Laying the Foundations
One teacher's journey
One of the things that I love about twitter is how it often challenges my assumptions and beliefs.
This has happened again as someone I respect posted a tweet that I thought wasn't too controversial.
Actually, I thought that it might be controversial, but I was surprised at which people were saying that flash cards shouldn't be used when teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondences. These include many whose opinions I also deeply respect.
So what to do? Well, it got me reflecting on how and why I use flash cards. 1. Flashcards are cheap and easy to make. Anyone can make a flashcard. You just need a pen and some card (although most people would probably print them). This is perfect for educators who are time-poor and/or with limited financial resources (a.k.a. all of us!). 2. Flashcards can provide retrieval practice. Once you have the flashcards you can use them to get students to retrieve the information that they have learnt previously. Novices need plenty of practice in order to learn new skills. This is particularly true when we want students to learn something as crucial as reading. In order to read effectively, students must learn grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Putting them on flashcards allows the teacher to provide regular opportunities to practise these skills. When you go through a set of cards with your students, you can easily sort them into the ones that they got correct and the ones that they got incorrect. Then you have sorted these into a pile of material that needs to be retaught, along with a pile that students are firm with. 3. Flashcards are portable. If students need opportunities to practise, then teachers need to take advantage of any opportunity they have. I find flashcards perfect for slipping into a pocket so that we can review material whenever my class is waiting for something. This means that I am able to maximise my instructional time. Half the class needs the toilet? Flashcard time! Packed up quicker than expected? Flashcard time! Waiting for the rest of the school to join us for assembly? Flashcard time! 4. Flashcards are maneuverable. One of the key arguments that arose against using flashcards when teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondences is that these are better practised in the context of words. I use flashcards to demonstrate how these isolated units can be blended together into words. I can put the 't' 'e' & 'n' cards up and blend it to read 'ten'. I can rearrange the same cards to form the word 'net'. I can substitute the 'e' for a 'u' and make the word 'nut'. This makes the complex process of reading visible to students. 5. Flashcards are not always perfect or useful. There are of course limitations to flashcards. If we emphasise the 'flash' aspect then we may not be providing our students the thinking time that they need. I am not convinced that flashcards are useful when students are learning split digraphs ('a_e' etc.). Flashcards could of course be used in ways that are ineffective, or promote an unhelpful culture of competition. I think the important thing is that educators reflect on how they are using flashcards to support their students' learning. Once again, it comes back to being intentional about our practice in helping every child to learn. I have focused on using flashcards when learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences as that was the context of this particular discussion. However, I use flashcards across subject areas, and find they are especially useful in maths. How about you? Do you use flashcards? Why or why not? How do you use them? I'd love to learn some new ways to incorporate them into my instruction.
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It's that time of year, the end of the school year, Christmas approaching, and on top of it all the students are getting swimming lessons. I get the joy of sitting on a hot pool deck watching the kids learn new skills. On the first day I turned to the graduate teacher next to me and said, "Watch how the swim teachers are breaking down each skill. They are phenomenal at it!" I started to observe closely too. .. Then I realised that they were following Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. Photo by Brian Matangelo on Unsplash Rosenshine's Principles of InstructionThe Principles of Instruction were compiled by Barak Rosenshine. They are a series of research-based principles that draw on the realms of cognitive science, cognitive supports, and the practice of expert teachers. The resulting list of 10 principles helps teachers ensure that their students are able to learn material efficiently and effectively. Rosenshine's article on the Principles of Instruction can be found here. 1. Begin a lesson with a daily review.Swim teachers start every session by reviewing of what the kids already learnt. Last Friday they taught the students to call 000 in an emergency. The following Monday the very first question was, "What number do you call in an emergency?" In the first session the children were taught how to enter the pool safely, and you can rest assured that they have reviewed this in every single session since. Reviewing the prior learning is an essential step in checking whether or not our students have actually learnt it. If a student hasn't learnt it, then the teacher needs to teach it. This is why I start every session, whether it's Maths, Reading, Art or Science with a recap of what we've learnt in the previous lesson. 2. Present new material in small steps.Swim teachers are awesome at breaking new material into small steps. Need a survival stroke? That's "Chicken, Aeroplane, Soldier". Want to learn freestyle? "Kicky legs, blow bubbles, rainbow arms." Trying to dive under water? "Crocodile arms, hide your ears". When we teach skills we need to break them down into smaller steps. When a skill is broken down into smaller steps, it helps teachers to provide feedback on each element of the skill. Swim teachers are excellent at breaking a complex movements into isolated actions. This reminds me of how a solving a worded problem in Maths can be overwhelming. However, if we break the problem into small steps then all students can succeed. 3. Ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all students.My goodness, swim teachers ask a lot of questions! Within the first five minutes of the lesson I counted at least 50 questions. It was a fantastic back and forth where the instructor would say a brief fact and then ask a question to check that students had understood. How often are you asking students to respond? A brilliant reflection is to get someone to observe you and count how many questions you ask in a set time frame. The swim teacher asked a question every 10 seconds. This helps engage students. If you can't have someone observe, then record yourself and keep a tally. 