacher share the learning objective to students and discuss the success criteria with them. Instead of doing this, so far what happen at school is teachers already design set of assessment tasks with its fixed criteria for the students to do. This cause issue with the implementation of inquiry based learning, where students didn’t get chance to participate in designing assessment task. ● While the teachers felt being helped by the use of WALT and WILF, there is sense of fragmented learning happen throughout the unit. This cause teacher to lose opportunity to do more inquiry and to explore more conceptual understanding by students. This became worse when the WALT and WILF is set aligned with the lines of inquiry and it became timeframe e.g. we need to finish first lines of inquiry in week 3 of the unit. ● The existence of assessment tasks at the end of each WALT (learning objective) seemed like they are just mini summative tasks that happen throughout the unit. ● Many even still use WALT and WILF only for the sake of documentation instead of an effective tool to design learning engagement and assessment ● There are two separate planners being used the WALT and WILF and PYP planner. ● Teacher’s questions were not being addressed well throughout the unit. Possible solutions: ● We will still use WALT and WILF for daily lesson purpose. Teacher will share the WALT (learning objective) during the lesson and discuss the WILF (success criteria) with students when designing assessment tasks. ● We will try to use other format of designing assessment task and learning engagement by empowering teachers questions and more focus on the conceptual understanding of the units. ● Focus more on the conceptual understanding by mapping the key concepts and related concepts. We then create learning objectives, teacher question, learning engagement and assessment based on this mapping. Download example of concept map below:
Adapted from Service Excellent Workshop 2012
If you work in an institution or probably the owner of a company and would like to improve its service, here are some aspects that you might want to consider to look at carefully. Access Access is important for your customer. You need to have good location where people recognize your institution easily. It’s hard to find great and strategic places, but it’s harder to develop comfortable space. When you have found good location, you need to maintain and manage what are inside your institution so the customer and your employees are welcome and feel comfortable. You may use website to expand the accessibility, though this should be fast and easy to access and have quick response for communication. Competency Every staff must know about the product or have high product knowledge. Any customer who enter the building and are curious about the product and service that you offer, need to be responded well by any one that they meet and ask to. You need to keep update your staff with current information through meaningful and purposeful professional development session. Courtesy Many companies have applied this into their service. Positive attitudes and good manner from staff are highly expected by customer. The way we communicate to them can increase credibility of the company. Once they are responded negatively, customer will leave bad impression to your company. Respect and hospitality should be emphasized as part of your company’s service. Reliability You need to avoid giving false data and wrong information about your institution. We might do varied strategies to promote our product or service but need to be careful of what company promise supposed to be what the customer gets. Information for promotion should be based by facts. Responsiveness Related to previous aspects about competency and access, a company should care and show more empathy to the customer by being responsive to their problem or complains. Staff and the administrator should respond to customer concern immediately, otherwise customer might leave to find other company for the products they need. Speed When many aspects are being accomplished, still many of companies nowadays are competing in terms of providing quick and fast service. Considering that time is important for the customer, high speed service should be available for them as they won’t wait too long to find other place which provide better and faster service. Security You might have great product but without customer feeling secured and comfortable with your service then it might cause serious problem to your company. Many cases happened in some institution regarding with the safety issue, and this really drag down those companies’ reputation. Therefore, providing service to make customer feel welcome, safe, secured and comfortable is essential. Tangible Appearance does matter. It becomes one of important aspect in providing service to your customer. Staff must dressed neat and tidy and might come attractive uniform which might influence customer feeling toward your company. You should pay attention more on the aesthetic aspect of the surrounding environment at your working place. This definitely will attract customer to come and want your product. By Alan Yip – Founder and Master Trainer of MINDEDGE
