Earlier this year, I sat in a meeting where school leaders reduced teacher workload by identifying assessments to stop doing because they weren't helping us teach better. That is leadership.
I made this chart describing how to emulate effective classroom instruction with remote teaching tools. Inspired very much by
@teacherhead
@Doug_Lemov
and
@daisychristo
The new Vic Teaching and Learning Model 2.0 is simpler, more coherent and more focused on actual teaching and learning with explicit instruction. This is great!
Do you know what feels great? Teaching routines to children who HAVE ALREADY BEEN TAUGHT THE SAME ROUTINES by last year’s teacher. Our new staff were amazed.
This is a simplified timetable to show how we allocate time at what I'd describe as a pretty hardcore "Science of Reading" school. It's pretty clear that phonics is there, but far from everything we teach with regards to reading and writing.
The best textbooks and curriculum materials out there have been prepared by subject experts with ample time and resources. I’m a fan of capitalizing on the expertise of others in order to benefit the students in my care.
A thread on designing slides for a Maths lesson using explicit instruction. Here's the general structure:
1. Concrete
2. Explain the picture
3. Model the procedure
4. Explain the procedure
5. Guidance fading
6. Independent Practice
1/6
Lots of parents have expressed surprise, since their child has started at our school, that their child now talks to them about what they’re learning at school. That’s really lovely unanticipated feedback on our knowledge-rich curriculum.
I’m glad people are changing their minds and changing reference books to reflect the science of reading. But still, isn’t it wiser for schools to learn from those who accepted the science long ago and have used their time implementing/iterating/learning/improving?
5 things I'm professionally excited about in 2022:
1) TEACHING GRADE 1 - Our school has a knowledge-rich curriculum, so I know what I'll be teaching kids this year, and it's cool! Ancient civilizations, major world religions, the extended code in phonics. Can't wait!
A typical day in one of our prep classes includes 30 min. of phonics. That's 10% of instructional hours. A good chunk of the remaining 90% is reading and discussing texts whether it's enjoying stories or learning history, geography and science.
Having a script doesn’t diminish the creativity and autonomy of the actors, artists and craftspeople who work on a film; it enables it. The same is true of a detailed curriculum and the teachers who bring it to life. 6/6
I’m happy to announce I’ve accepted a position as Learning Specialist at Docklands PS which opens next year. I’ve been given a great start to my career by the brilliant staff and students at Essendon North PS. Super excited to see what next year brings!
Teachers want the flexibility to shift between quiet and loud modes of learning. Traditional classrooms allow this. When different groups share an open-plan space, there is less flexibility because you need to be mindful of your neighbors. The default learning mode is quiet. 1/2
Some things to spot in this video: 1. Students in rows 2. Mini whiteboards 3. PRIME Maths textbooks 4. Document camera 5. Ochre daily review slides 6. Interactive whiteboard 7. Students using place value discs 8. Rocket Math intervention 9. Connecting Math Concepts intervention
Maths is a crucial life skill that opens doors for students’ future success.
Check out this video to see how
@DocklandsPS
supports all students in maths, including those with maths learning difficulties.
Learn more:
#math
#diverselearnershub
My two-cents about ITE: Preparing people for teaching should involve a lot more time at uni PRACTISING THE ACT OF TEACHING instead of lectures/note-taking/essay-writing. I mean actually acting out lesson delivery and getting feedback. It's cheap! Doesn't need school placement.
Our data suggests our school is good at differentiation. Importantly, our differentiation strategy includes NO WITHIN-CLASS ABILITY GROUPS. What we do instead: whole-class teacher-led instruction. It’s the most viable way to improve student outcomes AND retain teachers. 🧵1/4
Proud moment: At our school 59% of students achieved high growth in Maths from Year 3 to Year 5 NAPLAN. Compare that with the state average and similar schools!
Some theories for why our Maths data is improving: 1. We stuck with a curriculum for a 2nd year, so teachers KNOW THE CONTENT BETTER and are teaching more fluently. 1/5
My colleagues are doing something very cool. They've designed a system to implement screening assessments for all students who start at our school so those who need extra support get it as soon as possible. 1/5
In student-driven inquiry projects, Ss are more likely to encounter information as disconnected facts as opposed to teacher-led instruction where the teacher chunks, sequences and connects information just as an expert storyteller would.
Here’s why I think a knowledge-rich curriculum makes it more likely that students go home and chat about their learning with their parents:
1. When the T is the ‘Sage on the Stage,’ they are modeling to Ss how to share info. Then the Ss go home and they become little sages.
Lots of parents have expressed surprise, since their child has started at our school, that their child now talks to them about what they’re learning at school. That’s really lovely unanticipated feedback on our knowledge-rich curriculum.
Thrilled to present to staff the importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum. Here’s the key slide. The goal is that these become reference points for professional dialogue at our school.
I presented an EDI intro this afternoon. (Sprinkled in some Rosenshine and TLAC for kicks.) Staff were fantastic, engaged, curious. I feel quite lucky to be part of this important early culture building at a foundation school.