4. Provide models.Swim teachers model exactly what they want their students to do. I am not quite sure how they manage to show what they need their kids to do underwater, but they've somehow worked out a way to do it! I think it has something to do with breaking the skills into small steps. This means that the instructor can use their arms to model what they want students to do with their arms. Then the instructor can use their arms to model what they need to achieve with their legs. We need to be able to show students not only what we want them to achieve, but also demonstrate how they can achieve it. When educators model to our students we are able to emphasise the process of learning, rather than just the outcome. 5. Guide student practice.Swim teachers guide their students very closely. They talk the kids through every step. There is a real closeness between a swim teacher and their students, as the instructor gently raises a chin to help a child float, or lifts their belly up. How closely are we guiding our students? Are we steering them through each step, or are we just telling them to get to the other side of the pool? Guiding our students intimately means that we can provide feedback so that they don't sink and are suitably challenged. 6. Check for student understanding.Swim teachers check to ensure that every kid has got it before moving on. If the students need more practice, then they get more practice. This makes sense because if they are not kicking well, then they won't kick well when you add arms into the mix! Likewise, it's essential that classroom teachers check their students understanding regularly. We should constantly be trying to find out which students have learnt new material and which ones haven't got it yet. 7. Obtain a high success rate.Do you know what they call it if a swim teacher doesn't get a high success rate? Drowning! Being subjected to a low success rate when you are learning to swim is traumatising. Swim teachers work hard to ensure that every child is learning and this leads to them having fun in the water. There is a lot said about the importance of enjoying learning. Learning is enjoyable if you have a high success rate. We need to make sure that every child is successful. This is another one to record. Film yourself teaching and make note of how many responses are correct. If students are getting it right at least 80% then you've got a high success rate. (Of course we don't expect students to get it right 100% of the time, either). 8. Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks.Swim teachers use plenty of scaffolds. Some of the obvious physical ones include kickboards, life vests, goggles, and pool noodles. The depth of the pool is another really clear scaffold: you don't get to go into deep water until you can actually swim! What scaffolds do you provide to ensure that the waters of your classroom is not too deep? Recently, I set my students a task in maths and very quickly I realised that I'd thrown them in the deep end. They were struggling, and not in a productive way. Fortunately, I realised that they were starting to drown and was able to stop the class and provide the scaffolds they needed. After breaking the problem up into smaller steps, the students were able to swim through it. 9. Require and monitor independent practice.Swim teachers seem to know just when to let their kids to do it themselves. The exhaustion from kids doing multiple laps of backstroke, freestyle and breaststroke speaks volumes for how much swim teachers want these skills to be automatic. We need to make sure our students also get the time that they need to practise skills until they have mastered them. And we need to monitor this independent practice, so that our students are learning what we intended them to learn. 10. Engage students in weekly and monthly review.A fortnight of swimming lessons wasn't really long enough for me to see how the swim teachers implement weekly of monthly reviews. For that I'd need to observe the squad sessions and I don't really like the idea of waking up at 5am just to write a blogpost... So I'll leave it to Troy (@TroyWood01) Think about this in terms of the foundational skills in maths, literacy, science, etc. Are you teaching these skills in manageable parts or a cumulative sequence? If you are then you will see the need to review them regularly. If what we teach is important, then we need to ensure our students learn and remember it. Not just at the end of today's lesson, but at the end of the week, month and year. Find out more about Rosenshine's Principles of InstructionHopefully I've given you an insight into how Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction provides a framework the we can use to ensure that we provide quality explicit instruction. All our students deserve to be taught in a way that empowers them to learn new skills. As educators, it is our role to reflect on how our practices best meets our students' needs. Explicit instruction is an effective and efficient way to cultivate student learning.
One excellent resource to learn more about the Principles of Instruction is Rosenshine's Principles in Action by Tom Sherrington. It's the perfect mix of easy-to-read, practical, informative and affordable! As I was driving home the other day, the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was playing. The sheer beauty of it was almost overwhelming. The way that the choir mixed with the orchestra made it an absolute ode to joy. I was struck by how the impact that these musicians had on me, playing a piece composed almost two hundred years ago. Admittedly I was listening to masters of their craft, but each one was still following the musical notation written on the sheet in front of them. The score in music is a script that allows artists to create beauty centuries after a piece is first created. Actors similarly use scripts to evocatively recreate the stories that Shakespeare wrote. Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash In education however, scripts are often demonised. In my first year of teaching I was told with hints of disgust that a particular program “was good, BUT last year we had to follow a script”. A similar disdain was evident when I began implementing scripted Direct Instruction programs. Scripts are seen to disempower a teacher by minimising their autonomy. A popular publisher has just blogged claiming that scripts shouldn’t be used in teaching because every child is unique.
