My Digital Classroom

Today was another day at the Secondary Literacy Network. It is one day per term where a number of the Literacy leaders in Catholic schools in Melbourne get together for a day of professional learning. One of the things I really enjoy about these days is hearing from other literacy leaders about how they are trying to embed literacy across the whole school and some of their experiences. The personal journey of one such leader today was both eye-opening and refreshing. This was a person who had been teaching for 15-20 years (across both primary and secondary) and was experiencing the same sorts of problems that I, and many others, are experiencing in our own schools.

In the following session, Jo Ryan from Clonard College shared how she had been teaching her Year 9s about a year 12 issues unit. She has scaffolded the work to a high degree and provided the students with a framework to approach what can be a difficult part of the course. We were all given a copy of her unit and I think this is something that we could use back at school as a way of preparing our Year 10s for VCE English.

Today we had all six classes of year 8 English (two classes working together each time) complete an activity based on de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats. We are studying A Bridge To Wiseman’s Cove (an excellent book by James Moloney) and to break things up a bit, we opened up the dividing wall between the two classes, divided the two classes into 10 smaller groups, with each group looking at a particular character. The groups then had to look at their character through the lens of the red hat (emotions), green hat (ideas – predictions), white hat (facts), Black hat (criticisms), Yellow hat (positives) and blue hat (summary of other hats). At the end of the session, each group had to present their findings to the wider group.

The activity seemed to work really well, with students finding evidence to support each of their points, and it was really interesting to see them having to look for the positives in undesirable characters.

The IWB file made it really easy to keep track of the time allocated for each hat, and gave the students a visual cue as to what they needed to be focused on during that time period.

I did receive the comment at the end of the day by another teacher who wasn’t 100% sure about what they gained from the lesson, as much of the information presented by her students had already been covered when they constructed individual mind maps for each of the characters earlier in the novel study. I’m sure this is true to a certain extent, however, I think that they were also picking up new things and were forced to think deeper than they had previously done about their character. In addition to this, it will also have reinforced and built upon the work that was done earlier in the novel.

I do think highly of this teacher and think that we have to look critically at our lessons, making sure that we review what student learning took place.

One of the things for which I want to use this blog is as a record of the good things I have gained from different PDs. On the 20th May, I went along to the Secondary Literacy Network at the Treacy Centre in Parkville.

The first keynote speaker was Dianne Cullen from the school of Education at ACU, talking about how ESL fits in with the current teaching courses on offer. One of the best things I got out of her talk was finding out about the Language & Multicultural Education Resource Centre (LMERC) in Carlton. This facility contains a huge range of materials in the areas of LOTE & ESL, and is available to all Victorian teachers once you join (membership is free).

Another thing which I felt I needed to include was this excerpt by Chris Davison about ESL learners, which appeared in TESOL in Context vol.1 1990:

“In terms of classroom procedures, they need much more repetition and practice, more explicit instruction and concept-checking, more careful paraphrasing of difficult vocabulary, more demonstration and modelling, more highly structured and sensitive elicitation of existing knowledge, more opportunities for controlled teacher-student and student-student interaction and more time to absorb the rhythms and patterns of the target language development, not just opportunities for use.”

Although this was written back in 1990, the information contained within rings just as true today as it did back then. While this is not new (obviously, if it was written 18 years ago) it is still a good reminder of what we need to be doing to ensure that our ESL students, and indeed all our students with weak literacy, succeed in our classroom.

The other keynote speaker on the day was Associate Professor Pauline Gibbons from the University of Technology in Sydney, talking about setting ESL students up for success in an intellectually challenging classroom. At the centre of her presentation was the message that if you don’t understand the language, you can’t learn the subject. This is so true and is what I’ve been trying to get across to the different faculties here at school.

It was interesting to hear about the 7 intellectual practices, although what made it better than many of the presentations that I have seen, was that she also included real classroom examples on how each of these practices have been implemented.

One of the best things I came away with yesterday was a list of integrated literacy activities that could be done with students across all subject areas. These included some things we already do, but also others I had never heard of like dictogloss, split dictation, sentence matching and barrier crossword.

I came away from the day with a lot of new things that I can’t wait to introduce in my class, and hopefully the classes of others around the school.