Saturday 16 March 2024

Writing - there's more to it than meets the eye

 In my little series about literacy, I thought I would meander off a little into the topic of writing.   

Writing and reading are inextricably linked, while there are obvious differences, there are many pieces of the puzzle that are the same.  Sadly however, writing seems to be completely misunderstood and it is not yet widely acknowledged in our education system, that writing is one of the most complex cognitive tasks that we ask children to do.

I have posted about writing before, a few years ago now, and reading back, there was much I did understand, but a lot I realise I just didn't know.  Since then, my deep dive into the Science of Literacy and more accurately in my mind, the Science of Learning or Evidenced Based Teaching, my approach to writing has changed.   

Often writing is seen as just one part of the daily timetable, the teacher models, the children write and that is it.  Little thought is given to the foundations that need to be in place for children to be successful in this process.  Or if thought is given, an attempt is made to teach it all at once, through one modelling session.  I know this was me, I scheduled writing, I wrote, the children helped me, then they wrote.  Often they just drew a picture and scribbled some letters and this was ok.  I celebrated the effort, I cherished the storytelling but if I did give thought to what else I should have been fostering, it was shoved in with everything else. 

 I was also really good at 'motivating' their writing, we used drama, imagination...all the bells and whistles.  

Many children made excellent progress within this approach, they picked up what I was putting down and quickly became writers.  Others appeared to remain stalled, mystified by the process of writing, often unable to come up with their own ideas, yet I persisted with my approach, thinking if we just kept plugging away at it, they would get it.  I wrote with children every day and hoped that the frequency of writing throughout the week would mean progress.  As I write this, it reminds me of the current government's soundbite "an hour of writing a day."  

What we did find, school wide, is that there were a group of children, that never really became writers.  This happened year after year.   

They improved slowly with time, but were often termed 'reluctant', writing was just not their thing, their spelling was atrocious and their writing was messy.  They disliked writing as much as I dislike soggy brussel sprouts.  Still we blamed the fact that this was just the norm, some children would just never take to writing and that was ok.   Funnily enough they were predominantly boys and it was around year 4 we really noticed them significantly lagging behind their female counterparts.   Our summation was that boys really just didn't like writing and therefore we needed to come up with engaging and authentic contexts to write about.   So instead of looking at what actually makes up the writing process, we tried to make it more exciting.  Again, this really worked well for those children who were already successful writers and those who were our 'reluctant' writers really loved the 'excitement' of the motivation, but there was little impact on the quality of their writing.  They were happier to write, but this didn't make them any better at it.

I look back now, appalled at my mindset, but forgive myself for not knowing better.  I am a firm believer in the fact that if we know better, we should do better, so over the last seven years I have committed myself to knowing better and to looking at my practice when children are not achieving as I would expect.

What I know 'better' now, is that writing is incredibly complex.  While many would say, we get better at writing, by writing and therefore children should be writing everyday in order to improve, I say, that if we are just doing the same thing, over and over and expecting different results, we are deluded.  Of course repeated practice is crucial, but what is it that we are repeatedly practicing?

So in my 'knowing better' journey, I have discovered that writing has so many facets, many that can be linked to reading, many that stand alone and many that actually benefit reading.

What I am about to list, is obviously not a complete list of all the parts of the writing puzzle, but I think they are the ones that we need to actively be teaching and fostering in our classrooms.  Using this thinking, it is likely, rather than one 'writing session' you will be teaching the foundations or building blocks of writing over the day in bite sized chunks, bringing these things together for sessions where children do write independently, but the 'modelling' sessions may not look like they used to.

I have not gone into great depth in any area, as I don't want this post to bore you, rather I would like it to either be affirming, or give further food for thought.

I preface this all by saying, this works beautifully in a classroom following a play pedagogy and the very nature of play, will foster and develop many of the areas I list.






1) Working Memory.

This is often completely overlooked when people think of writing, but if I am unable to keep an idea in my head, long enough to plan or write my story, how do I actually write it?  

More significantly, if I am cognitively overloaded by having to concentrate on some of the other areas listed, I simply don't have the cognitive bandwidth to keep my idea in my head.  

Now, there is research to say working memory can not be improved and other research that says it can be improved.  Whichever is true, I think the most important thing we can do, so that a child can keep an idea in their head long enough to get it written down, is free up the load other tasks are placing on them.  As Anita Archer would say, teach the stuff and cut the fluff.


2) Formation

This has been ground breaking for me.  I knew handwriting was important, but didn't really think of the role it played in writing.  Seems silly to say this now, but I didn't see it as actually part of my writing approach. 

Being able to automatically form little shapes leads to fluency (accurate and at an appropriate speed.) By automatic, I mean, they appear not to even have to think about it.   This very obviously frees up cognitive space to concentrate on the other skills that writing requires.  This means, that handwriting sessions are integral to writing and need to be part of an everyday programme. 

If we look at my discussion around our reluctant writings, this is possibly one of the core skill deficits  that led to their supposed 'reluctance.'

I also love this Anita Archer quote "If you expect it, pre-correct it."  This is so relevant to letter formation for our youngest learners.  As teachers of our youngest learners, we already know what it is they will struggle with and what habits they will form, if we allow them time to do so.


3) Fine Motor and Gross Motor Skills

This links in strongly with formation, as it is basically impossible to learn to form letter shapes correctly, if holding a pencil and sitting upright is a challenge.  