Does male and female learn in different way? Is male more intellectual and logical than female? Is Female more diligent than male? Why is female easy to get moody and angry? Why does male tend to be more physical? What does the scientist said about learning? This post is the answer to some of the questions above. I adapted some idea courtesy of Mr. Alan Yip, a trainer from Singapore. Brain Based Research We often wonder, does intelligence affected by the size of the brain. An average brain weighs 1.36 kilogram and Einstein’s brain weighed 1.23. As one of the most intellectual person on the planet, Einstein has smaller brain size than the average people, so we can conclude that it’s not about the size but it’s about how you use it. How about gender? In our brain we have what we called Corpus Callosum, a connecting tissue between both sides of the brain. Surprisingly, female has 25% larger tissue than male. It’s believed that female can do multitasking while man can only do one thing at a time. Male Pre-Frontal Cortext (the center of command in our brain) matures at the age 30, while in woman, this cortex matures earlier at age 25. It gives effect to male that they usually has short attention span, more impulsive and delaying things. Another good findings in the brain research is that female brain use two part of brain to process words, while man only use left brain to do verbal processing. Therefore female tend to talk and has larger vocabularies, while male tend to be more straight forward when talking. Social Emotional Differences Hormones play a vital role in controlling our emotion which will affect our social relationship with others. While testosterone is responsible to make boys not good in processing emotion, more competitive and express their emotion through action, Oxytoxcin hormones in girls makes them to be more social, is more emotional and use this to feel, see details and more expressive in words. As parents or educator, we can use this as strategy to be more effective with our approach to the kids or students. Boys like to to do active games, therefore we gave them active game that involves physical, teach them how to control feeling through competition and sport and use more pictures when introducing concept. With girls, it looks like a bit easier because the oxytoxcin hormone also create girls to be able to tolerate boredom, like to please others and like to bond with others. But once girls get hurt, then they will carry this the whole time, therefore teaching them to feel happy ab out themselves, others and everything around them is crucial for girl. Girls are more fragile with emotional feeling that is asily affected by what happen surrounds them. It’s important for parents to build more confident, self esteem, open communication, survival skills, to give safety for their insecurity. Understanding and Helping Our Kids By understanding these differences, we could take the best of them and give the best for them. Here are some things that we can do to help them learning. Association We can do this game by choosing one topic and ask the kids to call out any related words. It’s best way to start learning. This strategy is similar to what we called brainstorming. It starts with what styduents know (prior knowledge). This will enhance creativity, increase speed of thinking, activate prior knowledge. There are some rules of this game, where you don’t give judgement, play with them, and do not over do it. VAK (Visual Auditory Kinesthetic) Understand how they learn best. Based on research 70-75% percent of students are visual . if we use the right strategy then it will improve the students learning. Some of VAK strategy including Body spelling, use body gesture to write, flash card, draw first before write, use music to stimulate feelings, use all senses to boost our ability. Smart Learning This strategy related to language acquisition. It’s believed that people who have more words could have bigger chance to be more successful. Increasing word power is significant. Some strategies you can do is by having words journal to keep new words daily, have our kids to read aloud, listen to music also increase vocabularies. 3 Conditions to remember Respect your children As parents or teachers we need to respect our kids, as we expect them to respect us. When they have problem we need to hear without interrupting. Listening to them doesn’t mean that we always agree, we could say our concern after listening about theirs. Set Clear and Fair Rules When children making mistakes, avoid to give punishment. Giving logical consequences to things that they probably do wrong will be more effective and beneficial for their growth. To set the rules, you will need to have clear and open discussion about this and ensure that both you and your kids understand what are the expectation. Praise their effort Whenever student making effort give we need to praise them. However there are some conditions when giving praise could be misleading. Under praise could also be dangerous for our kids. When praising we should focus on their effort, instead of only focusing on their intellectual achievement like “Well done”, Excellent or “Good Job” . Effort praise may include suggestion for improvement i.e. “Keep trying, you may do …”, it’s good that you have started, you can do better if…” After all, all kinds of praise should be delivered using positive emotion. This post is based on research and study about gender and learning theory. We are aware that gender could be bias; therefore in this case we are more generalizing rather than stereotyping. Overall, it aims to help us as parents or educator to improve their learning. It's always interesting to write about certain subject through negative point of view. After writing about the yellow hat and the green hat of PLC in my previous post entitled "How to Make PLC Works", I would like to put my thinking black hat on and talk about the challenges, barriers and difficulties in implementing PLC at school. This post doesn't aim only to criticize the PLC that happen at my school, but merely as a reflection to help us to improve the implementation of PLC for next school year. This writing is compiled based on readings, my observation as PLC mentor and discussion with