Teaching & Learning

LITERACY

We are continuing to raise money to expand our home reading books to engage students in home reading and we thank you all for participating in our termly fundraisers.  

Our new Fountas and Pinnell Guided Reading books for the upper school have arrived and have been processed, ready for students to read.  Teachers have a variety of text types to choose from to engage their students during small group work..  

As life long learners we continue our journey in learning.  Last term we ran a Professional Learning session for teachers in Years 3 - 6 on reciprocal reading.  This is a practice based on the foundational skills introduced through guided reading, with a greater focus on scaffolded talk between the teacher and the students.  This practice develops comprehension strategies, makes explicit what readers do - predict, clarify, question and summarise.  Roles are given to students to take greater ownership to lead the discussion about the text with the teacher as a facilitator. 

NUMERACY

Our teachers engaged in a fantastic professional learning experience with Peter Sullivan on Curriculum Day last term.  The focus of the day was giving students the confidence and orientation to think for themselves … and seeing themselves as the agent of their learning.  This includes all students participating in whole class learning experiences with students hearing a range of perspectives and possibilities.   Students will be devising their own strategies and solutions for productively challenging problems.   We want them to think for themselves, critically and creatively, actively creating their own knowledge. 

We presented a further professional learning session to unpack our maths instructional model.  This will consist of:

Anticipate: Teachers using our Whole School Scope and Sequence, academic references, student data to plan the experiences.

Fluency : All students participating in a shared activity making connections between visuals, symbols and vocabulary.  

Launch: Teachers pose a challenging and engaging task  puzzle/problem/game that students need to solve.  They unpack new vocabulary to prepare the students for success.  Students may ask clarifying questions.

Explore: Students work independently and then with a partner to solve the task.  Teachers rove, question and prompt students thinking.  They may pull a small group of students together to focus on an explicit skill.  Others may be given an enabling prompt to assist or extending prompts to extend students.

Summarise: Teacher shares student work and invites them to talk about their strategies. Teacher may explicitly teach a strategy. 

Re-Launch- Re-Explore - Re-Summarise:  Teacher poses another task similar to the first to enable the students to consolidate their learning.   Students are encouraged to try a more efficient strategy and then discuss their learning at the end of the session.

Our teachers and students have been very excited about our new model which is in the early days of implementation with an expectation that teachers use this model for at least one lesson per week this term , working towards 5 lessons by 2024. Many have jumped in and are doing 4 - 5 lessons already.  Feedback from the students has also been very positive.