We met in the HTH media arts conference room for the morning's briefing and the welcome box of coffee and a selection of (very sugary) snacks. The first workshop of the day was a live project tuning session facilitated by a mixture of HTH teachers and students. The tight timings and discussion protocol really made sense to me. The member of the group that was chosen to have their project idea 'tuned' was a fellow DT teacher so I was very keen to see how the room responded to his ideas. The students did an amazing job of facilitating the session gently ensuing all delegates contributed their thoughts and the tight timings focused on warm discussion rather than reiterating problems. We achieved more in 16 minutes developing a curriculum aspect than I have ever managed outside of this process.
After the project tuning session we had a short amount of downtime to finalise our presentations, everyone was hard at work when.... Whaaaa whaaaa whaaa... FIRE ALARM!! It was not a drill so a full school evacuation followed. It transpired to be nothing more than smoke from a science lesson. The boys chose to do their presentation of learning first, they delivered a confident and informative response to their essential question. They responded to some very detailed questions and held their own in a room full of teachers - I was very impressed!
During my observation time I sourced answers to the following questions:
Andrea has sourced resources from 6th grade teachers' DPs in response to this last question.
As always... If you would like feedback from these questions please ask me next week.
Favourite 'Norm' of the day:
Be hard on content, soft on person.
After the project tuning session we had a short amount of downtime to finalise our presentations, everyone was hard at work when.... Whaaaa whaaaa whaaa... FIRE ALARM!! It was not a drill so a full school evacuation followed. It transpired to be nothing more than smoke from a science lesson. The boys chose to do their presentation of learning first, they delivered a confident and informative response to their essential question. They responded to some very detailed questions and held their own in a room full of teachers - I was very impressed!
During my observation time I sourced answers to the following questions:
- Where do they log their project plans?
- What training is given to those who are non-techie yet have to create their own DPortfolios?
- How much money do you have allocated to resources this year? If you need something you
don't have, what happens? - Do you create rubrics for every stage of the project? If so, when do kids refer to them? How do they use them?
- How exactly are kids (especially Yr 7 equiv) prepped for a Presentation of Learning? How do they learn the language to be able to articulate this?
Andrea has sourced resources from 6th grade teachers' DPs in response to this last question.
As always... If you would like feedback from these questions please ask me next week.
Favourite 'Norm' of the day:
Be hard on content, soft on person.