Saturday, September 20, 2008

Education Queensland Thursday 18 September

This morning we were hosted at Education Queensland by Margie Burrell and Susan Brown who were keen New Basics supporters. We only spent an hour and half with them but it was very valuable.

We grabbed hard copies of Blueprints and a CD with the Rich Tasks on it. We saw samples of work and discussed pedagogy and various implementation models. As the meeting progressed I saw Andrew, Teryl, Vickee and Kurt realising the potential of this model. Margie and Susan were impressed with what we were planning.

After a quick coffee we returned to the Hotel and spent the next couple of hours moulding our excitement into a workable plan which follows:

Read material supplied by Education Queensland before landing in NZ.
Download and familiarise ourselves with all Rich Tasks and Blueprints by end of holidays.
Meet in first week of Term IV to prepare ALG presentation.
Present the following to ALG by end of week 3:

One year 9 class (minimum) be staffed by converts who would teach one Rich Task/Blueprint to that class in 2009 and report to ALG.
Combine two Year 9 classes as desribed above with four teachers and deliver a full Rich Task/Blueprint curriculum in 2010 and report to ALG.
All Year 9 and the Year 10 pilot have curriculum as above in 2011.
All Year 9 and 10 have above curriculum.

After that we discussed the Teacher Rubrics that everyone had been working on which will form part of the Teacher Observation programme we will be implementing next year which is described on the planning wiki.

This has been a wonderful team to work with and will be key people over the next few years.

After a late lunch we are relaxing a bit. Vickee and Teryl are going out on the town tonight with friends of Vickee and the boys are planning a ferry ride down the river to Regatta and having dinner there.

Tomorrow night we fly to Auckland and then drive home on Saturday.

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