Marubitshi: "learning talk"

The focus of this cell is “learning talk”. Through collaborative planning per grade we use Shayer lessons to challenge our children to be active thinkers, whose thinking can be enhanced and challenged by others. In today's lessons we provided opportunities for the children to work on real life problems as a group and come to their own understanding. We use the dedicate time for Maths in the classroom to focus their discussions on the planned Maths intervention. It is an integral part of our daily planning, not an added “onto” but added “into” our curriculum. Talk is encourage to help children to come to new ideas, make up their own minds, reason for themselves and play a part in another’s learning. As teachers we hope to model “learning talk”.

For example, can you explain it a bit more to help me understand?

Each lesson is divided into 3 episodes with episode 3 as the extension for differentiation. At present our lessons are about the Number System. We start off each episode with whole class instruction,followed by concrete preparation, before moving onto partner/group work, cognitive dissonance and ending with reflection as a whole class. Exit-tickets involved informal evaluation for formative assessment. Next week we will be teaching and observing the ”learning talk” of our children in these lessons.

Teaching reading in the IP

The teacher whose lesson we used as a jump-start went ahead and taught her 4 half hour sessions over 4 days.

It was exciting to actually teach reading and feel that the children are learning at different levels. What will I change next time? 1. Be VERY organised - right down to how many books are required per group and which group will be working in exercise books. 2. I must have task cards; explaining and writing on the board was fine for stronger children on day one when I had the weaker children, but took too long when weaker children had to work on their own on days 2-4. 3.Activities must be varied; children became restless once they had the same book twice. 4. The creative writing was not very creative. That group should do something that had been planned/prepared/discussed as a whole class before this lesson. 5. I found myself becoming bored by day 4. Will try 2 double sessions over 2 days.

The next lesson that was viewed was planned by a grade 5 teacher who used the first planning session as a guide. She was very positive about having a good chunk of contact time with a small group. All groups were engaged but the one group did not follow their instructions sequentially and missed the point of the study. The teacher concluded the lesson by reflecting on the process to improve the session on day 2. Both teachers planned an assessment sheet which clarified the purpose of the lesson. The second grade 6 teacher started his series of lessons where all students were actively engaged in groups. The one group did not fully understand their instructions and wasted much of their time rather than deciding on a course of action. This was a good point of discussion as it became clear that the most successful parts of these lessons have been grounded by the clarity of instructions. Teachers who continue to teach these lessons this week all plan to review both their verbal and written instructions. It was also decided that students who do not complete the work in class will not have to do it for homework so that they begin to practice the strategy “every minute counts”. Teachers will continue to get better at setting tasks which suit the levels of the groups to avoid student frustration. Next week we plan to discuss the clips that have been recorded in preparation for the inquiry lesson planning using this model.

Clickers enhance Active Inspire learning

Today in our CPD Humanities cell Brian showed us some strategies for using ACTIVE Inspire Learner response system or – the clickers. We explored various ways of using multiple choice, ranking and free response questions. The discussion centered on how this system can be used for a baseline assessment and we also expressed some concerns about recording the results. Brain put our fears to rest when he demonstrated how results can also be exported to EXCEL. We had a discussion on what might be the easiest and most effective way of trying this the first time and it was decided that maybe, it would be wise to start with a single Do-now type question using the clickers. All the members committed themselves to giving this a go in the next two weeks and reporting back on what we have learnt from our efforts. We realized that there is still lots to learn when it comes to using IT effectively in the classroom but we are keen to begin with small steps.

More advertising, focusing on higher order questions: Languages 2

Last weeks suggestion has been delayed, until the presenter is... present. We moved on with the second presenter, Ronelle Lochner, who is planning a lesson on advertising for her Gr. 10 class. She gave an outline of why advertising is important (it is in the final matric paper. This led to a rich discussion around cultural differences and the impact of multiculturalism on the interpretation of visual (and other) texts. Ronelle will present this Friday morning from 07.55-08.45. The lower school members of our cell will ask to be excused from their assembly. Ronelle will send through final lesson materials to cell members by Wednesday. We also had a discussion about a visual version of Bloom’s taxonomy, which Ronelle had sent to us during last week. The importance of higher order questions came up in relation to differentiation within assessment. Gala raised the importance of creating an equivalent Setswana version of Bloom’s taxonomy. This will aid students because they will know what is expected of them in answering questions.

PP questions the over-use of media in lessons

Today we briefly evaluated the lesson presented last week and focused our discussions on the potentially excessive use of media during lessons. We also evaluated the power of the hook to make the learning experience more concrete. We brainstormed the content of the next lesson and have decided to use the lesson plan template of the previous lesson. This will be facilitated by the core group of presenters this week but in the future it is hoped that each member of the PP group will be able to use it independently.

Advertising and beauty pageants: Language Cell 1

One of the Language cells has designed a lesson for Grade 9 Advertising. Colleen Knill prepared a wonderful PowerPoint presentation. Students will relate to the content which is set at the right standard. The teacher will facilitate a discussion with the class about body image and how they see themselves (Miss SA Teen comprehension). They will make connections between the role of advertising, beauty pageants in the community, and then write about this as a reflection in their journals.

Jellytotium - base concepts and jelly tots

Planned a lesson around the concept of relative atomic mass for Grade 10. We decided that we need to take time to explain basic concepts very well in order to facilitate a speedy grasp of later more difficult concepts. Illustration of the concept will cover one period. The class as a group will have to determine the relative atomic mass of an imaginary element “Jellytotium”. We planned the lesson around the use of jelly tots and determining the relative atomic mass with an electronic scale. The social curriculum will be addressed as the whole lesson will be group work and formative assessment will be done in the form of written and verbal questions. There will not be any differentiation as this is the first introduction of a base concept. In the follow-up lessons more attention will be given to differentiation and individual work.

Arts cell clarifies language and returns to basics

A wonderfully creative lesson plan was presented by the intern! We are all excited to see the inter-disciplinary integration and presence of various learning styles in this Gr. 9 Art lesson. The plan allows for many elements of good teaching practice to be integrated - the cell members immediately recognized where they could give input on additional strategies. We soon discovered, however, that it was more important to find a destination in our minds for the students rather than tweaking the “getting there”, as it was harder to figure out the “getting there” without being clear about the “where it is that we want the students to arrive at”. The discussion helped us realize that we have grown accustomed to using certain terminology in our lesson planning that is clear to everybody in our cell, but not be as clear to teachers outside of Lebone. We need to make sure that we break things down clearly in order to not overwhelm a prospective teacher with input and strategies and terminology. We have found ourselves going back to basics once again by clarifying the goal of the lesson together.