Category: Learning Community
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A Framework to reflect on Honouring All Languages
A Framework This framework provides an entry point to discussing, sharing, and reflecting on practices that honour all languages in our classrooms and communities. Click on the interactive elements below to read some examples of practices that may be relevant to your community context. What practices might you add to these? How could you use…
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Fostering Mind-stretch to enable a Growth Mindset
Photo by Calder B on Unsplash Our mindsets – they guide us, shape our actions and inform our perspectives. They ‘set’ our way of thinking, being, engaging, and doing. They are powerful and dominating. So, how could we encourage less ‘set’ and more ‘stretch’, in ourselves, and in our learners? Actually, do we need to?…
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Noticing with Intention
Noticing. We do it endlessly, as we move around our daily lives we observe, we notice, we cast a fleeting thought towards something, and then, generally, we move on. These are small, fleeting, moments. More often than not we think we will remember what we noticed. We have the intention to hold onto our noticing…
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Adopting an Inquiry Stance in Honouring All Languages
Photo credit: danielle-macinnes-iulgi9pwetu-unsplash How can I get started? I had a lovely conversation with a fellow teacher recently. Someone who is passionate about honouring all languages in classrooms and communities. A teacher who works tirelessly to gather resources to be able to meet multilingual learners where they are, so they can best access all learning…
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“Oh, you know what I mean….”
Photo by Colin Maynard on Unsplash Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides. Rita Mae Brown Why language choice really matters and what it means for us in our communities. Take a look at the collection of images above. What impressions do these conjure up for you? What emotions or senses are…
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What if…. we redesign our approach towards Professional Learning?
I once had the pleasure of joining an online author workshop with Grade 3 students and the author, Mo O’Hara. One of the many perks to being a school principal! During her talk with students, she inspired us all to pause, look around and constantly ask the question ‘What if..?‘ to fire up our imaginations…
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Cultivating ‘calm’.
The Impact on Learning ‘Calm is a Superpower’ this has somewhat become my mantra over time, and naturally during the pandemic years became even more of something to lean into. It has led me to think more deeply about how we find calm amidst storms. How we both instil, and nurture, calm in learning spaces,…
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Language Matters: From ‘being inclusive’ to ‘honouring’ all languages
Why we need to go beyond being inclusive to honouring. There are about 7,000 languages in the world. Being multilingual is now the ‘norm’ for the majority of the world’s population. It is more ‘typical’ for learners and their families to have knowledge of more than one language than to come from a strictly monolingual…
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Learning from Learners
Elevating Student Leadership What a privilege it is to be a teacher and school leader. For me, at the heart of this is empowering and enabling students to see themselves as leaders. When I started out teaching I realised pretty quickly that I found my happy place in those moments when you observe others finding…
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Nurturing a Sustainable Culture of Active Thinking
As the school year launches, teachers prepare for their new and returning students, school leaders to welcome new and returning staff and the focus turns to designing ways in which learning communities can come together, develop and thrive. In my experience this often means that team building activities are dusted off and there is a…
Jenny O'Fee 