2nd Work Review Sessions

So far I have completed the mid year work review with three of my supervisees. I realised that as supervisor, I really need to have more dialogue sessions with them to understand them as a person and also their needs. Of course sometimes it also depends on whether your supervisee is willing to share openly with you their feelings and their thoughts.

I started off with little confidence when I started my first year as a supervisor as I was new and inexperience. Guess with a few years on the job and some advice and guidance from people who are more senior than me (supervisors, colleagues and friends), I feel I have grown a little.

I was glad that during one of the sessions, one of my supervisees actually realised on his own that he needed to change his way of scolding his pupils as the old way of doing things just cannot work now with the new pupil profiles. I must say that I was a bit shocked to hear that from him directly as for the past 2 years I have been trying to make him see this point. I can say that this is really a little achievement I have obtained and I really hope that he will really work on building good rapport with his pupils.

Guess we as supervisors must have faith in our supervisees and constant encouragement and recognition must be given to them. Also, trust is an important factor in building good relationship between supervisor and supervisee. When a supervisee has faith or trust in his/her supervisor, he/she will be more open to share their thoughts, feelings and so on. Then only can the supervisor know how to help or support this supervisee :)

Teachers' Reflection Blogs

• The dept has started reflection blogs since beginning of this year. During the beginning of the first term, most of the teachers did their blogs for the first few weeks. However, as we approach the end of the term, teachers were required to submit TOS for their Mid Year exam papers and also to get their books/files ready for checking, many of them stopped their reflection blogs. Even after a few reminders, I still did not get all of them on board. It is still the same few who constantly do their reflections every week. I approached one particular teacher to remind her to do but feedback from her was no time.

• Hence, I continued to provide some 15 minutes during staff time for the teachers to do their reflection blog last thursday. As most teachers did not attend the AfL workshop arranged by the school in Term 1, I also hope to help those who did not attend the workshop understand AfL better. Therefore to give teachers some ideas on what to reflect on, I gave them all a theme and reflection assignment to work on. The theme was AfL. Teachers are to read my blog on AfL and write their reflections on whether they have used AfL in their teaching last week or what they have understood from the blog and how they can use AfL in their teaching in the coming week.

• As of today, 5 teachers in the dept have done their reflection on AfL. As for the rest, I am planning to send an email to the rest to inform them that I am expecting their reflections soon. Hope this will help to make them do their reflections soon :)

T1W10

Lesson Reflections & Lesson Plans

During Staff Time on T1W10, one teacher feedback that she finds that lesson reflection is more meaningful to her as compared to doing up lesson plans. However, as a head, I need to be kept informed of their lesson progress and so I explained to all the teachers the rationale for them to submit lesson plans. But to ease their load, I made it flexible for them by allowing them to submit the textbook's SIOs to me instead but with indications of which objectives have been covered or planned for the week if they choose not to use the prescribed lesson plan template.


Book/File Check

Although I split the work between Rozi, I still went round to try to catch a glimpse of most of the teachers' books. Generally, majority of them gave a substantial no of assignments for pupils to work on. However, some of them still need more working on the marking part and giving meaningful feedback. Many teachers did not request their pupils to fill in the content pages of the exercise books, only content pages of files are filled. Hmm ...... maybe I should revert back to the old days when my first HOD insisted that all teachers must get their pupils to fill up the content pages of their exercise books. This would help me to have a better sense of the amount of work given to the pupils.

As for feedback, one teacher did not write any feedback on pupils' assignments except on the content page of the files. The only thing I saw was a big tick on each page of the assignment. How meaningful is this? I can't tell. Guess I will have to interview this teacher on how feedback is given to his pupils then.

SRP Schedule 2

First module of the Sec 2 to 5 SRP was just over and the dept has started the 2nd module in Wk 8. So far, the attendance was quite good. By now, pupils were aware of the expectations from them in attending SRP and they strive hard to do well in their topical tests and also the SRP diagnostic tests so that they will not be identified for future SRPs. It is quite obvious that this strategy is effective in making them take their learning more seriously.

However, I faced some problems in asking around for teachers to stand in for teachers who were not able to turn up for their scheduled SRP times. Hence, for the 2nd module, I assigned standby teachers for each session and I even assigned standby duty to teachers who do not teach any Express and Normal (Acad) E Math classes. Expectations were clearly stated in the schedule as well. Initially I had some reservations about such arrangement for fear that I will get strong disapproval from the teachers. To my relief, they were all very cooperative. I am quite glad that I have a great team of teachers ;)

PETALS

Just finished 2 full days of workshop on PETALS (Pegagogies, Experience of Learning, Tone of Environment, Assessment, Learning Content, Student-Centredness). Though it seems to be another new MOE initiative, but actually it is not. To me, it is nothing new as it is on stuff that teachers are already doing: Pedagogies, assessment, contents etc. So now when those of us who have attended this workshop go back to school, we just need to help teachers align all that they are doing with PETALS.

