I forgot to bring home the maths tests that my students did today so that I could finish their reports. Ooops…. so I’ll do a bit of a catch up here instead.
…meanwhile in Victoria…
Schools are forever trying to improve student achievement and data scores and so new strategies for teaching and learning are always being implemented. Victoria’s latest thing is the Framework for Improving Student Outcomes. Our school is focusing on different strategies that research shows to be effective in improving student learning.
After our Professional Development day two weeks ago, the lower primary teachers set about designing a co-operative learning task. The challenge for us was that the task couldn’t be too language based because the group would fall in a heap with some students having very little English and others quite a bit more. We decided as part of our house unit, that the students could make a 3D house together with each student being responsible for a certain aspect of the house. The language would be built in with the criteria – what we were looking for in the group work and also in the debrief session that could be conducted afterwards.
I had my students work in groups of 2-3. One student had orange paper and was responsible for the top part of the house – the roof, the chimney, the TV aerial.
Another student had brown paper and was responsible for the middle of the house – the walls, the windows (there had to be at least four) and the doors (there had to be at least two).
The other student had green paper and was responsible for the garden, the fences and the letter box.
It was fascinating to watch the students. For the most part they were highly engaged and were using lots of English. There were a few little outbursts, but that is to be expected. The students seemed to enjoy taking on the responsibility of their roles and no one really tried to do someone else’s ‘job’. Student B, whom I wrote about a few weeks ago, was fairly subdued, when he realised that no one wanted to work with him. He was put into a group with two girls and together they did a good job.
I was possibly slightly disappointed that no group made 3D shapes for the roof or other aspects of the house considering that we had been learning about 3D shapes earlier in the week. But this could just be a developmental thing – they didn’t or couldn’t think in terms of 3D shapes.
Another aspect of the strategies, that we are implementing, is putting a Learning Intention up for the students to see (and anyone walking past the classroom). Whilst I know that other schools have done this for quite a while, it is new for us. Also the idea that students evaluate how much effort they put into different tasks is part of the strategies that we are having to implement.
There was a lot of language in the debriefing session after the activity and the students assessed themselves critically against the criteria for making the houses. They were fairly self-critical too when I gave them a sticky note with their name on it and asked them to place it on the effort chart that you see above.
It was an interesting day of learning. I will never benefit fully from the students learning to work together as some of them will soon be leaving for their new schools. But it is something that needs to be started and learnt somewhere. If I had to sum up the day of learning in one word it would be – intense!
Have you been implementing strategies such as these at your school? What does it look like for you and your students?
the EAL Teacher Writer 