New school year, new blog post (finally!)

My goodness, it has been a while since I have updated this poor blog.

That is not to say that I haven't spent the last few months exploring my teaching practice and being challenged and engaged in problem solving, in fact just the opposite: every day at HPSS requires thinking and engagement from the teachers as well as the students, you can't just rock up to class with some worksheets that you use every year in the same topic for that year level.

All modules are new because the students make them new - they give us the contexts and show the direction that we need to cater to, and so keeping only a few steps ahead of the students is always challenging, exciting and time consuming!

Tomorrow HPSS welcomes in a new cohort of year 9's - the third such cohort. I imagine that our spaces are going to start feeling more full, and possibly that the older students are in for a bit of a shock having to share their spaces and teachers with yet another year group. I am really looking forward to having 'senior' students (Qualification years) as well as 'junior' students (Foundation Years), and seeing how or if the students have changed over the last 6 weeks, as well as welcoming new students to our special school. I am grateful that I have met with every single student in my learning hub (14 of them), along with their parents last week - it makes me feel like I know all the newbies a bit already, and because they've met me and been in our learning community space, hopefully the first day of secondary school is less daunting for them than I know it was for me.

Over the next few blog posts, I hope to review some of the work I was involved with last year, as well as make some more directed reflections on specific issues relating to the MindLab course I am completing at the moment.

I am also part of the re-vamped Learning Design Leaders team at HPSS this year, representing the Science learning area, and so will endeavour to share some of the (EPIC! MASSIVE!) work our awesome science team has done to completely review and redesign the way that we teach science at HPSS (capabilities focus.... watch this space!)