Children need core strength for handwriting, coordination and balance, they need to know where they are in space, to have the hand strength necessary to ensure holding a pencil is not an overly difficult task.  This is a massive area and I won't list all of the things a child is having to put together movement wise in order to write, but we do need to give the credit deserved to the complexity of this process.

So although it might not sound like part of a writing session, this is part of it and an awareness of fostering these movement skills is vital.  Again, where a play pedagogy comes in very, very handy!

The Key Strengths & physical skills needed for handwriting:

Gross Motor Skills (Posture Base)
Gross Motor Skills (Bilateral Coordination)
Fine Motor Skills (Sensory Perception)
Fine Motor Skills (Hand and Finger Muscles)
Eye Tracking Ability.
Spatial Awareness.
Motor Memory.
Visual Memory.


4) Encoding (spelling)

This is an area I massively overlooked when I thought of writing sessions.  Encoding now takes prime of place in our whole class literacy sessions (decoding, formation and spelling combined.)

Providing encoding practice that is based on a scope and sequence and taught systematically is vital.  I am not talking about good old word lists that get sent home, supposedly memorised and tested on a Friday.  I am talking about explicit teaching of encoding, based on sound to print, focusing on parts of the code being learned, where children are adding, deleting and substituting sounds.    I am talking about the spelling of specific sound patterns that are being learned, with repeated practice, to the point of automaticity.  I am talking about retrieval practice and interleaved practice, where parts of the code that have been taught, are woven into new learning and revisited again over time.

Why is this important, well the less children have to deliberately think about how to spell each word, the more they will be free to write well developed pieces, unhampered by poor spelling understandings.  If they have  many spelling understandings under their belt, and know how to spell many words, they will also be more willing to add interesting words into their writing that they may not yet be able to spell.

When I think about our 'reluctant' boys, this was an integral reason they were reluctant, spelling the words was just so incredibly hard.

Dictated sentences, based on the parts of the code we have learned and are learning have become a regular part of my practice, these are also gold for teaching children what a sentence is and what it needs to have.

You have a go at writing a sentence in a language that you have basic understanding and see how complex and creative your sentence is.


5) Irregular Words

Again, linked strongly to reading, but the spelling of irregular words is vital to building fluency of writing.  Words like (the, my, was, saw) are words that we come across so many times in the sentences we want to write.  If each time, we have to think about how to spell them, that is cognitive bandwidth taken away from the writing process.  

Many irregular words will only be irregular, till children have that part of the code and are learned exactly the same way as we teach regular words.  


6) Oral Language and Vocabulary

Oral language forms a huge part of our approach to writing.  A trend at the moment is a real decline in oral language.  This downward slide of oral language has been something I have noticed over the last 12 years and it is only getting worse.

If a child can not speak in a full sentence, how an earth do we expect them to write one.   We need to be providing explicit opportunities to develop oral language, to concentrate on the clear articulation of sounds, to hear wonderful language through poetry and rich texts if we want our children to be capable writers.   Children need to be exposed to rich vocabulary and develop a rich vocabulary bank of their own.

Again, there is a massive link to reading here and the development of a knowledge rich curriculum.


7) Sentence Construction

Explicit teaching of what a complete sentence is, is a vital part of the writing programme.  Children need to be systematically taught the parts of a sentence, learning about syntax and morphology.  I think I noticed the most dramatic progress in my classes writing when I became more explicit in teaching them about complete sentences.  It seems so simple, but is incredibly powerful.   I love Colourful Semantics for this, combined with the Syntax Project.


8) Idea Generation and Knowledge Development


If coming up with an idea is hard, how an earth do I write?  If I have very little understanding of my world, how do I write, what do I write?  

Coming up with an idea can be explicitly modelled, using pictures, songs, poems, videos etc  Children need to be taught how to do this. 
 When it comes to knowledge, our classrooms need to be places where knowledge about the world and connected schemas are actively developed.   I found the writing of factual pieces, based on the knowledge we had been learning, really assisted my classes progress with writing.  Because they had the knowledge, having something to write about was easy and creating connected ideas, even easier.  This focus on knowledge also brings in many Scientific understandings, which is an added bonus in a time poor classroom.

This post is just a very basic look at the facets that go into an approach to teaching writing effectively. 

 I share a lot of my practice through my facebook group Number Agents, if you are keen to see more or ask any questions. 

I am always learning and I think that that is one of the most important dispositions a teacher can have.  

 Writing is a massive area and far more complex than it appears on the surface.    

There is much more to writing than meets the eye.







Saturday 2 March 2024

The Science of Literacy - Knowledge Development

 


I thought I would do a bit of a series of posts (as I get time of course) about the aspects of Science of Literacy and how they are enacted in my classroom.  

I still see far too much of an emphasis on the Science of Reading being just phonics, there seems to still be very little understanding of what is actually encompassed in this term and the research behind this.  We are all so fearful of using the word 'balanced' we steer clear of this term, just in case people think we are talking balanced literacy.

If you look at the very well known pillars of literacy above, you'll see there is far more to all of this than just phonics.  However if you listen to researchers discuss the above visual, you will hear them say that the pillars above are misleading, seeming to apply that the same weight be applied to each.  This was not the intention of the diagram, and it is important to understand, for children to become readers and writers, there does need to be a higher degree of emphasis on phonics and phonemic awareness (with letters) in the beginning, for children to become fluent.  In a recent podcast series on Melissa and Lori love Literacy, Hugh Catts discusses specifically this.