Fun fact: There is not a single reference to vaccination in the Victorian Curriculum.
Another fun fact: The Core Knowledge Curriculum includes vaccination in Year 1 (including Edward Jenner's discovery of the smallpox vaccine), and again in Year 6.
Knowledge matters.
The focus on formal assessment and numerical data in the early years of schooling means children as young as six can be… identified and provided with the support they need to thrive academically.
Classic CKLA moment: A kid spots my AEU lanyard and asks about it. I explain what a union is as simply as I can: workers coming together to fight for better conditions. The 8-year-old replies, ‘Oh, is that like when the plebeians rose up against the patricians in Ancient Rome?’
Here's my current thinking around the necessary core components of a Maths curriculum. I've highlighted fluency practice because it's the component I didn't fully appreciate the importance of. But when we turned our attention to fluency, student outcomes improved a lot. 1/4
On Nov 3, I'll be presenting for
@ThinkForwardEdu
for the first time! I'll be sharing our school's experiences with developing and implementing a knowledge-rich curriculum. In our first year. During a global pandemic. Please come!
Proud to be one of the six teachers in Grade 1 that helped achieve this. We’re all relatively new to teaching synthetic phonics and three of us are graduate teachers. We’re a living example of how teachers who are willing to learn can achieve great things.
THRILLED with our DIBELS Grade 1 end of year data for the cohort (100+ Ss) that started with us in Prep when our school opened last year. Credit to our stellar teachers & HQIM. Note, some lower scores reflect Ss who joined us this year. Setting Ss up for success across domains.👏🏻
“Prep to Grade 2 will be taught using…daily explicit teaching of phonics and phonemic awareness.”
Fantastic news for Vic children! Well done to the Vic gov for this principled and aspirational policy move.
I can use my planning time on enhancing instruction BECAUSE the textbook has done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of what content I teach and the sequence. 4/
I’ll be writing to
@AEUVictoria
too. The leadership of AEU Vic is out of touch with working teachers. If it fails to represent the needs of teachers, their membership numbers will fall. Teachers deserve a strong union that supports them.
A letter to
@AEUVictoria
re yesterday's statement.
I am deeply appalled, devastated and hurt by the statement passed unanimously by the joint Primary and Secondary Sector Council on the 14th of June, 2024...
Finland’s student achievement has declined over the past decade. So, in 2020, they instituted the Right to Learn program that aims, amongst other things, to ‘advocate the learning of basic skills during the early years.’ Can they learn from their mistakes? Can we?
You want kids singing? Chanting? Discussing animatedly? That is more likely to happen in a traditional classroom space than an open-plan learning space. 2/2
Super chuffed to have published an article “Creating a Knowledge-Rich Curriculum at Primary Level” with my colleague
@Daniel9Oliver
in the latest edition of Agora from
@HTAVed
You cannot build a culture where students feel safe making errors, sharing errors and discussing errors if errors are always kept private. This means teachers need to be comfortable with making errors public. That’s a difficult hurdle to overcome.
My first go at leading in-house PD as a Learning Specialist. My strategy was to steal ideas from
@WALKTHRUs_5
+ Leverage Leadership 2.0 +
@PepsMccrea
(Motivated Teaching) +
@tombennett71
(Running the Room) +
@TeachLikeAChamp
and just kinda mash them together.
Proud moment: At our school 59% of students achieved high growth in Maths from Year 3 to Year 5 NAPLAN. Compare that with the state average and similar schools!
@msrebeccabirch
Agree. I also like the way Daisy Christoudoulou puts it: Yes, we should use different modalities in our teaching, but those decisions are driven by the content, not students’ personal preferences.
A structured, clearly sequenced curriculum is another good bet for improving schools during and after COVID. Tomorrow I’ll be in a Webex session guiding my preps in reading and writing CCVC words with double letters for the first time. I’m excited!
A curriculum story: I'm teaching G2 to use appropriate units. 'Would a fork be 2 metres?' A student calls out, 'That would make it a trident!' Everyone laughs. They get the joke because we encountered the word 'trident' learning about Poseidon during our Ancient Greece unit. 1/3
It's a Docklands Primary School one-two punch tomorrow at Sharing Best Practice Ballarat!
@EminaMcLean
on reading comprehension then yours truly on Humanities. It's also my first time presenting in-person at one of these events. Yikes!
After 40 minutes: Every single piece of writing judged. No writing to take home and mark. No arguments over how to interpret a rubric. High confidence that assessment is consistent across classrooms. So much better than traditional moderation sessions.
We ran whole school comparative judgment this afternoon because we’re interested in faster & more reliable assessment/reporting. After 30-40 mins of team work, we now have Grade 1-6 students on ability scales of 0-100 ready for PLC discussion tomorrow. That reliability though. 👏🏻
Last week
@Smithre5
ran an excellent PL session at our school on guided practice in Maths. Already seeing teachers around our school implementing example-problem pairs and guidance fading. (This example slide is part of a Grade 1 sequence.)
