07.28.14Letter from Nanango
Jillian Robinson is a Pedagogy Coach in Australia, working with teachers regionally out of the Nanango State School in Queensland about two hours from Brisbane. She and her colleague Lyal GIles, who’s Principal of Nanago State School, came all the way from Nanango to one of our workshops in New York and then flew back home to start training teachers. She’s sent periodic updates on her work with teachers in Nanango and I thought I’d share the latest as it was both inspiring but also provided a blueprint for what implementation might look like in other places where ideas like teaching techniques and practice for teachers might seem foreign at first.
Jillian writes:
We’re powering along down under, continuing to see amazing uptake of TLaC techniques and enjoying the quality and ease of use of the plug ‘n’ plays. In our last PD, we were able to use some clips from our own teachers to reflect on. This made a huge difference for our teachers. It removed all the assumptions of the context of the clips – very powerful.
We have had quite a few visitors to our school recently who have come to see Explicit Instruction in action, which is a focus of our school district. What they are commenting on, however, is our school culture and high standards of behaviour, conversation and engagement in classrooms – not something typically seen in our area. It has reaffirmed for me that change does not have to take forever – when people see such amazing results from change, it is inspiring and motivating.
I’ve been asked to present at a Pedagogy Coach forum next week and I was able to choose the topic. I’m planning a session on the value of practise and the coaches will spend most of the session in practise activities. Lyal and I both agreed we would never run PD without practise again, and this has been the thing that has given us the translation of what was learned in PD into actions in the classroom – the next day! We have some great testimonials from classroom teachers about how they have benefited from our new PD formats.
Hope all is well with you and yours…
Jillian
She’s promised video of her teachers at work so with a bit of luck I’ll be able to share some examples later.