“What the teacher is, is more important than what she teaches.”

I really didn't think I was going to be able to cross #13 off my 101 challenge this year. I had a little inkling that if I did it might have to do with my job but thought I may just have to fudge it - I'm a teacher, I teach kids how to do things all the time! DONE!
But I don't have to fudge it. I have a great little story and I'm so, so proud to share it.

I don't know if I've talked about it on here, but my class has taken part in some Master's research this year for a colleague and dear friend of mine. The idea behind the research is quite simply 'does the use of ICT help to motivate and promote self efficacy in students', in particular to writing and blogging.

Enter Room 13 and their blog. At our school all classes must have a blog that they post to regularly. It's a great way to share with our parents the things that are going on day to day in our classrooms. Mostly our blogs have photos and little write ups about fun things that we've been up to and a lot of this is written by the teacher. Somewhat more in my class - I teach older dudes (11 - 13 years old) - I would get the students to do a lot of the writing about what we'd been up to themselves. The class on the whole was quite good at getting into the blog and posting with text and photos but even though I wasn't writing on it as such, the ownership of the blog was really held back with me. They weren't really fussed by it though and I don't think they understood the potential of it all. After all this they certainly do!

But the whole class now loving blogging and realising it's potential isn't the main part of the story...

At the start of the year I very vividly remember having a conversation with one of the dudes in my class. He is a great great reader and a very skilled mathematician but had trouble with writing and because of this hated it. I wholeheartedly agree - why would you want to do something everyday that you're simply not good at? In Term 2 sometime I introduced a writing starter called 'Rocket Writing' that the class really enjoyed, and although he would often share his writing from this exercise with the class, he still wasn't very warmed up to the idea of being an author. Even after our first 'intervention' blog post (for the research) he wasn't really that fussed.

During the lesson for the 2nd 'intervention' blog post I saw a little spark in him. We were giving the students more choice about what they could write about with this post and something I said in teaching the motivation for this must have got him thinking. He asked a lot of questions during this lesson about how he could shape his writing and talked with  myself and his peers about how to nut out these ideas and craft it into a great piece of writing. It was then I knew that we'd hit that little part deep down inside that was saying to him, "oh yeah, maybe I can do this writing thing". He wrote an amazing piece of writing about people who inspire him including his sporting heroes and his Great Grandad. You can find it here. It's a bit of a tear jerker. I love that we got him to realise the emotions you can invoke in readers with your writing - he loves that - and his writing often pulls at the heart strings.

In one of his reflections on the process we went through he said something to the effect of, "using ICT in writing has meant a lot to me. My writing has improved so much. At the beginning of the year I was well below National Standard and now I'm almost meeting it. "
Task accomplished! He's not the only success story from the research but he was definitely one that stood out for me.

It's these types of things that make my job worth all the hard yakka. What I'm doing is important and to have something concrete like this that demonstrates it brings tears to my eyes - I really can make a difference in someone's life.