Last week I wrote of my concerns that some of our common teaching practices may actually be counter productive when it comes to teaching writing.
Here is an excellent article by the acclaimed writer, Libby Gleeson in which in which she raises these issues and more. It was written for a conference in 2007, but it is still current and well worth reading.
I wonder if I’m doing the right thing by my students in my efforts to help them learn to write.
A few weeks ago, I asked my Year Two class to write a recount of the excursion they went on the day before. We’d done all our brainstorming and modelling. All the scaffolding was in place. I had images and key words written on the IWB, and some models of recounts on large posters that could be easily referred to by students. The class were up to writing independently and there were about 20 minutes left until the bell.
As they wrote, I circulated amongst them, providing encouragement where I could, and help when it was needed. Every now and then, I would read someone’s paragraph aloud, hoping that it might help others to come up with ideas. I’d look over their shoulders as they worked, and occasionally I would notice a few students who weren’t writing. Some of them would stop mid sentence, others at the end of a paragraph, and just sit there.
Conscious that the time was running out, I would coax them to keep going. I’d ask them if they knew what they wanted to write next and help them with ideas. They would pick up their pencils and continue.
It was a nice lesson. Not spectacular, but it achieved the outcomes. They all completed their recounts and in so doing demonstrated a growing understanding of language and text structure, as well as at the subject matter. I was happy with the quality of their work and chose a couple to post on our class website.
However, it occurred to me that real writing isn’t like that at all, and perhaps, even though they are common practices, my attempts to support my students are counter productive for some.
When I write, I HATE people looking at what I’m doing until I’m finished. I posted about that here. If some does look at my work before I’m ready I freeze up and find it difficult to continue. I lose the flow. Is this how I affect my students when I check on their progress?
While writing this post, I have stopped several times. I need to in order to collect my thoughts – to work out what it is exactly that I want to say. I need to stop and read back through my work to see if it makes sense. In classrooms, ruled by bells and crowded schedules there is little time for students to stop, think and reflect. Stopping is discouraged because you’ll run out of time. Stopping is discouraged because the student may be “off task” or “disengaged”.
I’ve also deleted large sections of this post while writing. I’ve deleted, rewritten and deleted again. That’s a little more difficult when you are a Year Two student writing in an exercise book.
If I was a student in my class that day, I don’t think I would have written well. I might have produced some technically correct writing, but the conditions I need to produce quality writing weren’t there. I need time to think. I need privacy. And I need to be able to make and correct mistakes.
If our objective is to help students to truly express themselves in writing, to put their thoughts into words, share what is important, clarify ideas and create new ones, to create worlds. If our students are to learn to harness the power of the written word, then perhaps a different approach is required.
Image courtesy of http://www.book-clipart.com/
It’s the National Year of Reading in Australia - a great excuse to promote a love of reading in the classroom.
Our class schedules are so full that while we all spend time trying to teach students the skills for reading, I sometimes fear that we don’t spend enough time allowing students to read for pleasure. It’s going to be a priority of mine this year.
Some quick and easy ideas for promoting reading in the classroom.
1. Set up a reading space that is attractive and inviting. Make it an area your students will WANT to spend time in. Ensure there is a mix of genres, including factual texts, as well as a good range of ability levels. You can read about my little reading corner here.
2. Allow time every day for some independent reading. While the class are reading, spend at least some of this time reading for pleasure yourself. It will provide you with a nice quick break while being an excellent role model for students.
3. Share books that you enjoy with the class for no other reason than to have fun. While a discussion is good, don’t provide worksheets or insist that students complete written tasks for these ones. Click here for a list of 250 great books for children.
4. Encourage some interested students to start a book club, or facilitate one yourself. This website has some great suggestions for starting a book club for children.
5. Encourage students to discuss and respond to what they are reading.
6. Particpate in any national or international projects. National Simultaneous Story Time and The Premier’s Reading Challenge are very simple projects for classes to become involved with.
A few helpful Websites
Reading Rewards This site will allow you to set up a home reading log and the opportunity for children to rate and review books. I’m thinking of using it with my Year Two class, but it will be particularly motivational for Stages 2 and 3. It might be a fun way to stimulate discussion about books, and an easy, fun way for students to log their home reading.