I believe that we need to pause and challenge this bias against using scripts in education. A refrain that I hear is that ‘teaching is more an art than a science’. And yet musicians, actors and other artists use scripts. One of the best artists I know would save up her money so that she could travel to Europe and ‘study the masters’. She spent this time copying their works so that she could improve her own technique. Scripts can have a similar role in education, providing teachers with a clear path to mastery. The irony is that in Initial Teacher Education, pre-service teachers have to write their own scripts, often with hypothetical students in mind. So why don’t we promote using scripts that have been carefully crafted by experienced educators? I was hesitant to start using a script. I worried that it would take away my autonomy in my classroom. But it didn’t. I found that I no longer was stressing about what I had to say next and that freed my mind to focus on some of the myriad of other things. I was free to focus on which students were engaging. I was free to focus on how students were forming sounds. I was free to focus on providing feedback about the errors being made. I was free! The benefit of being provided with a script meant that my planning workload was drastically reduced. I no longer had the need to add in some busy work because I had run out of planning time. I had access to high-quality resources and was able to use my time to enhance and refine it. Given that workload is one of the biggest issues in education, why aren’t we harnessing the use of educational scripts to provide this? Scripts not only empower teachers, they provide clarity and consistency for students. I once inherited a class that had had six different teachers the year prior! The learning journey of these Grade 2 students had been severely disjointed. This could have been minimised if they had experienced at least a consistent programme. But the reality was that each teacher had brought in their own syllabus. While a script won’t eliminate the disruption, it will help to minimise it. The disruption for students also emerges as the change teachers each year. Using a scripted programme allows each teacher to explicitly build on the specific knowledge that students have learnt each year. Rather than guessing what students might/should have learnt, their teacher is able to look at the scripts and have a much more thorough understanding of the knowledge that their class has. Every child is unique, but so is every audience member. I don’t go and see Hamlet, while the person next to me is watching Macbeth. Rather the similarities between us means that we can experience the same show. Fortunately for education, the similarities between students is much greater than the differences. If this weren’t true than the system would come crashing down. I believe that there is an art to teaching. Like musicians, actors, and many other artists, teachers should reap be given the tools to hone their craft. A script is a tool that can enhance our teaching and help us provide a better education for our students. This post has been adapted from an article featured in Dystinct Magazine Issue 3 in May 2021 My school has had an exciting journey over the last year. It’s a tale that may resonate with you or inspire you. It’s a story of how mindsets and attitudes can shift when evidence emerges that there is a better way to teach our students. This tale began a decade ago, and the first mindset that needed to change was my own. When I started teaching, my understanding of dyslexia was ill-informed. I thought it was an almost mythical, vague umbrella term for anyone who struggled to read. I now know better and look back with guilt at how naïve I was. I remember teaching my first class as a graduate teacher. This class of 8 and 9 year-olds included one student who was very much a beginner reader. I quickly realised that I didn’t have the knowledge to teach someone how to read from scratch, despite completing a four-year Bachelor of Education. I thought that there should be a systematic way to teach a beginner reader. Instead, I was left struggling to teach her, and she was left struggling to read. I regret that I didn’t provide this child with the instruction that she needed. After teaching in Melbourne, Australia, I moved to a remote community in the Northern Territory. There I worked with some of the most disadvantaged children in Australia, predominantly Indigenous Australians. For most of my students, English was their second (or third) language. The teachers I worked with were some of the most passionate and hardest working individuals I’ve met. While I was in the Northern Territory we started to teach English using Direct Instruction programmes as part of the Australian Government’s Flexible Literacy in Remote Primary Schools Program. This approach was unlike anything I had used before. Teachers were provided with a script that built language and literacy skills systematically. More importantly, we received some excellent training and instructional coaching. My own knowledge and skills in teaching reading and writing improved dramatically during this period, as did my ability to mentor and support others. The importance of a consistent and sequential programme cannot be overstated. Teacher retention was a significant issue, and it was not uncommon for students to have several classroom teachers in a year. Using Direct Instruction programmes helped ensure that our students continued on their learning trajectories despite changing teachers. I remember being awestruck when students were able to identify the ‘predicate’ and ‘subject’ of a sentence. I didn’t know what these terms meant, let alone explain them to students and other teachers! I relished listening to students read a rich tapestry of stories, including classics like the Trojan Horse. It was incredible to see these students being successful in the face of multiple challenges. The use of Direct Instruction as part of the Flexible Literacy in Remote Primary Schools Program was found to have a radical impact on the growth of Very Remote Indigenous schools. “In contrast, our analysis shows a 124% growth for Very Remote Indigenous schools involved in Flexible Literacy from 2015 to 2017 while growth in the same period was 19 and 34% for all Australian and Very Remote Indigenous schools, respectively.” (Pearson, 2020, p8) I relocated to be closer to family at the birth of my second child. I got a job at a school in central Victoria which was entrenched in ‘balanced literacy’. Balanced literacy assumes that reading is a natural skill that is learnt through exposure to books and minimal explicit teaching. The school had just invested in Fountas & Pinnell’s Levelled Literacy Intervention and were using this as the intervention programme. This program encourages students to learn words as whole units and provides predictable readers. Children are encouraged to make guesses rather than use knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences to decode accurately. Despite adopting a balanced literacy approach, the school still managed to get ‘good’ results. We are fortunate that our students come from families that love them, support them and surround them with rich language experiences before beginning school. However, some students continued to fail to pick up the skills they needed to become readers. And while this number was ‘acceptable’ in respect to our data; it wasn’t acceptable in terms of the devastating impact that this could have on a child’s life. My new school’s approach of balanced literacy ran counter to my recent experience of using Direct Instruction. One of the common posters in the school highlighted the strategy of “looking at the picture” to decode a word. I dealt with this tension by doing my best to provide quality teaching while ticking the boxes that the school required. I’m proud to say that no one in my class was told to look at a picture when trying to decode. I also built positive relationships with other staff members and started planting seeds that there could be a more effective way to teach literacy. Last year, I accepted the role of Literacy Leader at the school and put my experience and knowledge in teaching literacy to the test. In front of me was the seemingly monumental task of changing our school’s practices to better support all of our students in their reading journey. It turns out that a global pandemic is a great time to convince others that change is needed. In April and May, Victoria underwent its first COVID19 lockdown and schools went to a ‘remote learning’ model. Not having to commute to work, I used the time to dive into the research around the ‘Science of Reading’. “The body of work referred to as ‘the science of reading’ is not an ideology, a philosophy, a political agenda, a one-size-fits-all approach, a program of instruction, or a specific component of instruction. It is the emerging consensus from many related disciplines, based on literally thousands of studies, supported by hundreds of millions of research dollars, conducted across the world in many languages. These studies have revealed a great deal about how we learn to read, what goes wrong when students don’t learn, and what kind of instruction is most likely to work the best for the most students.” (Moats, 2019) I was able to see how this body of research supported what I had learnt through my experience of Direct Instruction regarding how students learn and how teachers can best support students to learn how to read. All I had to do now was convince my principal and my colleagues that our school needed to change direction in our literacy programme.