So, teaching preps is definitely not at all challenging and every day goes exactly according to plan look here’s me on the Channel Nine news looking like everything is under control this is a completely accurate reflection of reality.
Today I read to Gr 1 about a staircase in a Mayan pyramid leading to a tomb & they all went WOAHH. In Jan, these kids didn't know what a tomb was. It's because we taught them about tombs earlier when studying Ancient Egypt that we could have this "woah" moment. Very satisfying!
Seeing a lot of argument against slides, but I suspect there’s a secondary bias. I’m in favor of slides as a tool for GENERALIST PRIMARY TEACHERS. The job is to teach 4-5 unique lessons every day across a range of disciplines. Slides are such a helpful scaffold for teachers.
Geez, I’m unexpectedly emotional about these numbers. One year into building our dream school. I’m over the moon that our hard work and commitment to evidence-based practice is having this impact.
One year of a knowledge/language/text rich curriculum seems to have had an impact on reading comprehension!
Grade 2: 47% at/above Benchmark 1 in 2021, now 66%
Grade 3: 50% in 2021, now 72%
Grade 4: 25% in 2021, now 49%
Grade 5: 34% in 2021, now 45%
Grade 6: 30% in 2021, now 60%
Exciting data on our Ss' maths fluency. Here is Gr 1 last year (green) and this year (teal). The movement of the teal box indicates GROWTH for the Ss. The difference between the teal box and the green box at End of Year indicates SYSTEM IMPROVEMENT. This pattern is seen...
Thanks to everyone who watched me share our school's work on developing a knowledge-rich curriculum. Really exciting to be able to connect with other educators and schools on the same journey. Thanks,
@ThinkForwardEdu
!
The Science of Reading is complex and its many components can feel overwhelming. To know where to start as a teacher, it's worth understanding that Content Drives Everything. 1/
Great to see that explicit teaching of phonics in early reading instruction has BIPARTISAN SUPPORT. People of all political persuasions can agree that education should be designed to achieve the best outcomes for all students.
Watched a 7:30 Report video about Finnish educational success. Turn off the volume and there are some interesting things. First, students sitting in rows rather than haphazardly arranged in a flexible learning space...
E.D. Hirsch likens language comprehension to a slow-growing plant. At our school, we've been patient gardeners. These data are the results of three years of steady work on reading fluency, knowledge-building in the humanities and sciences and reading great literature.
CHUFFED with our interim NAPLAN data.
Y3 Reading: 89% of students who have been with us since 2021 are Strong/Exceeding (84% overall up from 65% last year).
Y5 Reading: 100% of students who have been with us since 2021 are Strong/Exceeding (94% overall up from 69% last year).
One of my preps brings in a book on the Celts. While I'm reading the book to the class, a student asks, "Is this stuff real?" I say yes, and there is this gasp of awe throughout the class. Can't wait for these kids to learn about Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt next year!
Core Knowledge x Aus: During a unit on world rivers, we’re reading about the Congo River and we encounter a photo of fish traps. The Ss remark, ‘They’re just like EEL TRAPS!’ So cool to see Ss using knowledge we taught them to integrate new knowledge in unforeseen ways.
Last term, we taught Grade 1 about the history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. So important for building literacy (religious references are everywhere) AND from a community perspective: Knowledge of diverse cultures = Understanding = Respect.
What I want is primary maths textbooks. Not pedagogy textbooks aimed at teachers, but textbooks for each grade level with loads of practice questions. Recommendations?
Look, I've taught kids who DID seem anxious about Maths. Here's what I think helps: (1) Clear explanations about how to do the maths, BEFORE asking Ss to do the maths. NON-EXAMPLE: Starting a lesson by asking them to solve a problem they don't have the skills for.
In reading circles, some claim we must start with a so-called “love of reading”. Its absence is sometimes blamed for low progress. Over in numeracy-land, they talk about “maths anxiety”. Meanwhile, music teachers just get on with it. “It” being teaching 🎼🎹 Thx
@BronRyrieJones
For example, we use a textbook for Maths which prescribes a clear scope and sequence. There is even a script for how to deliver lessons. Despite that level of prescription, there is still work to do. 2/
These Daily Review slides are exceptional. We use a fraction of each lesson’s slides (to align with our curriculum and because we allot less time for Daily Review). Other than choosing which slides to hide, it’s plug and play. HUGE TIME SAVER.
I taught a killer lesson on word problems in maths today with Gr 3. The difference? DELIBERATE PRACTICE IDENTIFYING SCHEMAS: We read several problems and just decided whether they were ‘part-whole’ or ‘comparison’ problems. Later, Ss applied this to independent problem solving.
As I understand from The Age article, the choice for primary schools is:
(A) Improve literacy outcomes for more students by teaching phonics, and
(B) Don’t teach phonics because the most privileged students might not like it.