Profile

Wendy Hogg

Type: Primary Science
School: Kapanui Primary School www.kapanui.school.nz
Programme: Fern Hunt
Hosts: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa, Tongarewa
Nga Manu Nature Reserve, Waikanae- ngamanu@clear.net.nz
Wikispace- Corers12-1 wendy pearson

Description

Wendy Hogg is a graduate Bachelor Agricultural Science (Lincoln 1980) and post graduate diploma in Education (Victoria ). She has spent the last 10 years teaching at Kapanui School across a number of different levels but mainly year 5/6.Prior to this Wendy worked in Agricultural consultancy both in New Zealand and latterly in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.


Hosting Wendy in 2012 are 2 organisations that will provide support and learning opportunities on a number of levels. Dr Leon Perrie, Curator of Botany at Te Papa will train Wendy to identify, gps position,photograph and classify ferns. Bruce Benseman, Manager at Nga Manu Nature reserve in Waikanae will involve Wendy in the day to day activities at Nga Manu and she will help establish a fern educational resource for the centre’s new classroom. She will also be seeking to find, photograph and identify ferns that are specific to the Kapiti Coast to add to the Te Papa information resources.

Wendy is looking forward to discovery and new learning. She is particularly excited by the prospect of finding out about such primitive botanic plants and the possibility of discovering new species. Working in a local community will assist in taking new science learning back to the classroom later in the year and beyond. A world of wonder awaits!

Increasing the opportunities students have to talk about science has many benefits. It provides opportunities for teachers to learn about the knowledge students already have and makes students’ thinking visible. In this way it is an important tool for formative assessment. Talk, however, does much more than just make thinking visible: it actually supports the development of thinking. A large number of studies have shown that structured classroom talk produces deeper engagement with the content under discussion, and develops subject-specific reasoning Resnick, Michaels and O’Connor (2010) call talk that attempts to make discourse norms and ways of behaving accessible to all, Accountable Talk. This sort of talk attends to, and builds on, the ideas of others; emphasises logical connections and the drawing of reasonable conclusions; and speakers endeavour to make explicit the evidence behind their claims. To begin these sorts of discussions, students need to have interesting and complex questions and ideas to talk about.