Those of you who know me will understand why this reflection is endorsing Hapara Workspace and how fabulous it is for leading professional learning. I have all my badges for Hapara and here is my Hapara Champion Trainer certificate to confirm that I have completed all three levels of training.

I love using Hapara Workspaces for learning and this year I added all our Newmarket School teachers as learners in Hapara Workspace. As part of my Champion Trainer Certification I built a workspace for teachers. However I did not build this from scratch. I took our 2018 PLG workspace that our ISL and I collaboratively created,  made a copy and then ensured that it was framed with Visible Learning Concepts in that all the goals and rubrics were clear and explicit for each section.

Our current workspace ensures that our Newmarket School teachers can learn from the In School Leaders (ISL) in our school and they can do so on their own time, without the need for face-to-face meetings or substitutes. Our workspace allows us to experiment with leading professional learning in our school. Each section is packed with resources including readings and videos to help explain the focus of each professional learning strategy. Each part has a landing page so that everything is one click away. Each part has an assignment that we ask teachers to do to help drive their own learning deeper. These have been framed using a SOLO Taxonomy rubric co-constructed with the ever fabulous Pam Hook.

For us as ISL and ASL in our school we can quickly pull up examples of our teachers professional learning and lessons that are active in the workspace.

Within our workspace, my favourite section for 2019 is our newest section. 

We asked our teachers to ‘To video teaching a targeted strategy which gives attention to student learning.’ and to share the link on Hapara. 

This part has been really exciting because by the end of term 2, all of our teachers had carried out videoing a mathematics lesson and nearly all had shared it on Hapara. My principal asked us how did we manage to get our teachers to do this. My response was, transparency using Hapara Workspace. The goals and the rubric were clear. Also our ISL expected it to happen and continually reinforced this during staff meetings and team meetings.

Our next steps for this is for each team to view team members videos and to give feedback. We also asked that each teacher reflect on the process.

I took many of the ideas from the Hapara trainer course and incorporated these into our workspace.

I have to give a shoutout here for our fabulous Senior Management Team at Newmarket School. They were the first to line up to complete their Champion Educator Certificates using Hapara for teaching and learning. They would never ask us to do something that they were not prepared to do themselves.

Also for our teachers at Newmarket School because just about all of them have completed the Hapara Champion Course. Just waiting on a few more then I will get a Hapara Grelfie, ‘Group Selfie’.

I also give a shout out to our ISL leaders @Nikki_From_NZ and @BelindaHitchman who lead professional learning in our school and were the first to get their maths lessons videoed and shared with their teams. Talk about Teacher Agents at Newmarket School. They make things happen. What a fabulous evidenced example of teachers preparing to share their learning with their peers and to give and receive feedback.

I wonder if I can push our teachers just a little further and see if they are willing to take up the Hapara Champion Scholar course. This second course focuses on pedagogy and looks deeply at learning from student perspective. This course also ensures that learning is really transparent for the learner with goals and forms of assessment really clear on their workspaces. They need to be aware that they will get feedback on their workspaces from their peers in the course. I also wonder if our teachers would be keen to video and share a writing lesson.

Imagine the resources being created for our future teachers by our current amazing teachers.