Some questions that came into my mind while I was going through the workshop:
1) Have my lessons fit into the framework of PETALS?
2) Have I taken care of the P, E, T, A, L aspects in my lessons?
3) How can I help teachers in the Math Dept be more conscious of how they plan and implement their lesson using PETALS?
4) Lesson Study is a powerful tool to provide insights in pupils learning and improve lesson plans. So how can I push the use of this tool in the dept?
5) How can I tap on the talent of the teachers in the Math Dept?
6) How do I measure if a lesson has been carried out effectively?
7) How do I monitor or measure the effectiveness of teaching taking place in the classrooms?


Had a small talk with P on our way home and gotten some advice from him on how can I improve the quality of teachers’ reflections:
1) Select good reflections and share with all in the Dept.
2) If possible, everyone gets at least one reflection being shared.

Session with Supt

The SMC had a meeting with our Superintendent joining us at the beginning to help us with identifying strategies that will help our school move forward and improve. Initially many of us thought our heads were going to roll as the O level results were so bad, esp. for Math results which is the worst in AI history, never before we had such drastic bad results. But, supt did not reprimand us at all. Instead she asked us questions to make us think and reflect, and even gave useful advice to some of us.

After some thoughts, I realised these 2008 batch of pupils were in Sec 2 in 2006, the year in which I was just appointed Acting Head of the Math Dept. That year was also the year which we had to make a lot of adjustments to the SOWs due to the change in syllabus. New topics were not included in the textbooks as we were still using the old texts. Some lower sec topics were shifted to upper sec and some upper sec topic shifted down. This batch of pupils was also the batch which we started math foundation which occured during curriculum time so that minimum remediation was carried out after curriculum time as teachers always feedback about bad attendance for remediation. Had the math foundation not worked for the weak pupils as when this batch of pupils came to upper sec, their lower sec foundation was not there? Or was it due to my new management that had failed? (I was not very confident of managing the dept then.)

When Supt mentioned about analysising the O level questions which will help pupils prepare themselves well for their Os, I thought have we not done that? Maybe not all teachers did but I know that some teachers do analysise the O level papers. We could have done things in solo. I feel the sec 4 teachers might have done too much for their pupils that pupils did not take ownership of their learning. Hence, for this year's batch of Sec 4, the sec 4 teachers must come together to discuss on how we should involve our pupils in analysing the O level papers rather than teachers doing it alone. We have to change our old ways of revising work with them too as the type of pupils that we have now is different from the past.

Math Staff Time (T1W3)

Fredrick shared with all a lesson on Probability with the use of poker cards which was inspired by the movie "21' that he had watched. Interesting lesson which captivated the interest of his pupils but as an educator he still need to be cautious not to promote gambling in his class so as not to arouse the dissatisfaction of parents. That's the life of a teacher, to inculcate not only knowledge and skills but values too.

The sharing also raised a probability problem. The problem is a game that requires one to guess which door out of three (say A, B & C) that has for example the car behind it while behind the other two are only goats. When the participant guess one door, say A, the tester will open one other door, say B, which has a goat, and ask the participant if he/she wishes to change his/her mind on his/her choice to door C. The probability of switching the choice and winning the game becomes higher. In fact, in this case, probability of door C having the car becomes 2/3 and not 1/3 anymore. Hence, teachers had a small discussion on why it is so but most were still not convinced with the explanation for the 2/3 probabiliy of changing choice that one of us came up with. But it sets most of us thinking through all the possible explanations that we can have.

It was indeed a good sharing for the day! I will try to get teachers to share their innovative ideas during Staff time more often :)

Lesson Reflection Blogs

Quite a no of teachers in the dept have started posting their reflection blogs and I tried to read as many of them as possible and of course give some comments as much as I can. Still notice a no of them have not done so. May have to think of a way to get them to do it weekly.

Though a certain amount of time needs to be spent on reading the blogs and commenting them, it is quite fun and rewarding. I feel that posting reflection blogs does help us to get to know what others are doing in their classes and also getting feedback from others who commented in our blogs does help in developing and motivating us in our teaching. This is a good practice but not easy to sustain unless one has a right mindset that it is not an additional chore to what we are already doing.

Reflections - Math Dept (1st Math Dept Meeting on 6 Jan 09)

Had a dept meeting on 6 Jan 09 at 2.40 pm in the staff lounge. It was held there due to the availability of wireless network. I had wanted to show all math teachers how to assess math dept stuff upload in the school's google intranet but did not managed to do so as more than half of the teachers were not present for the meeting :( Hence, I proceeded with the plan of getting all those who were present to set up a blog for themselves so that they can use their blogs for lesson reflections. This is still in experimental stage.

It was quite an adventurous session as many of us were first time to create a blog of our own and some of us not so IT savvy :) I felt good as it kind of brought us closer as a team because in the process there was much laughter and jokes going around. There was no pressure of getting expected MSG or any form of stress to get work done. Hope my sentiments were right ;)