Searching ......
"Since any teaching strategy works differently in different contexts for different students, effective pedagogy requires that teachers inquire into the impact of their teaching on their students” Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 35
"Since any teaching strategy works differently in different contexts for different students, effective pedagogy requires that teachers inquire into the impact of their teaching on their students”
None of the teacher actions described in the other guidelines can be effective without teacher inquiry.
Inquiry is vital as it help teachers to:
It is important that teachers have knowledge of their learners, including knowledge of students’:
One way for teachers to conduct some informal inquiry into students’ vocabulary is to give students a word-list (For example, as part of a ‘vocabulary jumble’ activity) and have them complete this ‘Traffic Light’ activity:
Teachers can then easily see what items students are most and least confident with.
“Students learn most effectively when they have time and opportunity to engage with, practise, and transfer new learning. This means they need to encounter new learning a number of times and in a variety of different tasks or contexts. It also means that when curriculum coverage and student understanding are in competition, the teacher may decide to cover less but cover it in greater depth” Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 34
“Students learn most effectively when they have time and opportunity to engage with, practise, and transfer new learning. This means they need to encounter new learning a number of times and in a variety of different tasks or contexts. It also means that when curriculum coverage and student understanding are in competition, the teacher may decide to cover less but cover it in greater depth”
In the context of adolescent literacy, it is important that students get extensive opportunities to:
A major problem in some secondary schools is that students simply do not get enough opportunities to read and write. Tatum describes African-American students in some inner-city schools as experiencing an ‘in-school literacy underload’ (Tatum, 2008). Facilitators in the Secondary Literacy Project have observed a similar literacy underload in some New Zealand classrooms
This is not to suggest that literacy instruction should be solely based around reading and writing. Effective instruction will also develop students’ skills to flexibly use and integrate written, oral, and visual modes.
For example, it is well established that oral language underpins written language; the two are closely interrelated. Effective teachers will plan oral language programmes to promote effective listening and speaking alongside their reading and writing programmes (Ministry of Education, 2006).
Making links between the written, oral, and visual strands are a powerful way of engaging students with text. Walqui (2006) uses the term ‘re-presenting text’ to describe tasks in which students transform their reading from one genre into another. Examples of re-presenting text include summarising written text in a visual form (such as a diagram) or oral form (such as discussion).
Some ways to find out how much reading and writing students in your school are currently doing are:
Make activating prior knowledge a routine your students do whenever they approach a challenging text or writing task. For example, you could:
Draw students’ attention to the organisational features whenever you introduce a challenging text or writing task. For example, you could refer students to this skim and predict poster:
Click image to enlarge
Download the following Word document and create your own Skim and Predict poster.
skim and predict (Word 28KB)
Teachers can support students in numerous ways to comprehend and produce text beyond their current level of expertise (for example, through teacher questioning, templates, retrieval grids, writing frames and other forms of scaffolding). Such support will be much more effective, however, when teachers make their purpose explicit to students, and provide students with explicit instruction about cognitive strategies that they can employ as independent readers and writers.
Imagine two science teachers who both have students who would currently struggle to write an extended essay about photosynthesis.
Teacher A decides to avoid the essay writing activity altogether, and has students record their information as a series of bullet points instead.
Teacher B chooses to provide students with a lot of support to write their essays. Students have opportunities to read similar essays and discuss their features. They brainstorm key subject vocabulary and important ideas to include. They are given tables and writing frames that help them organise their ideas. Students all complete an essay, albeit with considerable support.
The approach taken by Teacher B is a scaffolded approach. Scaffolding can be thought of as the purposeful use of guidance and support (through using instructional strategies) while handing over responsibility progressively to the learner. The ultimate goal is for students to self-regulate their learning and develop independence.
Connections can be made with Guideline 3 and Guideline 7 of the framework. The following will help guide your thinking when connecting these guidelines in your school context.
Consider what you can do to help your students:
“Students learn most effectively when they understand what they are learning, why they are learning it, and how they will be able to use their new learning” Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 34
“Students learn most effectively when they understand what they are learning, why they are learning it, and how they will be able to use their new learning”
Sometimes teachers will be explicit about content-based learning intentions and success criteria - but not about literacy-based learning intentions and success criteria.