When face-to-face classes returned in May, I arranged a conversation with my principal about why we should change our approach to teaching literacy to align with the Science of Reading. I thought this was going to be a difficult conversation. I made sure that I had done my research and collated my key talking points. This included the importance of explicitly teaching the six pillars of: oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. I was nervous heading into this meeting and worried about the very real possibility of being told ‘no’, especially given the recent investment that the school had made in Levelled Literacy Intervention kits. However, like many ‘difficult conversations’, it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. My principal could see that some students were continuing to fall through the gaps of our instruction. She recognised that our literacy programme could improve and has arranged the necessary resources to do so. Instead of the ‘no’ that I feared, I received an affirming ‘YES’! I am fortunate to have an incredible principal who can listen to research and is willing to adopt new evidence-based approaches. My next step was to start implementing a stronger Science of Reading approach in my classroom. I began by implementing a phonemic awareness programme. Lindsay Kemeny brilliantly outlined the what, why, and how of phonemic awareness in her article Phonemic Awareness: Where do I start? in the first issue of Dystinct. If you haven’t read this, then you should! Phonemic awareness is how we blend, segment, and manipulate the sounds in spoken language. “Many children with reading difficulties lack phonemic awareness.” (Kilpatrick, 2013, p.14) I started implementing a programme called Heggerty’s Phonemic Awareness with my Grade 1/2 class as there were some lessons available to support schools doing remote learning. I could see the benefit it would have for my weaker readers. What shocked me was the skills that my ‘strong’ readers were missing: many couldn’t reliably rhyme or accurately identify initial sounds in words. Explicit teaching helped, and within a couple of weeks these lessons were humming along. Every child was achieving success. So, of course, I invited my principal to observe. And she quickly got every other staff member to watch one of these lessons. We ordered the books so that all classes from Foundation- Grade 3 could begin implementing the program. It was crucial that I could share my knowledge with other staff, so I ran a Professional Learning series on the Science of Reading. Initially, we explored the Simple View of Reading which is a formula presented by Gough & Tunmer (1986) that: Decoding x Language Comprehension = Reading Comprehension. We investigated how oral language, comprehension, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary and fluency are all essential components in being able to read. We then started to hone in on how we could effectively teach phonemic awareness, as people were inspired by the success I was having in my classroom. And then Victoria had its second COVID-19 lockdown. However, the Grade 1/2 classes continued to deliver online phonemic awareness lessons every day of the second lockdown (which lasted from July-October). I’m still getting comments from parents who I think were equally amused and impressed about “chopping sounds” (usually with grandiose gestures). The Grade 1/2 team also started sending out decodable readers in our remote learning packs. These allowed us to focus on particular letter-sound combinations. It might seem like an outrageous expense to provide books that we might not get back. However, thanks to https://www.speldsa.org.au/, we were able to access and use free printable versions. When we returned to school in Term 4 we hit the ground running. We rolled out Heggerty’s Phonemic Awareness in the Foundation & Grade 3 classes. I ran further professional learning on teaching phonics systematically and synthetically. Our school ordered a heap of decodable readers. And we got rid of the ‘reading strategies’ posters that told children to look at pictures instead of words! I have been overwhelmed by how my colleagues have embraced our new approach. It’s not easy changing things that we’ve been doing for years (and for some, decades), but everyone is eager to learn more. They genuinely want to do what is best for their students and are going out of their way to give them the best possible education. What surprised me most was that the colleagues that I thought would be reluctant to change are amongst the most enthusiastic about our new approach. This year, we are continuing to focus on embedding our teaching of phonemic awareness & phonics (synthetically & systematic) with the support of our decodable books. We are shifting our comprehension instruction to support a knowledge-rich curriculum. We’re explicitly teaching vocabulary and looking at the morphology and etymology of words in detail. We've changed the assessments we use to better assess the individual components of reading (hello, DIBELS) and refined our intervention programme. It is a lot to work on, and I’m mindful not to overwhelm my fellow teachers. I am finding it a delicate balance to take small steps quickly, without rushing! In particular, our new approach is providing our graduate teachers with the guidance and training that they need. I am in awe of how they cater for all of their students. The clarity of our programmes means that the quality of their instruction is excellent. I wish that I had this level of support when I started teaching! I held a parent information session outlining how our school is now teaching literacy. The comments from parents have been overwhelmingly supportive with many starting to see the benefits. We have employed an experienced tutor to work with small groups of students who need extra support. One highlight was a recent conversation with a family whose child is presenting with dyslexia. The psychologist who prepared the report made a number of recommendations. It was such a positive experience to inform the family that we had already adopted the suggested strategies and approaches! My school has a long road ahead to ensure that every child gets the literacy instruction they deserve. But we have made a strong start. Our staff are on board, our parents are supportive, and our students are eager to learn! References Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, Reading, and Reading Disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104 Kilpatrick, D. (2013) Equipped for Reading Success. Moats, L. (2019, Oct 16) Of ‘Hard Words’ and Straw Men: Let’s Understand what Reading Science is Really About. Accessed from https://www.voyagersopris.com/blog/edview360/2019/10/16/lets-understand-what-reading-science-is-really-about Pearson, N. (2020). Yes, DI did it: the impact of Direct Instruction on literacy outcomes for Very Remote Indigenous schools. