Key Change in Reflective Practice

Step 1 (What): Identify one key change in your professional practice

Over the time of participating in Mindlab, my job has changed and I moved from a classroom teacher to a Deputy Principal/SENCo.  This meant that I could not always have access to children to trial new things I had learned over the course.  However, I found the leadership portion of the course very helpful.  I have chosen the Standard Professional Learning as I have had to begin to see our learners from a different place, especially in my SENCo role in working with children and their families with challenging learning and behaviour needs.

Step 2 (Now what): Evaluate the identified change

It has been interesting to step back and see our learners as a whole, large group rather than just my class or my team - how they interact with different teachers, how their teachers work alongside them and their families to find best outcomes.  I have had to do a lot of reading and professional development on a number of topics related to my SENCo role - behaviour management, autism courses, readings on dyslexia, workshops on the role of the SENCo, etc.  

I have had to learn to not work alongside my team that I was part of last year, but also the other teams within the school and how they work with their children.  I work at a full primary so this has been children aged 5 to 13 years.  I have also had to learn to set up and put in place systems to work with the teachers and children so that I could help meet as many needs as possible.

To do this, I focussed my Literature Review and my follow up inquiry around my new role and have shared it with my appraisor - we are planning for it to be an ongoing part of my appraisal for this year.  It has helped to focus our talks and my job,

When I took over the SENCo role, there was no system for identifying children (for either behaviour or learning), no way of tracking them through their years at our school, little follow up with teachers and scant paperwork kept on what had been done for these children in the past. Children had fallen through gaps in the system and not received any support or very little, and teachers were feeling very unsupported and felt they couldn't get the help they needed - "we'll just monitor them".  It has been difficult to set this up while in the position, but this is where my inquiry has helped - as I based it around the key competencies and linked them to leadership, it meant I could manage myself (workload), build relationships with others (team leaders, MOE service contact, health nurse, SWIS, etc), understand new ways of doing things (the language of the many forms I now need to complete), and finally participating and contributing - running meetings, organising behaviour plans alongside families and teachers, and using PD and readings I had done to help inform teacher's practice.

At this stage, I have collated a list of all the children who are identified as having learning and behaviour needs, and have begun gathering data on these children - who has funding, what support they recieve or should recieve, working with teachers to create independent learning or behaviour plans.  My appraisor and I are now looking into a points system to allocate children onto a priority list as we have a roll of 660 and there are approximately 120 children on the SENCo register.  

I have discovered that every teacher believes their classroom is the most important and has the most needs, so we are also looking at talking to them about the role of the SENCo as they are unaware of this, and also going over the register with them - who is on it, how children end up on it etc.  At present they seem to expect just to mention a name and a magic button can be pushed to fix their problem.  

Step 3 (What next) Share your next plan regarding your future professional development or your future practice.

For the future, the principal and I have set some targets for the expectations of SENCo children and are working through these.  As it is a learning process, we are making changes and decisions as we go.  I have had some great feedback from teachers about the support they are getting which is great!

I am also very keen to build relationships with family and whanau which I believe is very important.