Focusing Inquiry: Know your students
What literacy knowledge and skills do my students have in Social Sciences?
Use multiple sources of information to determine the focus of your inquiry – student voice, assessment information, diagnostic tasks.
- Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning e-asTTle
This is a norm-referenced online tool for assessing reading achievement relevant to levels 2–6 of the curriculum. It provides national norms of performance for students in years 4–12.You may wish to discuss the implications of asTTle results for your learning area with the Literacy Leader in your school.
- Subject resources related to NCEA assessments
are available - click on the relevant subject page.
What literacy knowledge and skills need to be developed?
- The Literacy Learning Progressions
describe the specific literacy knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students draw on in order to meet the reading and writing demands of the curriculum. Teachers need to ensure that their students develop the literacy expertise that will enable them to engage with the Social Science curriculum at increasing levels of complexity.
Teaching Inquiry: Planning to meet student needs
How can literacy learning needs be addressed in the teaching and learning programme?
- Videos
to support developing literacy leadership and effective literacy teaching practice across all learning areas. These videos provide brief summaries of the different stages of the inquiry undertaken by Mt Albert Grammar in 2011 as a result of its involvement in the project.
- The Guidelines for Effective Adolescent Literacy Instruction
provide teachers with a framework for literacy inquiry and outlines the principles of effective literacy instruction.
- Earth Under Pressure
– A unit of work for Year 10 combining Science, Social Studies and English learning outcomes. This unit exemplifies how literacy learning can be addressed in the context of each learning area.
- Making Language and Learning Work 2: Integrating Language and Learning in Secondary English and Social Science is a DVD that shows how teachers can effectively integrate content-area teaching and language learning. Copies of this DVD were sent to schools and further copies can be obtained from Down the Back of the Chair
. Facilitation Notes
accompany the DVD.
- Examples From Practice: These brief examples show how classroom teachers are identifying and addressing students’ literacy needs in Social Sciences
- Improving Reading in the Social Studies Classroom
- This site outlines some of the difficulties students face when reading texts in Social Studies, as well as outlining some teaching strategies
- Content-Area Literacy: History
:By Carol Lee and Anika Spratley (2009). This article outlines the challenge of using primary sources in History and offers some ideas about teaching students to read as historians.
- Units/lesson sequences
based on Social Sciences (and other) curriculum objectives, designed or re-designed for English language learners.
- Engaging and motivating students to read challenging texts in Social Studies:
Social Studies not English article (PDF 3MB)
The story of one teacher’s changing practice as the result of professional learning in the Secondary Literacy Project (2009-11), resulting in substantive change in her Social Studies classroom with ‘resistive’ readers.
How does research inform my inquiry?
How will progress be monitored?
Your inquiry will determine the ways in which progress should be monitored. For example, you may decide to monitor progress through student writing, oral responses, research skills and/or presentations.
Need help from your colleagues? Join the Secondary Literacy mailing list
.
Teaching and Learning
The Guidelines for Effective Adolescent Literacy Instruction
outlines the principles of effective literacy instruction.
Learning Inquiry
- What happened as a result? Assessment is the process of gathering, analysing, interpreting and using information about students' progress and achievement to improve teaching and learning. Refer to Assessment Online
- What are the next steps?
