The school context
Glenda is deputy principal and one of two literacy leaders at Rata Street School in Naenae, Wellington. It is a large Year 0-6 contributing school with a diverse population. The school was involved in the Literacy Professional Development Project from 2006- 2008. A focus for the leadership team at Rata Street over this two-year period had been and continues to be, on supporting teachers to improve outcomes for students, particularly in writing. Improving teaching practice underlies this improvement of outcomes and the leadership team undertakes regular classroom observations as well as providing many professional learning opportunities for teachers to develop knowledge and strategies. As a non-teaching deputy principal, Glenda is actively involved in leading the professional development.
The student data
An asTTle writing test was taken by all years 4-6 students at the end of 2007. The results revealed that while most students showed good progress especially in the areas of content and structure, many students were writing simple and compound sentences without the detail required by the topic and task. Although some were adding phrases to provide more detail, they were not adding to the content or purpose of the sentence. This pattern was noted across the syndicate, so at the teacher-only day, before the school year began in 2008, the teachers used the previous year’s data to group students in their new classes and determine appropriate learning intentions and teaching strategies. This enabled the teachers to begin teaching writing on the first day of school so no time was wasted.
The lesson and the practice analysis conversation that feature in these clips took place within the first few weeks of 2008.
The teachers’ inquiry
The focus for Glenda’s learning was on the effective use of instructional strategies that show students how to include adjectival and adverbial phrases in their sentences, providing more detail for the reader. This was a particular focus for the students with lower achievement. The teaching practice of all teachers had been observed and analysed at the end of 2007 and the specific goals for each teacher had carried over to the beginning of 2008. As a leader, Glenda had a particular interest in the impact of modelling on student writing, as this strategy had been a professional learning focus for the year 4-6 syndicate throughout the latter half of 2008. This professional learning included syndicate and staff workshops to explore the strategy, the use of a digital learning object to explore modelling in an online context and it had also been a focus of classroom observations.
However, Glenda was particularly interested in building her knowledge and practice of the ‘think aloud’ strategy and she had some evidence, especially from other classrooms, that this was having an impact on the learning of the lowest achievers. After analysing the student asTTle data, Glenda had then compared this to the initial samples in the students’ draft writing books. She felt that using ‘think aloud’ in her modelling would support students to transfer their learning into their writing. The children she is working with in the clips come from a range of year 5 classrooms.
The learning context
Over the past two years, the teachers at Rata Street, have endeavoured to provide authentic purposes for writing in their writing programmes. Across the Year 4-6 syndicate, ‘describing’ was selected as a major purpose for writing as it supported the learning needs identified from the end of the previous year’s data. Teachers felt that this focus would provide the context for teaching students how to construct complex sentences, with the additional phrases containing detailed information for the reader. ‘My teacher’ was selected as the topic and the audience was to be the students’ parents. The reason for these particular choices was that the teachers would be meeting the parents later in the month at a teacher /parent interview and by describing their teachers in a booklet that would be sent home, students would be able to ‘introduce' their teachers to the parents before they actually met. This provided a very real context in which students could develop expertise in the use of adjectival and adverbial phrases in their writing.
Published on: 02 Mar 2016