Obviously over time, the degree of weight applied for each pillar, changes.  There is also the important point to make that while there are key elements of comprehension that need to be taught and fostered through practice, comprehension should be the outcome of all reading and the old adage, learning to read and reading to learn, should be thrown out with the bathwater as it is misleading and infers that we can't learn to comprehend, while we are learning to read.  Obviously comprehension is something always being fostered, if not through children actually reading themselves, by rich picture books and other texts.  

I have popped oral language and knowledge along the bottom of the pillars, as they are so foundational and if you are anything like us, the oral language level of children coming in to school and the deficit in knowledge about the world are becoming quite alarming.

The other misconception about the pillars, as Hugh Catts has discussed is the fact the pillars appear to stand alone as if they are independent, this of course is not the fact and they develop together, being complementary of each other.  I guess this is where the reading rope is a really useful model, along with Active View of Reading (Nell Duke). 

This could be discussed at length, but what I really wanted to share, is how I ensure an approach that fosters each of these aspects, with an appropriate emphasis on what my children actually need.  I have a class of older Year One children mixed with predominantly Year Two (NZ) So they are 5 - 7 years of age.

Importantly it is necessary to note that my journey has led me to view the interwoven nature of reading and writing and therefore this is how I approach it in my classroom.  

Knowledge Development In My Classroom

Operating through a play based pedagogy, means this is something that happens quite naturally in terms of what is child led.  Tuning into the focus of their play, what they are exploring and featuring this in our discussions, highlighting this in our reflective journals and finding connected texts, videos and podcasts drives this easily.  It is something I have always done, but actually never thought about how it directly impacted progress in literacy.  Now I am deliberately thinking about it, it is easy to tie it into our writing and my modelled texts, along with any problems presented in mathematics.

However, once I started to focus on how we build knowledge, I knew I needed to go beyond this, there were so many areas that their play just wouldn't lead us to.  In a curriculum that is so overloaded as it is, it seemed very logical to pull this in through areas such as Science, SEL, Social Sciences, Drama, Arts etc.  

While this does happen quite naturally, I have learned to be more deliberate, to really tune into the knowledge and expand on it in different ways, to link it and interweave it, to listen to podcasts, to watch related videos, to use storytelling, to read about it and write about it.  Even more importantly, to record it in some way, in turn connecting it to our vocabulary development.

Another thing I have learned, is not to take for granted, what children do and do not know and not to waste a lot of time gathering 'prior knowledge.'  Most powerfully I make sure we connect writing to whatever knowledge we are deliberately developing and try to draw explicit connections to aspects of knowledge, where it is relevant.   If children are not yet able to write about it themselves, then they assist me to write about it.

Something we are working on at our place is this knowledge and reading spine, it is only a couple of years old and still a work in process, but it is our attempt to pull everything together and make it easier to 'fit everything in.'

Reading and Knowledge Spine

When building knowledge on a topic or idea I generally follow this rhythm:


*Knowledge presented through play, or deliberately by me

*Create some word storms around the topic or idea that can be added to over time and used for writing ( I have shared some examples of these in my group)

*Read some fiction books around the topic

*Read some non-fiction books around the topic

*Watch some short videos on the topic and listen to some podcasts if relevant

*Practical activities if relevant to the topic

*If able to, provide items in the environment that will encourage further thought through play

*If possible, find connected texts that the children can read, or access as a read together

*If able to, I write some decodable texts to go with our topic or idea.

*If appropriate I will use storytelling and dramatic inquiry that are connected to our knowledge.

*Focus our writing on the topic or idea

- Throughout the process, record our ideas and journey to reflect back on.


The above process may be quick, or it may extend over several weeks.  As much as possible, I allow children to guide it and generally we will start to wander off into connected areas.

There is obviously a massive link here to how we explicitly foucs on Vocabulary and I will focus on that a bit more in my next blog post.

Tuesday 20 February 2024

Extending from and inviting in play, literacy and mathematics (along with all the other stuff)


In my facebook group, I recently asked if people had burning questions they would like me to answer.  I thought I would write a very short series of blog posts addressing these, thinking they might be useful for others too.

The first question I wanted to touch on was this one:

"How you extend from your whole class sessions into learning through play in other parts of the day in different open ended provocations with the suggestion or invitation to incorporate certain maths lessons currently being worked on."

I posted a couple of sample days in my group, but thought they may also be interesting within this post to give concept to what our days look like.

For those wanting to know more about our days and how they are structured. Firstly every day can be quite different. I have a list of things I want to achieve in the week and work from there.
I start by plotting out the day in terms of must do, want to do and any tier two extra individuals I want to work with. I aim to see my tier two children (literacy) at least three times a week, more if possible. Through the day I make notes and tick things off, anything not done gets carried over.

