4. Plan for practice

It’s time to plan how you will put your learning into practice.

Try one of these suggestions in your work together over the next few weeks. 

Suggestions for practice

• Try a teacher-teacher aide classroom observation. Observe how your colleague supports students to connect with each other. Write down your observations, noting the things you could try. Meet afterwards and discuss the following questions:
  1. In what ways can we help students to connect with others?
  2. What are some strategies or techniques we can learn from each other?
  3. In what ways can we work together to better support all students in class?
• If you tried activities 1, 3 or 4, you will have discussed a range of strategies for building students’ peer relationships, connections and sense of belonging. Choose one of these to try in your class. Decide what the roles of the teacher and teacher aide will be. Try the strategy over a couple of weeks.
• Talk with members of the school leadership team about ways to get feedback about how peer relationships and students’ sense of belonging are fostered in your class. For example, this might be included as a topic when your school/class holds a family/whānau forum. Ask questions and listen to family/whānau preferences and ideas about ways to support their children. You could also discuss how the teacher aide works in the classroom to foster peer-to-peer learning and connections.