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1017/jie.2020.20 What if there was a way to assess that reduced our workload? What if this assessment was also more accurate? And what if it improved the cohesion and culture of moderation? It sounds too good to be true! But this has been my experience with using comparative judgement to assess students' writing in a national project. What is Comparative Judgement?Comparative judgement is simply the process of comparing two pieces of work and identifying which one is 'better'. This means that we are making a relative judgement, rather than an absolute judgement. "If someone walks into the room you're in at the moment and I say, 'How tall is that person?" That's and absolute judgement. If two people walk into the room you're in and I say to you, 'Who's taller? The person on the left or the person on the right?' That's a comparative judgement." When I first heard this example, the skeptic in me thought 'If someone walked in the door, I reckon that I'd be able to work out their height.' Then I took a moment to work out how I would go about determining their height and realised that I was relying on the fact that I'd have the door frame as a reference point. Thus proving the point that comparative judgements are much easier to make then absolute ones! So the premise of comparative judgement is that teachers will look at two pieces of writing and select the one that is 'better'. This is completed numerous times until the pieces can be reliably ordered. And, thanks to technology, this can be achieved quickly! Assessing Writing in AustraliaSomehow, I stumbled across the Assessing Writing in Australia project run by No More Marking and Templestowe Heights Primary School. Our school signed up and our Grade 3 students duly sat the task early in Term 1, along with 1200 of their peers across 24 other schools. The amazing dynamo, Jeanette Breen outlined the project in a series of articles for Teacher Magazine (here & here). The writing task was well set up. The stimulus was interesting, with lots of scope for different narratives. The process of setting students up on the No More Marking page was simple. Student pages were printed, and afterwards they are easily scanned and uploaded. I appreciated the timing of the task, as it would give us a snapshot of our students after an incredibly disrupted 2020 thanks to multiple periods of remote learning. About a week later we were ready to 'mark' the writing. Given the smaller size of our school, and the novelty of the process, all teachers participated in the marking session. We sat in the staff room during our regular staff meeting, each with our own computer. We started selecting which piece of writing was better. Some judgements were very easy to make. Others took more thought. I think it's important to note that we were never asked to judge one of our students pieces against a piece from another school. (I've now found out that 80% of judgements were our students' work, 20% of judgements involved students from other schools). It only took us 20 minutes to complete all of our assigned judgements! In this time I had reviewed the writing of most of our Grade 3s. I had also seen the writing of students from other schools. I can't remember the last time I had the opportunity to see writing from other schools! A week or two after, we got the results- a much quicker turnaround time than NAPLAN. Our students pieces were ranked against those of over 1200 others. We were provided a 'writing age' for each student. This data was fascinating as quite a few of our students performed better than we expected. This allowed us to examine our biases and how they could influence our decisions when marking using a traditional rubric. At our next staff meeting, we laid out every piece of writing in the order they had been judged. Looking at the pieces laid out, it very quickly became obvious what factors where determining the final score. Some students used many run-on sentences, others were starting to use conjunctions accurately, and others showed a high level of control over sentences. Vocabulary was another major component. Interestingly, handwriting seemed to have less importance in the overall marking. This session provided a myriad of rich discussions. There was none of the typical defensiveness that can emerge in a traditional moderation session, when teachers can feel compelled to justify their gradings. The conversation was no longer focused on the teachers' judgements, rather it was focused on the students' writing. Participating in the Assessing Writing in Australia project provided our Grade 3 teachers with clear understanding of how to improve their students' writing. It also provided important information for the teachers of P-2, as we could clearly see what we'd like our students to be writing. There were also takeaways for our upper primary, who noticed an absence in interesting vocabulary and have been explicitly teaching this since. In Term 2, we conducted a school-wide comparative judgement task for our students in Grades 1-6. We set a common task. Populating our students onto the No More Marking website was straightforward & then student response sheets were easily generated. I was able to do this in under an hour. Our task followed similar guidelines to those in the Assessing Writing in Australia task, and we conducted our task in the second week of Term 2. At the end of the day, teachers gave me their students work. I scanned it and uploaded it to the website. This took me less than 15 minutes! Setting up the judging session was just as simple. Teachers were allocated a quota of judgements to make. The judging session could be asynchronous, but we dedicated time in our staff meeting to complete (and to sort out any teething issues). I needn't have worried as the judging session was as uncomplicated as the rest of the process. Less than 30 minutes later we had collectively assessed the writing of every student. As teachers made each judgement I was able to observe how the students' writing was being ordered. Other data is provided including the strength of teachers' agreement in judgement, how many comparisons had been made, and (my personal favourite) the % of time a teacher chose the left hand piece. The results were ready as soon as our judgement session had been completed. Teachers were able to view them immediately. At our next staff meeting we laid out the writing samples and looked for themes. Once again, we found this incredibly useful and led to another 'no-judgement' moderation session. I use the term 'no-judgement' because individual teachers didn't have to justify why they gave a certain mark. The scores had been allocated in a collective process, and again we found that we were able to dive