Big doings - Global Teacher Fellow

This must be some sort of a record two posts in one week? What sort of crazy things will happen next?

The answer is: A whole lot! I'm leaving for Australia where I'll be traveling as a Rural Trust Global Teacher Fellow (Rural School and Community Trust). I applied for this back in January after hearing about it and realizing that I wanted to do something beyond my normal work. I realized that I needed to go somewhere in the southern hemisphere to be able to observe classes during my summer vacation. The requirement to travel over the summer was an integral part of the program. I choose Australia based on the suggestion of Dr. Dan MacIsaac, my advisor from graduate school, who had heard of the work being done at Deakin University and suggested I check it out.

Out of the blue I emailed Dr. Russell Taylor at Deakin University. Dr. Tyler send me some articles to read, told me about the research that was going on, and gave me more information about the school system in the province of Victoria. He invited me to come on down if my application was successful, and lo and behold it was!

It's been a whirlwind of the school year and I'm finally at the point where I can breathe a little bit well in between taking care of my kids and trying to get ready for this trip. I'm getting more excited and more nervous every minute there's a lot to do before I go but I'm also excited about the possibility of learning from other teachers professors change that to end. Hopefully this will help re-energize my own physics teaching will also give me a window into different educational system that approaches students learning in a different way than my own. I feel that this will be invaluable and I'm thrilled to see how they do things, especially reflective writing. I'm also excited to interview the teachers- nothing terribly formal- just a conversation about how their location reinforces their teaching, how they help students relate to the material, and how they grow professionally as educators – basically the same things that I struggle with as a teacher. I'm hoping to be able to visit teachers and schools that are located in areas similar to my own. I'm not positive that this will happen because those teachers are fairly isolated and Australia is a huge place. I'm limited to the province of Victoria but hopefully I'll be able to find some schools where I can observe things that are relevant to my own teaching. Dan O'Keeffe, a retired physics teacher who runs the Vicphysics Teachers' Network, has been a godsend, helping me figure out logistics and putting together an itinerary for me to visit different schools.

A lot of my preparation before I leave has also been technological: trying to get a good app to do interviews, trying to organize my notes and my thoughts for everything that I want to get out of this experience. I've decided to use this blog is a place to chronicle all of my different visits. Probably won't be anything too detailed but after each school I go to I'm hoping to put some quick notes up here so that people can see my impressions and track my trip.

So thanks for taking the time to read this- and come back soon to see more new stuff!