Junior Yellow Wellington Trip 2013

On 2nd July we used our CRT planning day to go up to Wellington to visit three schools.  The purpose of our trip was to look at collaborative teaching approaches and also Reggio inspired teaching.  Our team worked together to choose three schools from a Ministry of Education shortlist.  We visited; Island Bay, Worser Bay and Adventure School.  It was great observing other schools (nice to be on the other side of this process!) and ask questions about Inquiry Learning approaches.  We found it very worthwhile and affirmed many of our ideas on teaching Inquiry at the junior level.  We found clear links between Reggio inspired teaching and Inquiry.  We saw schools working collaboratively to the power of two or three.  The schools we visited who were effectively using spaces were working in schools built in the 1960's and 1970's.  The spaces they were working in were definitely not 'MLE' but these teachers were using spaces they had created to successfully team teach.  Children were on task and working productively.  At the end of our day we spent some time reflecting and thinking about our future steps as a team.  See below for our mind maps and reflective thoughts.  We have asked for some time at a staff meeting during Term 3 to report back to staff about our Reggio journey and our team actions from our observations in Wellington.