into what elements of the composition had led to the mark. This in turn led to more rich discussions about how we can improve our students writing. Our staff are keen to use comparative judgement as part of our assessment of student writing. We are also looking forward to the next round of Assessing Writing in Australia. And the great news is that you can dip your toe in the waters of comparative judgement too! Check out www.nomoremarking.com/products/awa to find out more about participating, whether you're primary or secondary! There is an information webinar on the 26th of October to learn more. It'd be great to get more schools involved! Photo by Sangga Rima Roman Selia on Unsplash I am trying to grow lawn in my front yard. In May, we laid the dirt, sowed the seed, fertilised and watered it. Now it looks a bit patchy, but it is decidedly lawn. That's why I found myself spending the morning on my hands and knees meticulously pulling up every weed that has invaded what is meant to be a nicely grassed area. It is a job that requires very little thought: so my mind wandered. And my mental meandering ended up in the realm of education. In our classrooms there are also weeds. We need to be careful not to let these take over from our instruction. Each of the weeds I kept pulling up reminded me that we need to be vigilant for the weeds of education and make sure that we remove them- roots and all. SorrelSorrel is a tangy, lemony flavoured herb. There is nothing wrong with sorrel, in fact it can be a great plant to grow. But if it is in the wrong place then it can take over. I would like grass, not herbs growing on my lawn. In education there are plenty of good activities that find themselves in the wrong place. One prominent example is the use of problem solving prior to explicit instruction. If the teacher hasn't taught the skills necessary to solve the problem, then students will flounder and be left confused. We need to be wary of sorrel and make sure that we are thinking carefully about how we craft our lessons and units to ensure that we maximise the learning opportunities. CloverClover looks a bit like grass, but it ends up taking over. This means that the grass that I desire has no room to grow. The clover of education are those practices that look like learning is occurring, but instead end up taking time and energy away from activities that could have more impact. Learning high-frequency words by rote is one example. Sure, it looks like students are learning to read, but it is taking time away from learning the phonics skills that would actually help students to learn how to decode these words. Clover needs to be removed from our classrooms so that we have the time, energy and space to focus on the things that will make the most difference to our students. Stinging NettleIn a surprise to nobody, stinging nettle stings. It is harmful and can hurt when you touch it. When I lay a lawn for my children to run across, I didn't plan for them to get stung! Unfortunately, there are harmful practices in education that have taken root. Three-cueing, and the reading strategies often promoted alongside it (Eagle Eyes, Lips the Fish, etc.) are some of the weeds that can cause damage to our students. These weeds have no place in education, and yet they are pervasive! We need to eradicate these stinging nettles from our classroom. Is there a weedkiller?Unfortunately, I can't put a weed killer on my lawn because it can't distinguish between the grass I want to grow and the weeds I want to be rid of. So, I'm left on my hands and knees, painstakingly removing every single one that I encounter.
Removing the weeds from our classrooms take the same level of inspection. We need to critically reflect and examine our own practice to check that now weeds are creeping in. We also need to welcome the feedback of others and allow them to point out where these weeds may be taking root. Our students deserve a lush lawn of education! This week, as Victoria entered into its fourth COVID lockdown, my mind turned to motivation. My motivation waxed and waned. Yet I still had a job to do, and while I was still passionate about providing learning experiences for my students, it’s just that bit harder to find the motivation when I’m staring at screens rather than the (usually) smiling faces of five- and six-year-olds. Fortunately, my intrinsic motivation of wanting my students to succeed is supported by the extrinsic motivation of getting paid to do my job! So, what’s it like for our students? Surely, their motivation comes and goes in a day at school. For some activities, most students will be intrinsically motivated. Other activities might be a bit of a struggle to keep them engaged. Of course, we would love each child to intrinsically motivated for every moment of every day. But let’s face it, in a group of twenty, not everyone is going to be intrinsically motivated all the time. We could fall into the trap of trying to make every lesson more exciting than the one before it. But this is a dangerous spiral to enter: one that can ultimately lead to blaming the teacher for not making learning interesting, engaging, or fun enough. Today I want to share a game that I play with my class. This game helps to increase students’ engagement and motivation. This game helps to ensure all students are focused on learning, and we all want our students to be spending time engaged in learning. Welcome to the Students vs Teacher GameI was introduced to the Students vs Teacher Game (sometimes called ‘Beat the Teacher’) when I was first trained in Direct Instruction programmes by NIFDI. The Students vs Teacher Game is a vehicle to increase student motivation. It enhances learning because it minimises off-task behaviour and distractions. Students feel successful and positive behaviour is reinforced. The rules of the game
There are a few things that the teacher needs to do to make sure the Students vs Teacher Game is successful:
I’ve used the Students vs Teacher Game for Literacy and Maths. This year I am using it to support our Phonemic Awareness programme. When I started to use it, it took me a while to get it to flow (maybe a term of using it daily), but now it’s second nature and the amount of instructional time it saves is phenomenal. I’ve used it with students aged 5-14 years. And while the way I ‘sell it’ might change, it is still very effective. I care about every one of my students too much to leave their motivation up to chance. The Students vs Teacher game helps me ensure that every child in my class is engaged in learning. Further reading:You can find out more about NIFDI (the National Institute for Direct Instruction) at https://www.nifdi.org
