GR8 Thinking @ MCC
GR8 Thinking Skills @ MCC
This year, a key focus of our Annual Improvement Plan is to improve student comprehension. Staff at Marian have spent every Wednesday this year undergoing professional learning to improve their ability to explicitly teach comprehension strategies. We have drawn these strategies from the work of Sheena Cameron in her book ‘Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies: A practical classroom guide’. Our professional learning is also drawing on the research on what works best in the classroom, particularly the strategy of direct instruction and formative practices.
We have formed a dynamic literacy team that is driving our initiative; Damien Herb, Tonetta Iannelli, Rose Turunen, Toni Griffiths, Angela Brown, Justine Parle, Belinda McKellar and myself. As a team we have decided on 8 key strategies that will become part of the common language of literacy instruction across the classrooms in all Key Learning Areas at MCC. The strategies include:
- Skimming, Scanning and Summarising
- Making Connections
- Predicting
- Questioning
- Inferring
- Visualising
- Synthesising
- Self-monitoring.
Please have a look at our Gr8 Thinking Skills posters that will be displayed in every classroom below. Thank you to Lucia Dickie for sharing her artistic flair and developing these posters that will enhance the learning.
The purpose of our work is to provide students with more metacognitive awareness and for students to develop a “toolkit” of strategies they can draw on when they are trying to understand what they are reading. Currently, we have worked on ‘Skimming, Scanning and Summarising’ and ‘Making Connections’ and students have been engaging in these activities in their classes.
Please talk to your child about these strategies. The more students talk about, think about and use the strategies, the more likely it will be that these strategies will become part of their normal cognition. If you have any questions about our current literacy initiative, please do not hesitate to contact the school to speak to either myself or any member of our literacy team.
Christie Scoble
Assistant Principal – Learning and Teaching
