My Practice and Community---part 2

Following the part one of my practice in community, here I add on a little more about core value of myself and my kindergarten.

Talking about core value of myself. I am believer of constructivism and supporter of community of learning. I firmly believe that children should dominant their learning, rather than teacher. Learning should be a fun process, it should be like air, you breath it everyday and can't feel any burden from it.It was impossible in old days to practice those values in traditional schools. but with the help of technology advancement, especially those technologies influenced by modern teaching theories, such as Lego, Scratch, Internet and MOOOC, It is possible to make a change. On the other hands, "teaching" under those theories are still difficult to me sometimes. Because of the long influenced by the traditional teaching theory, it is very natural to go back to old teaching in daily practice. But teaching itself means learning, isn't it. with more reflection, encouragement from my communities, and continuous learning online/offline, I believe I can make it :)


In term of core value of my working place, I list them as below:

• Respect: develop a positive feeling of esteem
• Belonging: creating connections and being part of a group
• Empowerment: celebrating every child's achievements
• Resilience: encouraging and developing the confidence to keep trying
• Enjoyment: ensuring life is fun 

Compared those value with Regio, Te Whariki from Ministry of Education and my core value, It matches each other, That is the reason why I like to work in my place now. 

In term of legal, professional regulations. I think of the big concern is safety(I will talk about it in another post "Applied Professional Ethics" in more details). Sometimes, because of lack confidence to ourselves or to children, I have to sacrifice some children's right to play,such as climbing trees, which were common in my age, for their safety reason. Sometimes, because of the professional regulations and our mixed age classroom, we had to do something which maybe not the interest to children in some age. One example is, when we do calendar or mat time for older children, younger one maybe has no interest to those since they are too young to understand this, should we keep on doing it or let the younger one attending separate activities? if yes, will the management support that? Those kinds of things bothered me sometimes. But as i said, the shift from transitional learning to modern learning is still under the way, I am sure most of the those problems will be fixed when more and more people adopted the idea of community of learning.