Reporting phase: Semester 1 reflection
Vlogging project In semester 1 this year (just finished!) I undertook making a few vlogs about my teaching experience as a lecturer at uni. The results are here: Week 1:...
View ArticleStrategies for pulling all-nighters
Eat a high protein dinner. Carbs for phase 1 – 10pm-midnight. Shapes are ideal. Doritos and salsa delicious, but hard to eat and type. Coffee is a morning drink. Try to hold out until 1am. But also...
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What does poetry mean to me? #PBL unit
This semester I am attempting to demonstrate project based learning (PBL) in action by giving both of my classes an extra-curricular project to work on. (More about whether these projects are...
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Teaching and work-life balance
This week I’ve given my pre-service teachers this ‘wicked problem’ to start a conversation about work-life balance: Imagine it is dinner time on Tuesday and you have three things to do before school...
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Assignment marking: Do the math
Something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while is the unseen labour that goes into marking student work. It’s semester 2 marking time in Australian universities, and I’ve just finished a stack...
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If students designed their own schools…
Chatting in the mid-year break with Bianca and some other PBL-peeps, this video was recommended to me. It’s only 15 minutes long, and now I’m recommending it to you too: The video shows what can be...
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Assessing soft skills in PBL
This week in class we explored the Essential Fluencies as an alternative set of ‘soft skills’ to the General Capabilities in the Australian Curriculum. One of my students followed up this investigation...
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Let the PBL begin (again)!
It’s the end of semester one, which means two things for me: It’s time to prepare my ethics application for my funded research on project based learning in secondary English. It’s time to finalise...
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It took nine weeks
How long did it take for you to settle back into work? This is what people will ask me, down the track. What people have already been asking for a few weeks now. I started work just after bub turned 11...
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Eye of the Tiger
I want to make a play list of songs that would be good for getting ‘psyched up’ for work. There’s currently one song on my list – used as a theme song for the TV show Suits, ‘Greenback Boogie’ reminds...
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New Milestones – Twitter, Blog, Work
Blog It was very satisfying this week to get a notification from WordPress reminding me of my blogiversary. Six years of blogging! The time sure has flown. And although I still have much to learn...
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Risk-taking and risk-aversion in teaching
Happy 2014 to all! It seems I inadvertently took a blog break over summer holidays – a break from most things digital, in fact. I’m back in the swing of things now though, with a head full of ideas and...
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Explaining theories of learning and pedagogy
I want to post here two excellent images that I have come across to explain the various theories and concepts that can be drawn on in relation to learning and pedagogy. The first is an image that I...
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Inspiring PBL unit outlines from #CLP409 students!
This semester I modified my unit planning assessment for CLP409 (Secondary English Curriculum Studies 2) based on the outline developed by Bianca Hewes. You can see the 40 fantastic project outlines by...
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Guest Post: ‘Christopher Pyne, equity goals, and the p-word’
This week a former student of mine posted a link to a piece she had written for the University of Sydney student newspaper, Honi Soit. I read the story (feeling proud, impressed, and agreeing with her...
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TeachMeet Debrief – September #TMBrisbane
Tea break at #TMBrisbane (photo by author) #TMBrisbane 2013 (September) I recently publicised a TeachMeet that my students and I were hosting at QUT as part of a unit on English Curriculum Studies....
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We’re hosting a TeachMeet!
It’s been over a year since I went to my first TeachMeet, up here in Brisbane. I presented a pecha kucha on ‘fair’ assessment and Project Based Learning and had a great time meeting a bunch of other...
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It was a cyberbullying kind of day…
Most teachers have had some experience with cyberbullying. Whether your students are very young primary schoolers or adolescents, circumstances can arise when students post nasty comments about each...
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Preservice students’ ultimate classroom design
In most English Curriculum units I run an activity where students work in groups to design their ultimate English classroom. Here are some of the elements that come up in many of the designs: Really...
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Which PBL?
Today I attended a whole-day symposium on ‘learning and teaching in collaborative environments’, aka the LATICE program at QUT. At the start of the day I was really excited to hear some of the speakers...
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