I don’t know about you, but I am often amazed at how quickly days can fly by at school. Time can quickly slip by and it can feel like there’s just not enough hours to teach. This is why I am a firm believer in routines and maximising the time spent in High Value Activities, or “learning” Emina Mclean has a recent blog that explains what High Value Activities are. If you haven’t read it yet then check it out here (While you’re there, make sure that you read all the other posts as it is a phenomenal resource!) Since reading this post I’ve been reflecting on the yield that every learning activity returns. Time is too precious to waste doing busy work that doesn’t benefit my students. Rather than dwelling on the moments where I feel that I am wasting valuable time, I thought I’d share some activities that are gems that keep on giving. These gems are activities that are high yield. They optimise my students’ chances to learn. Students are able participate constantly. These gems are flexible and can be adapted for a range of situations. And they are a lot of fun too! GEM 1: Open, Shut ThemWhen my daughter was three, I took her to the local library every Friday for storytime. Stuart, the local librarian, would entertain this group of toddlers through a journey of stories and songs. The highlight was when he would sing the song ‘Open, Shut Them’. If you don’t know it then the lyrics go: Open shut them, open shut them Give a little clap, Open shut them, open shut them Put them in your lap, Creep them, creep them right up to your chin Open wide your little mouth, but do not let them in. Roll them, Roll them, Roll them just like this. Shake them, shake them, Blow a little kiss. We would sing it through once… and then came the moment we were eagerly anticipating: the silly version! Stuart would lead us as we sang it through with actions that were the opposite of what we were singing. The kids loved it, and the adults loved the kids loving it! So, of course, when I started planning my preschool-school transition days, I borrowed this fantastic idea. My future students loved it as much as my daughter did! This song was a brilliant activity to help kids feel comfortable and have fun at their future school. We sang it daily at the start of the year, and I could see my students get excited about it. And when we started adding verses, the true potential of this song started to be unleashed. It is brilliant for teaching opposites. Some of the typical verses go:
Adding simple actions helps ensure that students learn antonyms. And then I tweaked it again. I started adding specific vocabulary words that we had been learning. We read The Very Cranky Bear and sang ‘cranky and cheerful’. We learnt about forces in science and sang ‘push and pull’. We heard how Miss Muffett was frightened by a spider and sang ‘frightened and calm’. Open, Shut Them is a gift that keeps on giving. And, of course, we always end it with the silly version! GEM 2: BingoMy class love bingo! Currently, we are playing it in maths to practise recognising the numbers to 20. I have a collection of boards with nine squares on each one. What I love is that the same resources can be used for a lot of different purposes. Students put coloured counters on their boards as each number is called out or displayed. With a 0-20 number Bingo board, I can:
With a letter bingo board, I can:
Now that I’ve set up my bingo board document, I can use ‘replace all’ to quickly replace the items on the students’ boards. This means that I can easily use it to practise reading words. I’ve attached an example. You might notice that there are some similar words (trek/track, yet/vet, panic/picnic). I want my students to closely attend when they read. Using similar words means that they have to pay attention. If every word started with a different sound, then all I could be checking is their initial letter recognition! I’ve attached pdf versions of each of these bingo boards for your use. Once you’ve printed and laminated it, you’ll find that you can use them again and again. And once students have got the rules down, they can focus on the learning.
GEM 3: Colour RunGrowing up in Australia in the 90s, Fruit Salad was a popular game in the schoolyard. The teacher would assign everyone one of four different fruits, and you would run across the basketball court whenever your fruit was called out. If you were the slowest in your fruit, then you would join a group called ‘jam’ or ‘compost’. If ‘fruit salad’ got called out, then everyone would run! Some teachers would change this game to ‘traffic jam’ where each group was a different car type… We are learning about colours in Art, and I realised that Fruit Salad could easily be adjusted to consolidate our knowledge of colours. I use the primary colours (red, blue, yellow) as groups. When their colour is called out, students run to the other side. The slowest student isn’t sent to another group because I want everyone to be involved as much as possible. When I call out ‘rainbow’, everyone runs (because every colour is in the rainbow). I’ve taught warm and cool colours, so I can also call out ‘warm’ and red and yellow groups will run. If I call out ‘cool’, then blue will run. And then there are the secondary colours. I can call out ‘green’ (blue and yellow run), ‘purple’ (blue and red run) or ‘orange’ (yellow and red run). I can see that I can adapt ‘Fruit Salad’ for any topic that has categories (living things, properties of matter, types of rocks), and this is why I think it is a gem of an activity. So what are your gems? What activities do you use that have a huge yield on your students’ learning? I am always on the lookout for new ideas to use to help the children in my class. References:Emina McLean's phenomenal blog can be found at www.eminamclean.com/blog
Seriously, it is a much better blog than this one, so make sure you check it out! Our school uses Decodable Readers Australia to support students learning to read. They are great stories, often with an Aussie flavour. Have a look at their website and find out more about them https://www.decodablereadersaustralia.com.au/ I was going to start this blog relatively safely by sharing some insights into what happens in my class and providing tips to other teachers. Then I read an article in The Age newspaper by Adam Carey. In it whole-class instruction is portrayed as “The children sit in rows, engaged in a half-hour game of call and response with their teacher that is part reading exercise, part endurance test.” (Read it here [paywall]: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/no-student-left-behind-phonics-push-for-disadvantaged-schools-20210421-p57l0n.html) This dismissal of whole-class instruction is common and I am tired of it. Too much whole class instruction is often rejected as ‘drill & kill’, ‘chalk & talk’ or being the dreaded ‘sage on the stage’. For years I thought that I needed to minimise whole-class instruction. I ended up having multiple groups at different ability levels. I thought I was doing a great