With another school year coming to a close, it’s become the opportunity (with other paperwork out of the way for a few days) to start thinking about what’s going to happen next year. In doing this, I started to realise one thing - that I want the 2007 school year to be decidedly different to this one. Not that anything was wrong with this one, but change is necessary.

The reason for this desire to change is that I need to very carefully ask myself whether teaching and learning is effective as it can be. Our teacher-librarian was one of a number of Parramatta Diocesan educators who recently heard Marco Torres explain our three options when faced with this dilemma; namely “complain”, “quit”, or “innovate”.

My hope now is to take up option three. For this to happen, a lot of what happens in my rather “conventional” classroom needs to be critically appraised and changed. If the world is different today, if children are different today, then teaching and learning needs to change with it.

I’ll leave it as is for now. There’s a lot more needed to break this open, and hopefully I can now do it using this blog that for months has sat here while I’ve asked “what worthwhile purpose can I actually use this blog for?”

I have no idea whether any of this is going to work. I don’t even know if I’ll find the time and motivation to get it all done for a whole year. There’s no harm in trying though, is there? Hopefully, even the smallest success will make any effort worthwhile.