About stevemouldey

Geographer, Educator, Pontificator

Getting to Know My Learners

Posted on February 2, 2015 by stevemouldey

Day 2 of #28DaysofWriting and it was Day 1 of school for the year. That meant that today was spent with the 12 Year 9 and 10 students in my Learning Hub (our HPSS version of Learning Advisories). Part of the day focused on getting to know each other and part of the day on a challenge introducing them to one of our Hobsonville Habits.

I have 2 aims in the first few days of school every year:

Get to know my learners
See them go home happy

Today I got to know my Hub through a range of activities involving them speaking to each other, writing answers, drawing pictures and creating sculptures out of material such as play doh, paper, straws and pipe cleaners. I also learned a lot (possibly more) by watching how each of them approached each activity. Continue reading →

2015 Was A Great Year

Posted on February 1, 2015 by stevemouldey

Creative Commons image sourced from: http://pixabay.com/en/sylvester-2015-fireworks-435376/

An ex-Principal of mine (Prue Kelly at Wellington High School) used to start the 1st Teacher Only Day of the year saying that it had been a great year. By setting that expectation from the start we just had the ‘simple’ task of proving her right. I am facing a year looking completely full of awesome (yes in the true sense of the word: reverence, fear et al) challenges: Continue reading →

#EdJourney Part 1

Posted on January 28, 2015 by stevemouldey

I recently finished reading a wonderful book by Grant Lichtman called #EdJourney. This book is the result of an 89 day trip in which he visited 64 schools and interviewed over 600 people on educational innovation and the future of schools. Part One of the book is on roadblocks to change and innovation in schools and then gives examples of how schools he visited have overcome these. The four major obstacles found were:

Time (the most common)
People (risk, fear and growth mindset)
Leadership
Structure

Each of these are discussed in a chapter and also gives examples of how schools have overcome each of these. Continue reading →

2014 blogging in review – thanks everyone!

Posted on December 30, 2014 by stevemouldey

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

This blog is written for 2 purposes: 1) to help me process my thoughts 2) to share my thoughts in case they may be of use to anyone else. Thanks to all of you who have read, shared and commented on my posts this year. They have all in some way contributed not just to the stats below but also to progressing my thoughts further. Thank you.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

How Might We Promote Growth Mindset, Risk Taking and Perseverance in Teachers?

Posted on November 17, 2014 by stevemouldey

It has been a while since I have posted a Question Quest post and this is a question I have been pondering a lot lately. This HMW question actually started as a why question:

Why are teachers so unwilling to be uncomfortable when they expect it of students every day?

I have been frustrated to see teachers across the country unwilling to take a risk and push themselves to try new approaches. It seems that it is about getting teachers to feel ok with that uncomfortable learning feeling. To me, discomfort is just a part of learning:

The Learning Pit by James Nottingham

And if we expect students to be ok at grappling with confusion and discomfort while they learn new skills and ideas, shouldn’t we be ok at doing the same? Continue reading →

A Reason to be Hairy

Posted on November 10, 2014 by stevemouldey

One of my favourite times of year is November. The reason it is also my partner’s least favourite time of year is that most Novembers I take part in Movember. It is great fun but more importantly raises awareness and funding for Men’s health issues (thanks to Stuart Birch for sharing this great example of what the funds go towards).

This is a great reason to take part. Sure, looking back on my daughter’s birthday photos makes for funny viewing (as her birthday is in the last week of November), I get people watching me closely as the guy with a dodgy Mo walks by and it can get irritating over the last weeks but it goes to a good cause.

That said, please make it worth my while to look like I do below and sponsor my effort at this link: http://mobro.co/stevemouldey

My Movember effort so far

Working in an MLE

Posted on November 7, 2014 by stevemouldey

This post was originally written for The Network – a newsletter for the New Zealand Board of Geography Teachers:

Modern Learning Environments (MLE) seem to be springing up all over the country and all new builds or developments in schools now are supposed to be under this model. I have been teaching in a brand new MLE this year at Hobsonville Point Secondary School. So what is it actually like to work in an MLE? Continue reading →

How Might We Reduce Scarcity?

Posted on November 6, 2014 by stevemouldey

This term I am teaching a module on Economic concepts called The Apprentice. Each week is a different challenge based upon a different concept or skill. So far we have investigated resource types, consumer rights and made an advertisement. Today our focus was on the concept of Scarcity and I decided to approach it as a 90 minute Design Thinking challenge.

As usual, we started the class with a What If question – today’s being: What if there were no chickens left in the world? With 5 minutes to write down as many ideas as possible and then sharing a few answers, 10 minutes of our precious 90 minutes a week was gone. We had, however, opened up into a divergent mindset ready to think creatively in our task at hand today (as well bemoan the loss of KFC and pancakes from our lives).

The only form of direct instruction in the lesson happened next as I led a whole class discussion on Scarcity. What does it mean, what are some examples etc. Students then chose a specific scarce resource and worked in groups for 10 minutes to generate a list of all the different things it is used for and what the issues are with it as a resource. After this the group had to come to a consensus as to what the key problem is for that resource.

We then discussed the challenge for today:

Continue reading →

Design Thinking Discussion

Posted on October 28, 2014 by stevemouldey

Last week, as part of Connected Educators Month, I organised a Hangout on Design Thinking. Design Thinking has become quite a buzzword lately with many more teachers investigating it as an approach, The aim of this Hangout was to have both Primary and Secondary educators from New Zealand (Kimberly Barrs and myself), Australia (Zeina Chalich and Tim Osborne) and the United States (Mary Cantwell, Lisa Abel-Palmieri and Dan Ryder) discussing what it adds to their classroom, how they got started and what others should do to get started.

Here’s how the awesomeness unfolded:

Steve Mouldey

Emergent Reflections of a Secondary Teacher

Author Archives: stevemouldey