job at differentiation. I was being ‘student-centred’ and believed I was meeting my students ‘at their point of need’. This focus on small group instruction has some major consequences. Firstly, it reduces the amount of instructional time each student receives. I would have between 3-5 groups. In a 60 minute reading session, I might see 3 groups for 20 minutes each (on a good day). The other groups would be doing ‘independent tasks’. And while I tried to make these tasks meaningful activities, I now recognise that they often ended up being little more than busy work. By shifting to more whole-class instruction, I maximise the time each child spends on meaningful work. Secondly, I was suddenly doing three-five times the amount of planning! This is a significant increase in workload and an unrealistic expectation on teachers- especially graduates. Now that I am doing less planning, I am finding that the learning activities we do in class have a much more significant impact on my students' learning. Thirdly, using ability-based groups can doom students to a trajectory of under-performance. One 2016 review by Marshall Jean of the National Education Policy Center found that “Tracking is often implemented in ways that hinder the learning of students assigned to low tracks” (Read it here). Despite the claims that small groups creates a more equal system for instruction, the opposite is true! Moving to whole-class instructions means that I am providing opportunities for ALL my students to achieve at a high level. Last year I started using Heggerty’s Phonemic Awareness with a Grade 1/2 class. I knew that this would be a powerful session for my weaker readers. I knew that it would help them segment and blend sounds. What I didn’t realise was how much my stronger readers would benefit. These students were reading Harry Potter, yet struggled to identify the final phoneme of a word. If I’d stuck with small groups then these students would have missed out on meaningful learning. So, what does whole-class instruction look like in my classroom? All students complete the same tasks. I want all children to achieve the same learning. Otherwise a gap in learning will emerge, and I will doom some of my students to a trajectory of under-achievement. I used to set different comprehension tasks for each group. All students would be learning about finding the main idea but the complexity of texts and topics explored. How much richer is it for students to explore the same texts and hear the thoughts of all of their peers? Would you be happy if your child was getting a watered down version of what their peers receive? Differentiation still occurs. I am still able to meet each child at their point of need. One example of this is my paired-fluency reads. Each child reads a list of sounds and words to their partner for 30 seconds. This list is the same for every child, but some students may only say a few sounds, while others may read the whole list. Their partner follows along and corrects them if they hear a mistake. One task for the whole class that is still differentiated for each child. My students sit in rows for table-work. This allows every child the opportunity to see the whiteboard clearly. It also gives me the chance to monitor EVERY child’s learning and provide feedback immediately. I Check for Understanding frequently. I once heard that the average number of times that a teacher hears from a student was about 3-6 times in a lesson. So I decided to measure it. Within the space of 1 hour reading session I heard from students about a dozen times each IF they were in one of my instructional groups for the day. For those students who were not in my instructional groups, their number was zero. One hour of learning and all some students got was a cursory glance at their work. Nowadays, I regularly use a variety of devices to check for understanding. This means that I hear from ALL students over 50 times in a one-hour session (this is a very conservative estimate), through the use of mini-whiteboards, choral responses, cold-calling and other strategies. Checking for Understanding techniques will be a great topic for a future blog. Would I rather my 5-year-old’s teachers to hear from 0 or 50 times in an hour? Would you like me to give feedback to your child half a dozen times in a day, or over two hundred times? Which one is more student-centred? Whole class instruction is powerful. Let’s not dismiss it with silly caricatures and catchphrases. If you want to find out more about shifting reading groups to a more whole-class approach, then I strongly recommend the video Rethinking Guided Reading by Natalie Campbell & Stephanie Le Lievre. I had a meeting with my 5yo’s teachers this week. It was wonderful to be talking to other Prep teachers and have the chance to collaborate (i.e. steal a great Anzac Day activity). Any anxieties I may have had about putting my 5yo’s education in their hands were alleviated. It also made me reflect on the importance of communication between parents and teachers. When I started teaching I was anxious about parent-teacher interviews and other contact. This wasn’t helped by one particular family who threatened to sue me! I blundered along for a few years until I moved to the Northern Territory. Living and working in a remote community, the need for communicating with families about their child’s learning was clear. I had a phenomenal principal who suggested that we need to make contact when things are going well, not just on the occasions when things aren’t. This positive approach was transformative and has stuck with me ever since. When I moved to my current school I faced the daunting task of again building relationships with a new set of students- and their families. I wanted to let families know what was going on each week. started to write and draw on a whiteboard. At the end of the week I would take a photo of the board and send it home. I got a number of appreciative comments from parents who felt much more in touch with their child’s learning. With COVID-19 and remote learning I sent a daily email to my Grade 1/2 class’ parents. I (and all teachers at my school) would also call each week to see how we could assist them. Remote learning was a tough time as Victoria had a strict lockdown for an extended period. I think families felt supported by the school. This year, I’ve moved to creating a page that goes home each Friday. I let parents know what their child has learnt during the week. I use Powerpoint and generally include something about reading, maths, and our humanities/science unit. I try to keep it brief and find Powerpoint a good format for that.
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I'm JamesI am a father of two (8 & 5), married to a future Early Childhood Educator. Archives
September 2023
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