I write to live, and live to write....

GTS: 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 Today we had a teacher only day at school. We begun the day with school-wide writing moderation. We firstly talked about why moderation is important. We had a moment or two to independently think about that question, then we used a strategy that we use in our classroom's-Peer/shared why we through moderation was important. 
We then as a staff put all out ideas together into a mind map which is included in the photo below. We then went onto TKI and looked at Why we moderate  article and also discussed key points we found were significant to the question. 

Together as a staff we went through the EasTTle marking rubric and looked at the different stages and what the key words were that differentiates each of the stages, so that we had a better understanding. We also looked at the exemplars online as this would also help us in making judgements on the writing moderations. 




We then got into our groups where we worked together to moderate 3 different writing samples from different year groups. This is found was very helpful as we talked together  in regards to coming to an agreement as to why we thought that student was at that level and justifying our scores with reasons. 

Teaching conversations are very important during moderation as we learn from each other. Being a beginning teacher and being able to work alongside and talk to an experienced teacher, you learn a a lot improving on our curriculum and pedagogical content knowledge. 

It was also interesting to compare the moderation results to our own scores and see the comments of the other teachers and see their views and why they thought the student were not at this level or that level.

I believe that as teachers we are life long learners and these discussions are important in terms of learning from each other through collaborative discussions.