Here’s how today went:
We started with a photo taken from our play last week. This is two pronged, to expand on their interests and build knowledge a vocabulary. It’s also a good link to learning about what a question is and ultimately will link back to our writing.
We then went to play.
After this we came together to visit again with our noticing slideshow, today recreating the patterns, talking about what was happening and learning how this can be represented in abstract form.
Play - then snack - part of a chapter from our class story. (Amelia Jane)
Part one of our literacy - whole class
Play - one check in, one tier two
Part two of our literacy - whole class
Play - morning tea
Part three of our literacy
Video on reptiles
Play - another tier two
Lunch playing
Lunch eating - rest of our chapter
Play - catch up with my more independent group, practicing how they keep a record of the books they’ve read
Tidy up
Library bus
Syntax - colourful semantics - who and do, nouns and verbs
Number blocks 🙂
Home


Another glimpse into the ‘flow’ of our day.
Before the day started I nabbed a couple of children for literacy goal check ins. (we run these individually to ensure children are being met where they are at and so we can keep track of any needs that pop up.)
We started our day with part one of our literacy, phonemic, phonics, word reading. We then moved straight into our handwriting, repeated exactly from yesterday and already a big improvement.
We then moved to play for half an hour, I mingled and then caught up with a two tier child and a check in.
Snack time just before ten, read another chapter of Amelia Jane and then moved into part two of literacy. Spelling words and writing a sentence. Remembering what a sentence needs to have. Practicing our fluency poem, learning to perform it line by line and working on prosody. This poem is then woven throughout our day and will be used a little like talk for writing approach. This will run over several weeks.
Play for another half hour and I caught up with another tier two child then a check in and a mingle.
Morning tea.
We came back in to work on our noticing patterns to ten based on our slideshow. Again focused on whole to part, the meaning of equals and adding one.
Twenty minute play then part three of our literacy, reading sentences then doing our paper text comprehension. Focus on prosody as well. Children move if to practice the sentences and illustrate them. As children finish they find a ‘just right for me’ decodable and practice.
Lunch playing. Had to shoo them out eventually because they didn’t want to stop reading.
Eat and read a chapter from Amelia.
Play or read, tidy, swim at 2.00pm
2.30 circle discussion about skinks to link in with our focus yesterday. Some lovely vocab discussion. A child has brought a dead skink to school, so we all had a close look. He shared some excellent facts.
Pack up - home
🙂 another busy day, but some lovely weaving, I had wanted to do more SEL learning but didn’t get there today.
An example of a day, the initial plan in blue with my scribbles added on throughout the day.



Basically there are core components of our day around math and literacy that remain the same. I only teach three days a week, so it is important I make the most of my time here. Other than that, our days are pretty fluid. I do not have a timetable, and our day flows through the things that I need to get done and the things I'd like to get done. As with any school, there are days where we have so many alternative things on, things are simply shelved for the next.

If you are familiar with my class and the way we do things, our whole class sessions max out at 15 minutes. We call them bite sized, and quite frankly time spent is often contingent on the mood of the class. Our whole class sessions for scope and sequence (maths) are often divided into even smaller amounts over the day, it just depends on the day really. The way I encourage them to 'think' about mathematics in their self-directed play is through reflection (based on a previous lesson with images in our journal, or photos of play that involved maths the previous days.) Children are naturally curious and if they see another child exploring a concept, they are more likely to join in, or spark something of their own. This can be invited, simply by leaving the equipment out, an image up on screen or through a declarative statement at the end of the session "I wonder if..." "What else can we find out..."

Inspiring math play from our problem solving is even easier. Because the portal worlds are something that children feel intrigued by, connected to and quite responsible for, they will leap into this play following a session. One taking on my role, others getting out the whiteboards and equipment, while others stand in as the characters, using the puppets. The problems they create usually revisit the one that we had solved that day. Again leaving some equipment out, invites further exploration. I also find children love big bits of paper, big bits of paper seem to inspire a load of connected play.

Literacy is even easier to inspire. I find children quite naturally seek out what we would say is 'literacy' as they develop and experience success in class based situations. The more success they experience, the more they grow and develop, the more they will seek out these tasks. When it is developmentally within their range of abilities to independently seek out activities they will. I find as the year goes on, we have a lot of letter writing to the portal, a lot of self instigated stories, lots of sign making for puppet shows and cafe menus, lots of instructions and cards. Simply taking photos of their play and sharing it as part of our learning journal is enough to inspire more of this play during their self-initiated time.

Of course, talk is always part of a classroom based on a play pedagogy, as is the development of fine and gross motor skills, all important building blocks of literacy.

I find the best thing to invite is declarative statements, not questions, or demands, but curious wonderings.

Discussions that take the form of reflection, knowledge building, picture books (anything really that is focussed) is enough to inspire play. A short discussion about professions, such as scientists, vets etc will often see a flurry of play related to this context. Sometimes it deepens, sometimes it is a flash in the pan. Again taking photos and using them for reflection, will inspire more play.

Simply provide the environment, the bits and pieces for props and children will do the rest really. Don't get stuck in the cycle of putting out beautiful provocations only to be frustrated when children use them for completely different things than intended. If planning a specific invitation, a picture book, a puppet and some paper can inspire a lot. I find the equipment in our class that inspires the most open ended play is old keyboards. They become just about anything in a class that uses play as a pedagogy.






Sunday 21 January 2024

What might an hour a day of mathematics look like?

 This blog post follows on from my one of yesterday about literacy.

Understanding the Science of Learning and understanding neurodiversity remain as important for maths and all other areas of the curriculum as they are for literacy.  In reality it is teacher knowledge and the way they can breathe this knowledge and 'flair' that make the difference.  