Busy Red Desk image courtesy of wikimedia commons
Managing the volume of work that I have to do as a primary school assistant principal is a daunting task which I am still coming to terms with. This is the second post in my series about managing workload in which I share some of the strategies that have worked for me.
In my last post, I described a workload audit. This allowed me to identify several time wasters which fit into 3 categories – those where the outcome did not justify the amount of time put into them, those that could reasonably be delegated, and those that took a long time and needed a new, more efficient approach.
Here are some of them:
1. Activities where the outcome did not justify the amount of time put into them
2. Activities that could reasonably be delegated.
3. Activities that needed a more efficient approach
Categorising the activities was important as I could quickly determine the approach needed to reduce their impact and increase my efficiency. I’m happy to report that after working at it for a few years, I’ve managed to reduce the time each of these tasks take, and in some cases have eliminated them from my workload. I’ll be dealing with each of them in future posts starting with that constant thorn in my side: homework.
What are the time wasters in your job? Have you had any success in reducing their impact? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
With just a few days to go before the school year starts, I’ve been in at work preparing my room for my new Year Two class.
This year I wanted to create an inviting area for my students where they can relax and enjoy reading for pleasure.
My classroom is a little tricky to organise. The back wall which I share with the classroom next door opens up to form a double room. This is great for team teaching, but you can’t put any furniture along it. I only have one wall which I can use for storage units, and the space left for a reading corner is rather small.
When I started working on it, it was fairly uninspiring, so I added a small rug and a hyacinth chest; both of which I picked up very cheaply at K-Mart. I put the books into clear baskets from the $2 shop, allowing them to be stored with their covers on display. This created a more enticing display. I added some bright cushions, also cheap at K-Mart, and some soft toys from my childhood which I couldn’t bear to throw out. Finally, I attached a wall decoration purchased about ten years ago.
I think it will make a nice little reading space for my class.
The cushions and toys finish off the space nicely.
As I suffocated under the avalanche of work that came my way as a new assistant principal, something had to change. To avoid burning out I needed to manage my workload in a healthy way, without compromising its quality.
I’ll be sharing the strategies that helped me in this series about managing workload.
The first post of the series is about one of the tools I find most valuable: a workload audit. I found out about it in the book Managing Teacher Workload: Work-Life Balance and Wellbeing by Sara Bubb and Peter Earley. Their audit was a fairly rigorous process, but I took a more relaxed approach.
1. Keep a diary
Keep a diary of what you spend your time on at work for a couple of weeks. (Yes, I know that this is yet another thing to remember to do). Write down very briefly what you were doing and the duration of the activity. Include interruptions, meetings, both informal and formal, breaks etc.
The very process of keeping a diary may immediately help you identify some areas you can change.
2. Categorise your activities
Try to categorise the activities in your diary. Here are some that I used:
Record the amount of time you spent on each category over the two-week period.
3. Cost-Benefit Analysis
Ask yourself the value of the time spent on each category in terms of student learning outcomes.
In my case, I spent a ridiculous amount of time preparing activities for the IWB. I’d been known to spend hours preparing resources that would only be used very briefly on just a single occasion. I learned to cut down on this sort of preparation time and reserve that effort for resources that would be used again and again.
4. Identify and plan to reduce the time-wasters
This is where it gets tricky. Some of those time-wasters feel as if they are beyond your own control. Start with the areas you can control, and make a time to discuss some of the other areas with your supervisor. Working collaboratively, you may find a creative solution to some of those areas that seem too hard to change.
Once you’ve completed your audit, you are well on the way to managing your workload. I’ll be sharing the time-wasters I found and more importantly, how I reduced or eliminated their impact, in the next posts of this series.
Have you struggled to manage your workload? What were some of the issues for you and what were some of the solutions?
Managing workload has always been a challenge for me and when I became a primary assistant principal it took those issues to a whole new level. With a full time teaching load, I often feel as if I have two full time jobs.
At first the workload was horrendous. I was back to working 12 hour days and most of the weekends. To keep my head above water I dropped almost everything I was doing outside of school, turned my back on my social life and quit the study courses I was attending. I made time for my family life (just) but it was a struggle.
