What I have learnt during Term 2

During this term I have seen how using the rubrics in writing and maths have encouraged my students to set goals and strive to succeed. It will be interesting to see what results using them on a regular basis over term three will bring.

Our Steps to Success

This term Ben and I have been working to have our students track their progress in Maths Problem Solving. 

We created these Steps to Success which we have embedded in a subpage on our students blogs.
The students reflect with teacher support about where they are working and post a link with the date under the column. The students then highlight what they are currently focusing on with their Problem Solving.

We have also used a create a word problem task that can be used to link as evidence of where they are working. We have brainstormed some ideas and would like to get into recording explanation videos as well.

PD: Jannie van Hees "Developing a Dialogic, Orally Expressive Classroom"

This term, the year 5-8 teachers are participating in Professional Development with Jannie van Hees. Last week we had our first session where Jannie van Hees facilitated a discussion on Oral language within the classroom. She encouraged us to encourage more oral out put within our rooms. Below are my notes from our first session.

Conversational Teaching and Learning

How do you explicitly grow the oral expression of our students?

Discussions, talk moves, repeating, rewording, Think/Pair/Share, Backing Up View Point/Answer, Individual Conferencing.

Students need to be encourages to “output” more orally in order recognise more complex language features. They need to have “gifted” words provided multiple times a day in order to effectively receive a high level model of appropriate language features. The need to be continuously fed in order to lift their language readiness.

When students are acquiring language knowledge there are three major gains that happen for them.  

1. Deeper Knowledge: Structure and Grammatical Language
2. Fullness of Expression: How to deeply engage and talk with others using rich vocabulary
3. Extended Language Growth, Vocabulary and Repertoire

This supports them to become effective communicators. Our role when communicating is to minimise the work for others while maximising the meaning.

Ideas for how to acquire language knowledge

• Pre peer share gift the students rich text so they have a higher level to peer share from.
• Lots over verbal peer share with others before tasks are written etc.
• Shaping, orally holding on.
• Show students video or listen to news- recall what they remember (helps to hold knowledge mentally.)
• Contributor and Receiver- engagement. 
• Students to pre gather information in their head, T to gift high level text, T elaborates with more ideas and complex expression. Must be done regularly and not once a fortnight!

Point to ponder: How many questions do you ask your students on a daily basis?  Questions do not provide opportunities for students to expand their thinking and language. Instead Jannie suggests to respond to meaning and purpose as they provide a way for students to expand their thinking and engage in understanding.

Reflecting on Progress: Term 1

Over this term I have made a start. My students have begun to track their writing learning. With a focus on sentences we have used the rubric to assess our work. The students have then gone through and sent their work to the Picasa Album. This has made their work visible for their peers and others which makes them accountable for their work.
Next term I will make sure I take time to continue getting the students to self assess, justify this and to send their work to the exemplar folders. 

Visible Learning: Creating a bank of exemplars

We have begun! Over the term the students have been using the sentence rubric to judge where we are working. The students have then orally justified the year level of their work and sent it to a Picasa album which is embedded in our site.

Please visit our site and look at our writing exemplars.

Picasa Albums!

After an inspiring conversation with the amazing Dorothy Burt, I have created Picasa albums to go with my sentences rubric.

Using the rubric, I plan to conference with the children about their work and agree on a year level their work is sitting at. Once they have decided, the students will then take a screenshot of their work and email it to the correlating Picasa album. 

This will create a bank of exemplars with which we can refer to throughout the year. It also makes their learning visible and the students accountable for what they are producing.

Over the following week we will hopefully have some work to share so watch this space!

Teaching Inquiry 2015

How can students knowing where they are working and what their next steps are increase the ownership of their learning?

This year I am lucky enough to be teaching in a Year 4/5 class with the amazing Ben Baxendine. Our brand new open modern learning environment currently caters to 60 eager students.

We have set our teaching inquiry on raising student ownership of learning through clearly guiding students about where they are working and what their next learning steps are.

I have decided to begin this journey by focusing on using rubrics for each of our learning goals during writing. 

As you can see in the example below I have broken down for the students what is expected when writing sentences at each year level. The students then use this to judge where they are working and to set their goal for what they need to do to progress to the next level.

My aim is to make this visible for the students with examples of their work on our site and also on the wall. It keeps the students accountable to themselves, their pairs, and myself and will hopefully inspire progress.