Visiting

For a number of years now I keep hearing about prinicpals visits into classroom. We are told about them at staff meeting and that certain faculties will be visited. I have been teaching around 12 years and I think I can count the number of times the principal has visited the class I was teaching.

This has often lead me to wonder, why are they not visiting the students, to talk to them about the learning that they are doing? Is it the subject that I am teaching, is it that they are happy with my teaching. I don't know.

Today I started the SPINS at school, these are three blocks of 90 minutes where combined year 9 and 10 students select what they want to learn about for the term.

I had been thinking about a few ideas, but it wasn't I had a chat with my SLL that I was able to define what these may look like.

I worked on three different SPIN's

First in an information strand SPIN, this is designed to work through docs, sheets and presentation, however having a chat with another teacher I might chance an aspect of this to look at the add in's of google drive to get students creating mail merges.

Second, is coding, this is develop the structures and interest in programming in scratch. There were a number of students in the class who did scratch last year. It was of interest to me at the end of the lesson why I had a chat with them that they enjoyed the lesson and learnt something from it. I want to keep this going, they even asked for homework.

Third was web dev, this is looking at how to create a web page using CSS and HTML. Today was looking at basic HTML codes and CSS to change the look of a page. Asking the students what they wanted to do next, they want to develop a website, however I am to give them the content and context. Only one student wants to develop their own at this point.

The impact on me has been having the principal walk into the learning common and see what is going on, ask students questions. I believe this has a great impact, not only for me, but for the students. 

I have seen Maurie about 6 times come into learning commons while I have been teaching SPINS, Big Project, Hub times and mytimes, and I must say it was a surprise the first couple of times, you think, is he checking up. But now I see he is actively interested in what is going on in the classroom and the school. Even tweeting what was happening.

Coding SPIN underway @HPSSchool with @gmacmanus pic.twitter.com/LFtx8GNYeY
— Maurie Abraham (@maurieabraham) February 19, 2015

Thank you Maurie for coming in and seeing whats happening.