Three important ways to make sure learning is clear and purposeful for students are through using:
Literacy learning intentions describe the knowledge or strategies students need to develop an aspect of their literacy. Learning intentions should be expressed in language that students understand and should support them in understanding what they are supposed to be doing and why. Ideally students can put learning intentions into their own words.
Literacy success criteria describe how students will go about achieving a learning intention or how they will know when they have learnt it. If students have been involved in the creation of success criteria they are more likely to take more ownership of their learning, be self-evaluative as they are working, and question the assessed work as it evolves.
Literacy exemplars are samples of authentic student work which can be annotated to illustrate levels of achievement. These could be examples of writing tasks, answers to reading tasks, examples of student note-taking or recordings of students explaining reading strategies.
“Learning is inseparable from its social and cultural context. Students learn best when they feel accepted, enjoy positive relationships with their fellow students and teachers, and when they are active, visible members of the learning community” Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 34.
“Learning is inseparable from its social and cultural context. Students learn best when they feel accepted, enjoy positive relationships with their fellow students and teachers, and when they are active, visible members of the learning community”
Classroom environments that support literacy learning are language-rich, vibrant, interactive, fun, purposeful, safe, supportive, and challenging. Such environments value the diverse knowledge and experiences students bring with them.
“Culture counts - knowing, respecting and valuing who students are, where they come from, and building on what they bring with them makes a difference to both teaching and learning” Ministry of Education, 2008, p. 20.
“Culture counts - knowing, respecting and valuing who students are, where they come from, and building on what they bring with them makes a difference to both teaching and learning”
One way for teachers to make ‘culture count’ is to include a balance of ‘mirror’ and ‘window’ texts in their programmes. Mirror texts reflect students’ own culture and experience while window texts give insight into unfamiliar ideas, perspectives, and experiences (Gangi, 2008).
Another way is to always encourage students to make connections to their own prior learning and experience. One further way is to treat students’ linguistic knowledge (such as knowledge of their first language) as a valued resource.
An important challenge for all New Zealand schools is to address current disparities in outcomes for Māori students.
These Māori concepts or principles are vitally important:
Attending to these principles is essential if Māori students are to feel truly valued and therefore become meaningfully engaged in classroom learning activities.
Feedback is a very significant component of effective instruction. Feedback is effective when it helps your students answer three questions: Where am I going? How am I going? Where to next? Hattie & Timperley, 2007
Feedback is a very significant component of effective instruction. Feedback is effective when it helps your students answer three questions:
Sometimes teachers will give good feedback about the subject content of a task (for example, the science ideas) but neglect the literacy aspects (for example, the paragraph structure or language choices).
Effective teachers will engineer effective classroom discussions and other learning tasks that elicit evidence of student understanding; provide feedback that moves learners forward; activate students as instructional resources for one another; and activate students as the owners of their own learning (Black & William, 2009).
Find out more about effective assessment for learning and about giving feedback in a literacy context.
Knowing how different texts are organised is very important for reading and writing.
Organisational features of texts include:
Surveying these features before reading helps students gain a general overview of the key ideas of the text, and an understanding of where key information is located. This helps activate a student’s schema and helps them form hypotheses about texts. It is particularly important at secondary school because many texts are not organised sequentially.
When students understand the hierarchical nature of organisational features of a text they may also be better able to separate main ideas from extraneous detail.
One powerful way to show students how an effective reader uses organisational features is by modelling a ‘think aloud’. For example:“My purpose in reading this newspaper is to get an overview of some news I might be interested in. The first thing I do is scan all the headings. Usually the bigger the headline, the more important the story is. By reading the headline, the photo and the caption I can quickly tell what this story is about... I decided to stop reading it after the first paragraph because that is where the most important information in a news story is and I only wanted to get a general idea of what had happened.”
Read more about how understanding text features benefits reading comprehension
Examples of skim reading tasks:
Read an example of an Assessment Resource Bank task about identifying text features of a scientific article.