While a 'programme' or 'approach' can help guide practice, teacher knowledge remains paramount, so just because it is so important I will reiterate, it is not time that matters, but the quality with which this teaching is done.  In order to make this a reality, rather than just mandating a length of time we need to spend on maths and literacy, significant time, PLD and resourcing needs to come forth from our government, I await this with baited breath.  

Not only this, significant support needs to be provided to teachers in classrooms to be able to enable them to assist ALL learners, the classrooms of today, look very different to how they looked even five years ago, and massively different from ten years ago.  Sadly the resourcing being provided to assist our most vulnerable learners has stagnated, if not reduced over the years.  It is hard to enact a a rich teaching environment, based on best practice, that meets the needs of ALL learners, when you are spending a significant amount of your day assisting children to regulate or meeting their health needs because they do not meet the mystical threshold for support.

Our system is not currently meeting the needs of our most vulnerable learners and something needs to be done about this right now!

Ok, a bit off track, but it needs to be said, in order to ensure ALL children make progress in literacy and maths, robust supports need to be in place that enable us to teach and connect.

Back on track, so what does an hour of mathematics look like in my largely Year 2 classroom.  Firstly, mathematics and literacy are everywhere, but maths is just so easy to find.  Maths is about patterns, relationships, connections and language.  Finding this through play is easy, so if we are only talking about time, it could probably be said that children spend most of their day engaging in some sort of activity or thought that could be classified as mathematics.  I could probably say the same about literacy, but this post is about how I am specifically and explicitly teaching maths over the day.

For those with my scope and sequence and for those that follow my number agent group, it is possibly really obvious how I do this.  For the intent of this post, I will presume you don't follow that group.  However I do encourage you to join this group on facebook, as I share a huge amount of my daily practice via this group.

It is important I note that if you have read my literacy post, you will note how this is seemingly broken up into small chunks.  This is an approach that works well, I call it bite sized learning, I find it allows time to review, teach and practice, is just the right length of time for my little people and reduces that cognitive load as we are being really specific and I am deliberately targeting my teaching rather than allowing myself to go off track.  This approach also works extremely well in my class that is based on a pedagogy of play and developmentally aware practice.  I find as the year goes on, the time we can spend does increase, but initially I like to keep it to ten minutes (this does not count the time taken to get them ready for the task.). As we venture more into problem solving, sessions will be more like 20, however this session is broken up, so the time that I spend explicitly teaching would be less than ten minutes.  


I should probably say something I neglected to say in my previous post. Like anyone I have children that find it difficult to sit with the class, or do exactly what we are doing at the time.  I don't see this as 'mis-behaviour' I allow them to do what they need to do.  If this means they continue playing near us, all good, if it means they sit on the couch and watch, all good, if it means they come for part of the time but them walk out of the class to reset, all good.  I want to meet every child where they are right now and this means being guided by their cues.  

So how does a normal day look - (Times for example only and not every day will include all of these things, there just is not time)

*Scope and sequence session - we will either break this into two parts, or one, dependent on the length of time needed to cover the session.  I will also break one session into parts over the week or even two weeks if that is more important, to allow for review and practice.  (Ten minutes per session) x 2 sessions

*Math talk - usually part of each session is some sort of visual image for math talk.  This can take anything from ten -fifteen minutes, dependent on how much children share.  There is a lot of peer to peer talk here and some talks include the use of materials. (Ten - 15 minutes per session)

*Math videos, songs and games - these are interspersed throughout the day, usually we will spend about five - ten minutes on one or all of these.  (15 minutes interspersed over the day)

*Problem solving - we start problem solving with story based problems based on the children and their lives.  These sessions initially are very teacher directed and explicit.  Children do have material and will also draw ideas, but there is close teacher direction here initially until children have the foundations for greater independence. (Ten minutes)

*Portal Problem Solving - this starts when we are over halfway through the scope and sequence and replaces the problem solving mentioned above.  You can find more out about this in my number agent group.  It includes review, explicit teaching, scaffolding, independent problem solving, sharing and revisiting.  (20 minutes)

*Finding math in our daily play, lots of sharing via our journal will include lots of mathematical thought.  

***My release teacher focuses in on other strands during her Wednesdays and Fridays.  The portal is used to deliver more strand based problems, while mine tend to focus on number.

What I am hoping to show with this post and my post prior to this one, is demonstrate just how much literacy and maths already happens in a classroom.  As I said in my previous post, our days a fluid, I do not have a timetable, we write down our must do, want to do and could do in our scrapbook.  We simply them tick off items done and write down the things not done for the next day.  Just like any classroom, every day is different and often if I have spent only a little time on maths the day before, I will make sure I spend more the next day.  This all evens up over the week.


What is important to me, is not only that children are receiving quality explicit teaching, but that they have ample time to develop social, emotional skills, to make friends, to play, to develop and share their interests and pursue their own passions, as with literacy, children will often link their play to what we have been learning and keep exploring these ideas.  

When it comes down to it, time is irrelevant, as my Std 4 teacher told me, quality over quantity (this was in relation to writing, and as you can see, it is a message I still struggle with.)

What we need is a system that resources us, supports us and provides us with the means to ensure that this quality is happening in every classroom.  As I said before, I await with baited breath.

