TPACK Reflections

Content Knowledge
Much of my teaching career has been as a Support Teacher: Literacy and Numeracy. My main role is to support classroom teachers to cater for individual student needs focusing on literacy and numeracy skills. My strengths lie in identifying the necessary literacy and numeracy skills students need to develop to be able to access the class curriculum and to provide appropriate program support for these students. I haven't developed a deep knowledge base all of the Key Learning Areas (KLAs), but instead have developed the ability to identify the literacy or numeracy demands of a KLA in order to provide specific support in these domains. The rollout of the Australian Curriculum and the provision of Achievement Standards that identify the knowledge and understanding that students should demonstrate at particular stages of their education have provided clear starting points for teachers to use when identifying the areas of support for their students. Many teachers benefit from support to be able to select appropriate learning tasks and sequence of activities to assist students to meet the achievement standards as well as cater for students achieving above the year level standards.

Pedagogy
Pedagogical knowledge is an area of relative strength for me. As the focus of my ST:LaN role, I support and work with teachers to provide appropriate classroom tasks to cater for a range of student abilities differentiation of class programs and assisting with whole school data analysis and student assessment. Being able to assist teachers by working with small groups to develop specific skills using a range of teaching methods and approaches is an area I am confident with. Over the last several years, there has developed greater focus on mentoring teachers, so I have strengthened my skills in this area. For the past several years, I have worked very closely with another ST:LaN teacher at 2 schools and this work environment has increased our personal skills as having the opportunity to collaborate on ideas and programs has improved resulted in improved student outcomes. An area of improvement is to develop a larger bank of skills to support high achieving students to ensure student engagement.

Technology
When it comes to technological knowledge, I am confident using a range of software and online tools to substitute, augment and modify learning tasks in terms of the SAMR model. My goal is to develop the ability to redefine learning tasks using technology. My biggest challenge is that I get really inspired by some of the ideas that are being shared, but then feel disheartened when seemingly being blocked by the lack of capable infrastructure and tools that can be accessed in my teaching context. In my current role with Project 600, a significant amount of time is having to be devoted to supporting schools and teachers who are struggling with poor bandwidth and trouble shooting technical issues with the online platform that has recently been upgraded. Trouble shooting solutions with new/unfamiliar tools is an area of strength as I like to always challenge myself to work out how to solve issues and work out solutions for myself, but also find it very beneficial to trouble shoot as part of a team. Unfortunately, too much time and energy is being devoted to this aspect which then reduces the time available to develop programs using digital pedagogy.