This was no good for my health or my relationships. Professionally, it impacted on the quality of my work and the quality of my interaction with students, their parents and my colleagues. I was spread far too thinly.
So it was important that I develop better strategies for managing my time and my job. Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing some of the ones that worked.
I’d love to hear from you. Do you struggle to stay on top of your workload? What are some ways you’ve found to manage it and keep that work-life balance?
Are we in danger of turning our backs on effective practice as we become seduced by the appeal and excitement of working with the latest technologies and gadgets?
This little anecdote illustrate my point.
One very effective way of teaching children to spell multisyllable words is to chunk them. In a nutshell, this involves the students breaking the words into blocks of sounds rather than individual letters. It’s a fantastic strategy – if you haven’t tried it a great explanation of chunking can be found here.
A couple of years ago, a visiting consultant was modelling some teaching strategies in my classroom. When teaching the children to chunk, she wrote each word on a piece of cardboard. To model the chunks, she cut the flash cards up into their separate sound blocks.
As I watched this, I’m ashamed to say, I was feeling rather dismissive. I would have created an interactive display on the IWB where the chunks would fly apart with sound and colour. Cardboard and scissors seemed so old fashioned.
However, the effect on my class was somewhat different. They were shocked as she cut up a real object. Though it was only a cardboard flash card, working with it had more immediacy and was far more tangible than the virtual flash cards I would have used on the IWB.
At a later point in the lesson she mixed all the chunks cut from different words and invited some students to put them back into whole words. Again, this is something I would have had them do on the IWB. As it turned out, her way was more effective. Using real objects, the children could hold them in their hands and manipulate them in a way that is just not possible on the IWB. It was a multisensory and kinaesthetic experience, not just a visual one.
This was a gentle wake up call to me which reminded me of the obvious. Young learners need hands on experiences with concrete objects. IWBs, computer screens and IPads are all fantastic devices, but they still create a filter between learners and the objects they are manipulating. They display virtual objects, not real ones, and there is a world of difference between the two.
The myriad of technologies available to us today are just tools of our trade. As we get to know our students and how they learn best, it’s important that we choose our tools wisely.
Do you have a similar story to share or any thoughts on this one? Feel free to leave a comment.
After working in public education for many years, I’m afraid I’m becoming a little bit cynical. All too often government education policy seems to be motivated by cost cutting, or populism rather than a genuine desire to deliver high quality education to all childen in NSW. Many of us remember the blue print for educational reform commissioned by our previous Labor Government. More and more I fear that both of our major political parties want to turn their back on their responsibility to deliver high quality education, leaving it up to the private sector.
Australians seem to be shifting away from a sense of collective social responsibility towards a more individualistic paradigm. With this shift, comes a change in perceptions of the role of public education. Increasingly, public schools seem to be perceived as a second rate option; a form of social welfare for those who can’t afford a private education. I don’t doubt that the vast majority of our population agree there an obligation to provide public education, but I am concerned that an increasing number of Australians no longer agree there is an obligation to provide a quality education.
Public Schools in Australia are doing quite well. As these charts prepared by Trevor Cobbold from www.saveourschools.com.au reveal, public and private schools from similar socioeconomic backgrounds perform similarly on national tests. The biggest determinant of difference is poverty. He explains it in detail here.
I am concerned however, that if we are not careful the quality of our education programs will suffer. Government initiatives, such as the My School Website, which allow schools to be compared based on national test results is already narrowing our curriculum. Some schools rort the system by persuading families of low performing students to keep them at home. In NSW a recent government wages policy has resulted in public school teachers being paid less than their private school colleagues for the first time, which will surely make it a little more challenging to attract new staff into the public sector. There is now talk of performance pay for teachers, a system which will pit teachers against eachother, breaking down the collaborative working relationships that are at the heart of much of our success.
It’s impossible to divorce public education from politics. While many of us might prefer to bury ourselves in our classroom responsibilities, if we are at all interested in the future of our education system, we must start paying attention to the politics that surround it and get involved when necessary.
We need to inform ourselves about current debates in education and participate in the dialogue. We need to be contacting politicians, writing to newspapers and participating in social media. We need to have our voices heard by the decision makers who determine our education policies.
Who knows, we might even make a difference.