Saturday 20 January 2024

An hour a day of literacy, what's so new about that?

 You'd have to be living under a rock to have not heard about the 'new' requirement of the current government to ensure literacy and maths are taught for an hour a day each.  

I don't know if you are anything like me, but when this policy was announced, it conjured up images of children sitting 'doing' literacy for exactly an hour.  I know that this is not the intention of the policy, but it certainly is how some seem to be interpreting it.  Let's get it straight, you would be hard pressed to find a classroom not doing an hour of literacy a day, but what we don't want is people focused on the length of time, instead we want them focused on quality teaching.

The policy itself feels like a 'soundbite' something to please voters, I guess we will have to wait and see what substance of understanding and resourcing comes with this policy, but while we are waiting, let me share how my 'hour' of literacy and 'hour' of maths might look on a day to day basis, in a junior class that embraces a pedagogy of play.  

Before I do this I need to make a few  things clear.  Doing something for longer, does not necessarily mean I am doing it better and every teacher needs to understand more about the Science of Learning.  Such as, the gradual release model, the self-teaching hypothesis, cognitive load theory, Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, what learning is and how we get learning into long term memory, why we need a scope and sequence, repeated practice, what is Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 support and what explicit teaching is etc.  

Rather than go on here, I will direct you to Olwyn Johnstons facebook group, where she very succinctly explains these things and so much more.

The Kiwi Reading Doctor 

I also firmly believe that every teacher needs to understand Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Dyspraxia, DLD, ADHD, ASD and be able to use these understandings to shape approaches that will not only ensure success for these children, but all children.  Having a degree of trauma informed practice training is also of immense benefit to teachers.

It would seem to be a priority for this government, if wanting teachers to truly teach literacy and mathematics successfully to all children, that they would provide the resourcing and training for all teachers to be well versed in these understandings.  Again, doing something for longer, without making a change to practice, will make absolutely no difference whatsoever.  




I have blogged a bit about the features of my literacy programme and these things of course morph and change over the year as children progress, below is a very simple breakdown of how things may look.  What is important to remember, is that I am constantly noticing, recognising and responding tweaking my approaches to cater for the needs I am seeing.  I have a Year 2 class, with a few older Year 1 children.

Crucial to all of these is review, review is always built into the start of every session.  Also crucial is maintaining an lovely perky,  with what I am wanting them to learn, made explicit and not hidden inside lots of talk.

Please note the times are simply to demonstrate that over the day, just how much learning is literacy specific.  It is also important to understand that via play, children are often also developing skills that they then bring into our structured sessions.

- Whole class literacy session (inclusive of phonological, reviewing sounds, learning a new sound, spelling sounds, spelling words, reading words, heart word spelling and reading, dictated sentence/s, reading sentences.).This session is broken into two parts if needed over the day, at the start I aim for sitting for not longer than ten minutes.  Sessions in total would be 15-20 minutes.  These sessions also contain songs and movement throughout and are presented in slideshow form.  This is considered Tier 1, I always have 3-4 children that I am then working individually working with in Tier 2.

-Handwriting, we teach this separately as well as focusing on formation within our literacy session.  We used Casey as a bridge from our juniors and then tag these to working on the formation of the graphemes, also easily linked to the phoneme as a nice review.  We found last year that an explicit focus on handwriting really made a massive difference to our class.  This is about 10 minutes.

-Writing, to start the year, we are heavily focused on speech to print and use a lot of dictated sentences and word chaining.  This is done within our literacy sessions, but we also take it out of these sessions as well as a stand alone.  10 minutes

-Writing - bridging from oral language we start with colourful semantics, coming up with ideas and creating a full sentence.  All out loud to start with and can be linked to representing in visual form.  We also do talk from images and use these to make up sentences.  Initially I will scribe sentences, and gradually children become independent enough in spelling and formation to do this successfully.  10 minutes (slowly over the year children will begin to write more independently, either based on the knowledge building the ideas we are exploring, or simply because they have a story to tell)


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Writing, along with the colourful semantics and sentence building, we also work our way through the Syntax project lessons, I do modify them slightly for my needs.  10-15 minutes

-Fluency/ Performance - each two-three weeks we have a text, children are learning out loud.  I do try to link it to our knowledge building, but sometimes these stand alone as a poem or rhyme.  We learn a couple of lines a day, until we have the whole text known, we work on actions and our expression.  Each day we practice to commit it to memory, we then perform it, either for another class, or to be videoed for sharing. 5 minutes

- Buddy Reading- Fluency- Repeated Reading - children have a buddy, chosen for a variety of reasons, but generally at a level that they can support one another.  The text that they are reading changes according to need.  It may be a word ladder, based on the sounds we are learning, it could be the poem that we are learning for our performance (once we know it quite well), it could be our decodable sentences from our literacy sessions or it can be a text that they can both read with one another's support, sometimes it is a mixture of these things.  The key is repeated reading, so the text remains the same for the week, or sometimes more. 5-10 minutes

- Decodable stories - as you will have seen, if you have read my other posts, is that I write semi-decodable stories for my children, with their input.  These stories include the code they know, but also elements they do not.  Each day we read a section together, discuss the text and children illustrate that part.  These get more complex over the year. 15 minutes ( some of this is the children drawing their pictures)

- Knowledge building, we always have an area of knowledge that we are developing, over the days I will read non-fiction texts, share videos, share images, share podcasts to listen to.  Children will respond in a variety of ways, and over the year, they will start writing factual sentences.  Can't really pin a time on this as it happens in pockets over the day and week and is often inspired by play.

