Dr. Strangeblog or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the RTC

Despite my somewhat irreverent post title induction into the teaching profession in New Zealand is serious business.

Beginning Teachers are granted provisional registration when they start their teaching career and spend at least two years being supervised by an assigned mentor before they can apply for full registration. In order to gain full registration Beginning Teachers are required to gather evidence of their professional development to demonstrate how they meet each of the New Zealand Teacher Council’s Registered Teacher Criteria.

Most teachers are still using the dreaded ringbinders as a way to gather evidence in the  event that the Council decides to audit their application. After unsuccessfully doing battle with University of the Hill last year to submit my paperwork via google docs I’m seizing the opportunity afforded by working in a digitally savvy school and am going paperless with the evidence-gathering process for registration.

Some of my work will go on behind digital gates however I would remiss if I didn’t also consider about blogging this journey. My Graduating Teacher Standards eportfolio has generated a lot of traffic to the site and provided a useful analyitical framework for my edublogging. I enjoyed the process of using blogging as a way to gain evidence for the Graduating Teacher Standards that in a fit of edugeekism I decided to take on a second blogging project, the Registered Teacher Criteria.

Following my credo that blogging doesn’t work without a purpose. Here’s my purpose

1. To Share – Bloggers love to share. Some would say we over-share, but if someone at some point gets some use out of my ill-formed ramblings then that’s marvellous.

2.  To learn – I’ve got an awesome group of teachers to learn from at my school. But yet still I love that there’s a network of teachers around the world that I can on for advice (and who so freely give it). Thanks PLN!

3. To provide an ‘adjacent possible‘  – So much of the discussion around teachers use of social media is  ill-informed scaremongering. Someone needs to show that not only can you blog while teaching without the sky falling in. In fact there are many benefits to using social media for professional learning.

4.   To inform.  One of the troubling misconceptions that came out in the comments section of this post is that people seem to assume that Beginning Teachers come into the profession knowing all there is to know about teaching. Documenting this journey from provisional to registered teacher as a way to de-privatize teaching practice and show that developing teaching ability is a process not just talent a set of  innate personality characteristics.

So yes it seems you have at least another 2 years of reading my opinions, rants, and musings.