teachers and my fellow admin team. Not Ready Staff plays important roles in PLC. When they are ready with the PLC expectation, surely the PLC will run smoothly. The readiness includes the competencies and skills of the teachers plus the understanding of PLC format itself or the process that they have to go through in order to complete what is required from PLC. The problem happens when staff are not ready. Therefore, it's suggested to do readiness survey before we do the PLC. This will not decide whether we should do PLC or not, but rather on how the administrator prepare the PLC format which should with the staff readiness based on the survey result. Poor time management Time is always an issue isn't it...and it's a cliche issue! Everyone gets 24 hours a day, it's just a matter of how we manage it. The problem about time in PLC is the timing or period of PLC process. Argument about how much time needed to do one PLC process always come up. Some teacher said it's too short, they need more time. But this might happen because they tend to procrastinate tasks that needs to be done and didn't set target. On the contrary, there is suggestion to make the PLC period shorter to avoid several issues that I mentioned above. This will help groups to focus, keep their PLC on track and to finish it within targeted time. Inquiry is low Related with staff readiness issue stated above, level of understanding of inquiry can be a major impact in PLC practice. When staff is ready, they will have high level of understanding of inquiry process, not only theory but also practice. Then the PLC process should be done following proper inquiry process. But when level of understanding is low, this might cause disaster to the PLC. The study will be not focused, all over the place and finally this PLC group tends to only focus on how to present well and look good at the end. This way, there is no true learning happens during the PLC. Furthermore, inquiry is more than only research. Even when teachers can do good research doesn't means they demonstrate good inquiry. Don't know what to ask Again related with previous the issues above about inquiry and staff readiness, this time the concern is about how to formulate good PLC questions? Based on the observation I did, some question are not good enough. When the question is not focused and not open enough to be explored then this will drive the PLC into failure. The question is the key of success to do inquiry in PLC. PD about good guiding question is beneficial to do when most PLC groups do not know how to make good question for their own PLC. Different head, different idea The most common problem in working environment is when we need to work with others. In the nature of collaboration, the times can get rough and tough when there are different opinions and ideas clashing then lead to disagreement. Another problem merge when one person have slightly different question or PLC focus but somehow have to redo his own inquiry to suit the group agreement. This is one of the weaknesses when the PLC group are created based on their general interest. So how to make group which have the same specific focus and be able to collaborate? Misunderstanding the PLC Different understanding of PLC definition might cause to misleading of the real purpose and aim of this program. PLC is not only a place for teachers to learn collaboratively. The main aim of the program is to improve teaching learning that happen at school. It's expected that there is significant actions taken in the classroom after a group of teachers do the PLC. Different PLC format that is applied within school also contributing to the success of the PLC itself. Clear communication of the system, guideline and policy need to be in place in order to succeed with the PLC. Despite all the facts above, PLC is definitely still a positive thing. It's one step forward in the professional development of the school. When we consider these downside of the PLC practices, then we could set a better plan for the next PLC. Good luck with your own PLC! As part of school commitment to keep updating the staff with current knowledge and skills from the latest educational research, we conducted two days in-school workshop on February 14th and 15th, 2014. Besides, this workshops also aimed to support teacher’s professional development in order to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the classroom. There were three workshops run in parallel on those 2 days,led by three official IB workshop leader coming from other IB schools across the region. We have Assessment in the Early Years led by Katie Bowen from Thailand; Concept Based Learning led by Jacqui Patrick from Jakarta; and Teachers as researchers led by Richel Dungit from Jakarta. Each workshop is designed specifically to address the needs for the development of the IB program in our school. We had these three options for teacher to choose which workshop that suit their needs at most. The format of the workshop is to engage the participants in active learning with some practical sample to be used and adapted in their classroom practices directly. Many things to learn from the workshop which help the school to improve the implementation of the program and have positive impact on daily teaching and learning process. This opportunities of professional development is an on-going process, as we are all a community of life-long learners. The concept-based learning workshop gave opportunities for teachers to deepen their understanding of concepts, as well as to review Sekolah Ciputra Programme of Inquiry to make sure that all Unit of Inquiry really lend itself to develop students inquiry and enable the students to share their learning through the conceptual lens.