-Storytelling, I use a lot of storytelling, puppets often feature, but stories come from my life, places, history, anything really.  At times over the year, we will use talk for writing as well. Can't pin a time on this.

- Chapter book reading - I always have a book I am reading the class, children love listening to this and love talking about what is happening in the story.  I try to read one or two chapters a day.  Generally while we are eating lunch, or at the end of the day. 10 minutes.

- Review based games - I try to intermingle over the week games that review the sounds we are learning, generally in the form bingo type games that are quick and easy to set up.  5 - 10 minutes


There is absolutely no way this all happens every day, highlighted in orange are the things I like to get to daily when possible. It is important to note, that often writing is an intermingling of the things noted above and it is worth following my number agent group on facebook to see what these actually look like.

Play is intermingled throughout our sessions and of course our knowledge building is linked to our learning in other curriculum areas and often drama is used as a tool for learning to that links strongly to literacy.  Of course it is not always possible to fit what I want to fit in and this is not intended to be a reflection of the other things that are included in our day, this post is just about literacy and I will do another about maths.  

Our days are fluid and we do not have a timetable, we simply write down in our A4 daily book what we 'must do' 'want to do' and would 'like to do' things we do not get to, are written down for the next day.  Again, quality over quantity.  

We also have an individual goal setting system with children that we are constantly working on with individual children in the moments we have free, this ensures that I know where I need to pinpoint support.  

The reality is classrooms and schools are busy places, we have so many demands on our time and so much to fit in, what is most important, is that what we teach, we teach it well and give our children  (all of our children) the best possible chance of really learning.

By the way, I have not mentioned the time it actually takes to get young children ready to start in our sessions (I know junior teachers know what I am talking about) I think it often takes us longer to get set up, then to take part in the session itself.





Wednesday 17 January 2024

Successfully Motivated and Purposefully Engaged



Yesterday, while I was strolling around the park with my dogs, podcast in my pocket as usual, I listened to the words of Carl Hendrick and his words really resonated with me.  They were not new to me, it is a message I have heard many times before, but for some reason this time they really resonated loudly with me.  Loudly enough that I just had to share my personal journey with the ideas of 'engagement' and 'motivation.'  For clarity I have posted the part of the transcript that contains the main part of the conversation I am referring to for reference at the end of this blog post, but you can also find the podcast here.

https://chalkandtalkpodcast.podbean.com/e/ep-22-mindsets-and-misconceptions-with-carl-hendrick/

So, motivation, it is such a widely used term. We speak about children being motivated learners and it being crucial that we employs strategies that will motivate students, hook them in to the learning.  Teachers are also heard to say, that a child just won't learn, because they are not motivated to do so.  In the past my beliefs did mirror these thoughts,  I mean, it makes sense doesn't it, if you are not motivated to learn, you simply won't bother.  

This brings up the image of an unmotivated child being passive, without inclination to try, that the fact they lack motivation is their fault.  

I still remember the target we set as a school from 2012-2014, all around motivation and engagement.  We saw children (boys in particular) struggling to engage in inquiry learning and showing a particular reluctance when it came to writing.  Our hypothesis at the time, was that their reluctance to engage was directly linked to their motivation to do so.  

Now, don't get me wrong, this review led us directly to Mantle of the Expert, which led us to dramatic inquiry, play, storytelling etc, all of which have become integral parts of who we are.  The process we employed did appear to engage children more, particularly boys, and perhaps had a marginal impact on their writing output and it certainly had a big impact on our enjoyment of teaching inquiry, but it could never have had the impact we truly wanted.  I think we completely misunderstood motivation and what it is that actually motivates us as human beings.

Looking at the idea of motivation now, after my ongoing journey into striving to learn more about the Science of Learning, I have a completely different take on what we did and how we can now use that lens (as we are currently) to directly ensure an impact on achievement and wellbeing.

When it comes down to it, being successful at something is just about the most motivating thing there is.  Even the smallest amount of success, appears to have huge impacts on motivation.  Therefore to get to motivation, we must be using teaching strategies in the classroom that allow this success.  Obviously this is where explicit, direct teaching come in, it is hard to be motivated to 'discover' something if you lack the basic foundations to do so. 

Basically being able to do something is a massive catalyst to want to do it again and vice versa, being unsuccessful, constantly struggling, is a massive reason children develop 'opting' out strategies.   This motivation doesn't only need to be thought of academically, but it can be viewed through a social/emotional lens as well.  If a child is successful in their play, if they get reward from what they are doing, they will seek to do it more often and deepen what they are doing.  If a child is able to develop the social skills to establish solid friendships, they will feel happier and be more motivated to widen this circle, be more accepting of others and in turn will develop further social skills.  On the other hand, being isolated or alone has an impact on everything for that child, it is very hard to be motivated to learn or take risks, if they feel unseen.   In fact the frustration and sadness they feel at being isolated, spills over into the classroom as they desperately try to communicate their unmet needs.

A couple of examples.  

