Wednesday, 25 July 2012

New year's resolutions

Hot on the heels of the start of summer break, I have plenty of goals for my professional development next year and I wanted to get them written down before I forget them:
  • Bring SBG in to all of my classes; the pilot period is over and I love it. :)
  • Try to avoid getting stuck in the daily grind (this goal deserved its own post: see earlier post)
  • Introduce Community Problem Solving as an after-school group - I'm really excited about doing this. The idea is that students identify some problem in their community (community could be school, local community, region, county, nation or world) and create a project that aims to solve that problem. In doing so they must plan the logistics, get sponsors/funding, recruit help and delegate work. Past projects I've heard about are extremely wide-ranging and awesome sounding. Take a look at an example here.
  • Start teaching wrestling/grappling in the school's free-choice period - One of my main hobbies outsite of work is Mixed Martial Arts, which I've been doing for about a year and a half now and I really want to get it in to my school life somehow. Because of the inherent dangers of MMA, it would be hard for me to ever teach it in school. Wrestling and other forms of grappling (like Judo and Jiu-Jitsu) are much more regularly taught to children and so I feel safer doing this. I don't nearly have enough experience to properly coach this, but the school I'm at has a free-choice period once a fortnight (which works like a taster session), which seems perfect for my level of knowledge. I'm really excited about this, but also worried about potential health and safety issues. I'd love some advice about this. The dangers are obvious:
  • Have at least one functional and rich problem for each unit I teach to either introduce the unit or round it off - I want classes to feel like they lead to something and are not just endless drills of abstract skills.

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