By Yan Yulius
PLC stands for Professional Learning Community is one professional development program that a company should conduct in order to meet individual learning of their staff. PLC is mostly done in educational institution like school to empower collaborative learning among the teachers, school heads and administrators. Our school tried PLC this year with the main aim is to improve teaching learning practice in the classroom. After getting several reference and brainstorming our own definition of PLC, the school staff came up with this statement “a Professional Learning Community is a professional group of people, motivated by a shared interest to collaborate and inquire through supporting and working with each other towards achieving a common goal that will improve their teaching practice so that it makes a successful difference to their students’ learning.” On paper, theory about PLC seems ideal but in reality we did face some challenges throughout the process of the implementation. However I tried to compile several rules that probably you might want to follow when you want to conduct PLC and make it works at your schools 1. Make it as a part of professional development plan. AS part of the appraisal system in our institution, every staff needs to have professional goals as their continuous commitment for their own professional growth. However they should not have extra goal only to include PLC as their PD; make PLC as one of the goals instead. It’s supposedly not an extra works which is outside their roles and responsibility. 2. Have an appointed supervisor/ mentor or an expert on the PLC focus When you are working in a group, you must have supervisor or mentor who will help the groups to keep on track. The mentor ideally come from leadership team or senior management team. Basides, the group may also appointed someone to be their expert mentor for their PLC group e.g. school counselor if they are working on inclusive education. Another important thing to do is to elect a representative of the group who will help to coordinate the meetings. 3. Maintain a record or journal that details the PLC journey It’s important to keep the record of their learning journey in any format. I would probably suggested blog as the media to record this, but some staff might choose paper and pencil to record their learning journey. Other options you might use besides using school server is Google Doc or other online collaborative tool like wiki. This will be useful when they present their learning to others, or when it’s published properly it might be useful research findings for other audience too. 4. Have focused area of interests What we have on the list as options for area of interest include learning environment, methodology, instruction, management, communication and assessment. Initially, teachers wrote questions and leadership team sort them into focused groups based on the area above. However, it’s difficult when team tried to get an agreed focused inquiry, when everyone’s got something else in their mind. It’s the supervisor job to ensure that the group inquiry topic is not too broad to explore. 5. Celebrate learning and findings at the staff expo PLCs are based on a spirit of sharing what we learn. Each PLC is expected to share their findings with the wider staff in an informal expo toward the end of the year. This is important step as the culmination of their learning and to give chance for staff to celebrate their PLC journey. On Saturday, March 8, 2014 PYP 6 held their ‘Exhibition Day’. This year PYP exhibition is under the unit of How We Express Ourselves where students expressed their social and also environmental issues through their chosen area of interest in Arts, such as through musical, dance or drama performance; through photography or drawing; and also through literary art or writing. It was an exciting day as it is the culmination of the PYP students’ learning experience at Sekolah Ciputra. They had been working very hard for weeks in their interest groups with the assistance of their mentors, parents, teachers and other community around school. From this event, we hope that students will always develop their knowledge and also their skill they have shown during the exhibition into their daily life when they will face real social and environmental problem around them.
The ‘Exhibition Day’ began with the students’ performances in Ciputra Hall. There were some students’ performance which were packed in one drama which suit with the theme of the exhibition. The script for the drama was written by students collaboratively, telling story about social issue of bullying that often happen in school environment. Students also did the arrangement of their own performance helped by the Arts teacher, Ms Adri and Mr. Dendy. They performed confidently and audience enjoyed the show. Besides performances, there were also talk show with the principals, coordinators, parents and students representatives. During this time, they talked about the exhibition process in general and also shared their experience involving in this year exhibition. After one and half hour of opening ceremony, the event was continued in the elementary building where students had the chance to exhibit what they had learnt and discovered throughout their exhibition journey in front of parents, teachers and guests. There were many displays and further performances for guests and visitors to enjoy. Some groups who were interested in photography had their photo gallery set up inside classrooms to exhibit several issues about pollution, climate change and cultural heritage preservation. Other groups who also focus on the environmental issues portrayed it in form of songs, drawing, book writing, drama and even fashion design. And there are still many other excellent artworks which made to portray different issues around us. The guests, parents and teachers were all impressed with the hard work that have been put to prepare and make the exhibition run well. Lots of positive comments and feedback given by guests and parents during the night. You can watch some of the comments live on http://goo.gl/mjpZJZ Thank you to PYP teachers, parents, students and everyone who were involved in PYP Exhibition 2013-14. We’ll see you next year with different theme and the same success. |
Yan YuliusAn IB PYP teacher, PYP Coordinator at Sekolah Ciputra International School, Surabaya, Indonesia Archives
May 2016
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