We have all had them in our class, those children we perceive as being reluctant to read. We could motivate them by providing them with wonderful exciting stories around their interest (possibly work in the short term) or we could actually explicitly teach them the code they need to read.  People that say those 'decodable readers' are boring have obviously not witnessed a child reading one on their own for the first time.  Their face lights up, they want to share it with everyone, they read it over and over and over, because it really doesn't matter what it is about, the fact is they can read it!   When it comes down to it, the decodable readers are not intended to be of interest to you.  Now I am in no way advocating for not reading wonderful rich texts to children or providing them with wonderful books to look at, but nothing is more motivating to a reader, than being able to read.   This success creates the motivation to learn more.

Personally I have a rocky past with mathematics.  But I do remember one time of motivation in mathematics, I am unsure how old I was, perhaps 8 or 9.  Maths didn't make much sense to me and I often opted out, because I struggled.  It wouldn't have mattered how exciting the maths session was, I would never have been motivated.  However one day we were playing a game, the answer was zero, it was obvious, but for some reason I was the only one in the class that got it.  I was so proud, in that moment I felt successful, I was open to learning more.  If at that moment my teacher had noticed the difference in my face and body language, and perhaps used that moment as a bridge to helping me, I may have built on this success.  Instead, it is the one glimmer I remember from maths at school.  Sadly I don't even think they realised how much I was struggling, I wonder how much of that is true for children in our classrooms today?  

Success is the biggest motivator of all to achievement.  In fact, strategies like dramatic inquiry will work so much better with children that are motivated by success.  It becomes the perfect combination.

So what about our boy writers?  Those boys we set out to help?   Well if we had explicitly taught them the foundations of writing from the beginning, as we are now, the dramatic work we were doing at the time, would have contributed hugely to them having something to write about.  What I have found in the last few years is there is really no such thing as a 'reluctant' writer when they have the foundations to actually have the cognitive freedom to write.

Engagement is something I have given a lot of thought to as well.  People often look at a busy, happy class as being engaged.  We think we need to pull out all the bells and whistled to keep them engaged, but again, there is nothing more engaging then actually being able to successfully complete the task.

Take Number Agents for instance,  I got so wrapped up in creating the world that I completely missed the fact that some children (while the knew the world inside out) were missing the maths.  It is why I pulled Portal maths back to the bare bones, the important parts to build the world, but not too much 'fluff' to overshadow the maths.  It has been the perfect mix,  the children still love it as much as they loved full blown agency, but the difference is, they are ALL getting the maths out of it.

I hope that as an educational collective we can take a good look at engagement and motivation and realise the role that success plays, that there is in fact a magic bullet and that is actually explicitly teaching the skills they need whether it be academic, emotional or social and noticing, reflecting on and responding to the needs we see in front of us.  

We need to teach children and stop looking for the next bell or whistle to get their attention or keep them busy.

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Copied from podcast transcript


 [00:22:05] Anna Stokke: You wrote a blog post called “Five Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Teaching,” and I was hoping that we could talk about some of those things, I found that really helpful and interesting. And a big one I want to talk about is motivation. So you wrote that you wish you'd known that motivation doesn't always lead to achievement, but actually, achievement often leads to motivation. So, can you elaborate on that for us?

 

[00:22:33] Carl Hendrick: Yeah, I kind of came across this in two points. One was Graham Nuthall’s book The Hidden Lives of Learners, which is, I just would recommend to everybody. It's a really short book. I think it was the first time I encountered this idea that motivation and achievement, there's a sort of an inverse relationship to them.

 

Then there was a review by Daniel Muijs and and Reynolds wrote a book, a really great, another great book called, I think it's called Effective Teaching. It's a review of the literature. And I saw it there again. And then I started to read some studies on this and started to notice that students who achieve things, even in the short term, it tends to have this knock on effect to their motivation.

 

My theory is that we kind of have the causal arrow the wrong way around. I grew up in a system where you'd try to motivate kids either through intrinsic or extrinsic awards or an assembly or a prize or whatever it was. Whereas I started to notice that, in my own practice, that if you can get somebody to a place where they experience success, even in just a small way and use that as a kind of a lever to move things forward, I noticed that that was a very effective way of doing things. 

 

And that was really about explicit modelling of things, close feedback, and opportunities for practice. And again, it's one of those things that's very counterintuitive. It's one of these things that the more complex something is, the less it's going to fly with the public and with people in general because it takes explanation. That's one of those things, which I think is, it's a difficult thing to get your head around.

 

[00:24:07] Anna Stokke: I agree with this, and from teaching for many years, I've observed this as well. And I think, especially in math, which has a lot of applications, I think there's a lot of expectations that we're always supposed to be including applications when we're teaching. But often, the applications are really messy.

 

And I've observed that in fact when students are unhappy in class, it's not because I'm not giving applications, it's usually when they're lost or struggling with the material. Also, like, my students, the ones that have more difficulty with math, it's actually the application piece that they don't like that much.

 

I mean, I do motivate with applications. I just think that the idea that applications are going to cause students to like math more or be more motivated to do more math isn't necessarily correct. I think that when students feel success, that's when they feel motivated to do more because it makes them feel good. They feel like they're good at math.

 

[00:25:16] Carl Hendrick: Yeah, I think there's a lot of students who are going through the day feeling no success at all and not learning anything at all. They're just kind of going through the motions. Again, that’s where, I think, instruction and thinking about instructional design is so important.