Activity 5: Professional connection map

Activity 5: Professional connection map

Connections -

Personal Connections

Personal connections are important to me. I am from a family of 5 and both my parents and my sister are also teachers or principals. Inevitably, this leads to education talk at family gatherings. I treasure these connections because my parents are inspiration for me in my education career and set a standard for me to aspire to. Conversely, connections I have made with friends and through sport sit outside the teaching sphere. I think these connections are important because teaching is a very demanding profession, through which the job is never really done. WIthout these connections to other people, I feel teaching could become all consuming, not just a job.

School Community connections

The majority of the networking and connections that I have made with other professionals is through my school community. I have taught exclusively in one school. Throughout the seven years of service here I have connected widely with professionals involved in the education sector. The current landscape of teaching means that a variety of different agencies are in and involved at any given day, e.g. RTLB’s, SWIS (social worker in schools), health nurse as well as my professional teaching colleagues that I work with. These connections help me to better deliver learning experiences for students. My honest reflection is that in this smaller environment is where I feel most comfortable and share most of my ideas during Professional Learning Community meetings and during Professional development that I participate in and facilitate in house.

Connections outside school

I have a small network of professional connections outside of school. I remain in contact with a few of my teacher training colleagues, mostly through facebook and stay connected to catch up on ideas through the shared experience of training together. Our school has recently joined the ‘Ako Hiko’ cluster and I have been tagged as one of the leaders of digital learning within our school. As part of this I have attended some professional development specific to this cluster. The intention is that we will meet termly and this will become a valuable support network for me as we have joined the cluster later and can learn from the experiences of others. In general, I am quite a reserved, watchful person and have made a few connections through the mindlab post-graduate programme. I will discuss this again later.

ICT connections

Through my area of responsibility for ICT in the school I have built connections with the technical support agencies that we utilise at school. I have enjoyed this as it has provided me with the opportunity to upskill my technical knowledge and apply this to the school context. This has given me a point of difference as a teaching within our school community, discussed in my previous blog post related to my teaching expertise. I regularly interact with suppliers of technical gear. There are many opportunities for training and development through this but I also can keep relatively up to date with newer ideas through correspondence from these providers, (albeit related to their products).

Online connections

Global connection is something exciting and this has opened up the chances for more like minded teachers to share and collaborate. Since enrolling in the mindlab course I have joined twitter and used social networking sites to join different teacher communities. I have also explored the VLN website which provides support and ideas for teachers working within the New Zealand context. Again, I tend to watch, observe and use the ideas of others as I would not categorise myself as an out there person.

Extending my professional connections

Through the reflection on myself as part of different communities I see that I am primarily an observer. A clear and obvious goal for me is to start to make contributions and make connections more with other like minded educators. There are two places where this can happen. I can take the confidence I have developed within my school context and share and participate as part of the Ako Hiko cluster where some of my other mind lab colleagues are also present, with the ic already having been broken. The second place is to contribute to the online discussions available through social networking and model what I would like from my students.

What are the benefits or challenges of working in a more interdisciplinary environment

This question is relevant to me as our school looks to investigate the use of modern learning environments and pedagogies. Clearly the benefits are that the pairing of like minded individuals with a different skill sets opens up a wider and richer range of learning experiences for students in classes. I think that at the primary school level where teachers are responsible for giving access to all strands of the curriculum this happens to some degree, but will work better when teachers with genuine strength and passion in particular areas come together this will be shared with teachers.

I think the challenge in this way is how teachers feel about the locus of control, are they ready to free up what happens and share that responsibility with others? Are they happy to become a learner again and how does the planning and facilitating of learning within this interdisciplinary environment give fair reflection to each discipline and ensure that all areas are covered, while still reporting to the national standards which are present in the current education climate.