Teaching And Learning Environments At The New Zealand Education System Essay

This chapter in The Skillful Teacher on classroom climate talks about a lot of different thing that fall under three categories: Community and Mutual Support, Confidence and Risk taking, and Influence and Control. I will speak about how my mentor teacher creates one aspect from each category in her classroom. The first category community and mutual support describes “the degree of inclusion, affiliation and mutual support students feel with one another” (330). I feel that Ms. Curran does good job at creating a classroom climate that values “Group identity and responsibility and interdependence”. Students are working with partner every day during class. Ms. Curran often reminds students that they must work with their partner and to ask their partner questions before they ask her. One example is that during a class I have seen her check in on a partner group and see that one student know the answer and the other is asking about that same question. She will walk away and tell them to ask their partner. This is also very clear during activities like discovery where students are figuring thing out for themselves before it is taught to them in formal way. They only have their partner to ask question and figure things out with Ms. Curran and myself purposefully try to not be very helpful. So like the jigsaw, discovery’s “structure forces interdependence because students must rely on their peers to learn certain material” (334)

I strongly believe that there is an urgent need for new pedagogies that develop 21st century learning for students as they prepare for their future. Schools should be looking at rethinking purpose, pedagogies, curriculum, structures, assumptions and expectations. The old pedagogies persisting into the 21st century are no longer relevant. What’s needed is a 21st century pedagogy which will serve as a paradigm that reflects a strong and creative commitment to relevance and quality learning and teaching (Whitby,

When students have opportunities to apply skills, rather than simply acquire them, the process to create and learn can be as important as the outcome. When school environments celebrate not only the individual, but also what groups can accomplish together, students become interdisciplinary thinkers, artists, activists and athletes. When students are taught to ask big questions and identify problems, they become critical thinkers and creative problem solvers. When learning environments are developed in these aspirational ways, everyone has a role: students, parents, educators, our local and global communities. Education is filled with these rich connections where explicit instruction is balanced with guided

I may often guide my students as they approach problems, encourage them to work in groups to think about questions and issues, and support them with advice as they tackle adventures, problems, and challenges that are embedded in real life situations that are both satisfying to my students and interesting in terms of the result of their work. I believe that learning is promoted and supported through collaboration among learners and teachers. As a result, learning become easy to occur in the lesson when we incorporate these approaches. I strongly believe that it is in interaction with others that children learn how to think. It is important to give students the opportunity to become responsible for their own learning, and this will allow students to be more likely to be self-motivated and develop self- efficacy. As students interact with their environment, they connect information learned through experience to prior knowledge, and so build new knowledge and understandings. As an educator, I recognise the value of the experience and knowledge that learners bring to the classroom context. It is my responsibility and role to provide experience that assist learners to further their existing knowledge of the world (Duchesne et al,

Let me further concretize this on how Miriam College put meaning into these learnings through some literature of placing our learners at the center of our existence. Hannon (2009) highlighted that current school reforms and improvement are inadequate and schools are faced with a greater challenge to scale-up, to prepare the learners “to live well and sustainably on this planet in the new century.”

in the 21 st century. This new paradigm for education contrasts boldly with the traditional

To engage students in the 21st century has become challenging for educators all over the world. Learners are so diverse with their interests, needs, and aspirations. Educators are now responsible for shaping their students into successful, confident and creative learners. The researchers conducted mixed methods case study working with middle school students from a South Australian Middle School. The case study wanted to see how teachers and students were working together to become collaborative learning designers while helping to create an innovative method to include in their curriculum.

Creating Cultures of Thinking by Ron Richhart inspired me to consider what my dream classroom would look like, be like, where students were doing the “work” of learning. I found myself looking beyond the collaborative learning community I tried to create each and began to evaluate the purpose of learning, the culture of learning, making thinking visible, make thinking engaging, having students authentically collaborate on their work. . I have always been able to create a classroom with excellent routines that focused on behavior, management, planning, and executing the details of instruction. Yet, I hadn’t thought of exploring the idea of thinking as a routine that students need to be exposed to, or that creating a culture of learning included

With the completion of my second secondary education practical, I have now been welcomed into two different schools and been a part of two different teaching staff. I have got to experience and been witness to many different types of classrooms, teaching strategies and student behaviours in my time at the schools. From watching and talking to the staff members from both institutions about their ideas and strategies that work well for them and their students, along with discussions about theorists in tutorials, I have constructed my own beliefs and ideas around my knowledge today, on how students learn and what the role of the teacher is in the classroom.

We have create the idea of a classroom as a 'learning community ' useful. Sarah 's learning community was one in which useful resources were available, interesting projects invited children 's engagement, expectations encouraged the children to sustain interests over long periods, and adults and children modeled and assisted each other, sharing the initiation and leadership of learning episodes. We differentiate between four kinds of educational environment or learning community. With respect to each of a particular set of learning attributes and their dimensions, any environment may be prohibiting, affording, inviting or potentiating.

The Pacific population is growing in New Zealand, and the number of younger Pacific Islanders is growing, and so will the demand for teachers that can engage with Pacific learners. Whitinui (2007) suggests in his work on engaging Maori

Action research is a means through which an educator stays informed of the on going trends in education with specific interest in individual content areas or classroom management techniques. Teachers need to understand these trends to better serve the students. By participating in these research activities, teachers embrace change in pedagogical strategies and learn how to best understand their students and the learning environment. These in turn opens avenues for differentiated instruction. Differentiated instruction is a teaching strategy that varies teaching techniques depending on individual student needs to meet the student at their points of need. Meeting students at their points of need and teaching them required content based using the most appropriate method should be the sole purpose for every educator. Therefore, teachers should conduct action research in their own classrooms to be better educators.

Education represents an avenue of growth for youth, as well as exploration of passions. The classroom is traditionally held as a place of thought and growth, in which young minds can explore a great expanse of intellectual fields to develop their own interests and passions. Contrary to this ideal, modern classrooms have developed into an institution of manipulation, coercion, and conformity, placing the interest of corporations ahead of the development of the youth.

In this essay I will discuss and define the key issues in New Zealand’s education sector. The reforms in the education sector have increased independence throughout the residential area in terms of local opinions. Yet, teachers and parents wanted the government to focus more on facilitating, staff workload and school funding issues instead of more changes to regulations. Majority of the schools faculty believed that New Zealand’s education department were omitted from structuring the governments education policy. This essay discusses the effect of the 1989-1999 education reforms by using examples from the staff, parents and the board of trustees and how they feel about this impact, if reforms such as funding, resources and equity, relationships and participation and if these changes have been successful and finally how the education system is today.

With the New Zealand election looming in just under six weeks, politics has dominated national news, sparking interest for even a twenty-year-old university student like myself. Having never voted in an election, my knowledge of the political system, and the terminology for that matter is far from adequate. Stepping into the shoes of a politician, this paper has allowed me to examine the two key ideologies that have shaped the radical reforms in New Zealand politics and more specifically, how these have influenced the role of education.