Malaysia Boleh

I haven't blogged since I arrived in Johor Bahru in May this year so I thought it was time to get 'back on the blog'.
I am very privileged to be working here as an Education Advisor contracted through a company called LeapEd, to the Malaysian Government.  We are working on a transformation project in government schools called Trust Schools.  To meet accreditation in Year 5 of the programme these schools must meet certain standards across a range of criteria.
The biggest shift is in the Teaching and Learning in these schools and some teachers have come a very long way on an amazing journey. To that end some of the biggest challenges are to meet the AfL and differentiation criteria.
At the highest level this means students need to have far more autonomy and be able to set their own goals, using strategies that suit them and their individual learning styles. To support teachers in doing this it is essential they understand the development and progression of students across the range of skills in their curriculum area. So (or 'jadi' in Malay) to that end I am currently working with a group of teachers in the two schools where I am based to encourage teachers - and ultimately students, to be clear about next steps in learning.
I have found some amazing resources on pinterest and will attach one example with some other links here.

From Pinterest

Grade 5 LearningTargets
Young Teacher Love
How to Write Learning Targets
Learning Targets Images & Examples

Yes please

Bigger, better, faster - of course we want it!

Tag the world

A great blog post from Techcrunch that has reminded me once again of the value of tags - I try to do these pretty thoroughly but in the process of uploading a whole pile of pics to flickr I have been remiss.  A good wet day activity will be for me to go back and add tags and descriptions to these hundreds of photos.  An example of the value is that I recently received a comment from a Penwarden relation I had never heard of, when I tagged an old photograph of my dad's grandfather.  Another example was when I uploaded some of my mum's old school photos and a family of one of her classmates contacted me to say that was the first photo they had ever seen of their dad (who is now deceased) when he was young.  Connections like that are so exciting.