Teaching about text forms can help students understand how text is structured and why. Teachers need to be careful, however, to be flexible about the features in a text forms as authentic text forms are often mixed.
Learning about organisational features of text also provides an important interface between reading and writing. For example, students can use the organisational features of texts they read to provide a framework for making their own written summaries of the text (McDonald et al., 2008).
Research in writing by Wray and Lewis (1997) shows that when students understand the structure of texts they have to write, they are more able to generate ideas and to organise those ideas coherently and logically (Ministry of Education, 2004, p. 131).
Learn more about writing frames.
Important text forms include:
Instructional tools
Graphic organisers and structured overview are instructional tools used to help students think about and use text patterns and structures.
‘Receptive’ refers to students’ understanding of language they receive (that is, through reading, listening, viewing). ‘Productive’ refers to students skills in producing language (that is, writing, speaking, presenting). Vocabulary instruction, for example, is often oriented more toward receptive than toward productive vocabulary. This might mean, for example, that students who can understand mathematical vocabulary such as ‘subtract’ when they read or hear it, may use non-mathematical vocabulary such as ‘take away’ when they write or speak.
Reading and writing are reciprocal processes and reading can be enhanced through writing instruction and vice versa. “To communicate in written language successfully, learners need to read like writers and to write like readers… teachers need to plan to make students aware of these links” (Ministry of Education, 2004, p. 73). For example, teaching students how to use topic sentences to signal a main idea in their writing may help students read more strategically because they know to pay relatively more attention to the topic sentence. Teaching students how to identify persuasive rhetorical devices in texts they read can help them to be more persuasive in their own writing. Effective instruction will help students recognise and make links between reading and writing.
The significance of acquiring domain specific vocabulary and understanding the way lexical items are used is very important. In general the more vocabulary a student has, the more vocabulary they are able to learn and the more they are able to cope and learn from complex academic tasks. Hiebert & Kamil, 2005
The significance of acquiring domain specific vocabulary and understanding the way lexical items are used is very important. In general the more vocabulary a student has, the more vocabulary they are able to learn and the more they are able to cope and learn from complex academic tasks.
Much vocabulary instruction in secondary content area classrooms appears to be focused on understanding new terms (that is, receptive vocabulary) but students also need extensive instruction and practice in using new vocabulary in speaking and writing (that is, productive vocabulary).
It is also important that content area teachers provide instruction to develop general academic and lower frequency vocabulary as well as subject-specific vocabulary.
Students benefit from the explicit instruction in and reinforcement of common strategies for vocabulary problem-solving. Such strategies include the use of morphological strategies (for example, prefixes), technical resources and dictionaries, checking across contexts, knowledge of parts of speech, and collocations.
Vocabulary learning is most effective when new terms are taught in the context of a current unit of work. One reason for this is that people need to experience and use a new term lots of times, and in a relatively short amount of time, before they can understand and use it confidently.
An effective sequence of vocabulary learning will include these steps:
1. Inquiry to identify students’ existing receptive and productive knowledge of vocabulary related to that topic, e.g.:
2. Explicit instruction in new terminology, e.g.:
3. Repeated opportunities to practice – both receptive and productive, e.g.:
4. Metacognition – students reflecting on their own learning, e.g. discussion or written reflection about:
5. Inquiry into effectiveness of teaching sequence, and planning next steps.
Key comprehension strategies used by effective readers include:
One of the fundamental challenges for teaching these cognitive strategies is that thinking is not visible. Therefore, less effective readers and writers are often unaware of the strategies that more proficient readers and writers use. Furthermore, effective readers and writers are sometimes not aware of the strategies that they use themselves.
Effective instruction will make the thinking processes that sit behind such activities ‘visible’. Such instruction might include explicit teaching of strategies and modelling of ‘think alouds’ by the teacher
This could also include discussion about problem-solving strategies among peers, and meta-cognitive self-reflection by individuals.
« Previous Next » 1... 927 928 929 930 931 932 933 934 935 936 937 938 939 940 ...1214
