Focusing Inquiry: Know your students

• Pasifika Learners and Literacy
• Maori Learners and Literacy

What literacy knowledge and skills do my students have in Technology?

Use multiple sources of information to determine the focus of your inquiry – student voice, assessment information, diagnostic tasks.

• Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning e-asTTle This is a norm-referenced online tool for assessing reading achievement relevant to levels 2–6 of the curriculum. It provides national norms of performance for students in years 4–12.You may wish to discuss the implications of asTTle results for your learning area with the Literacy Leader in your school.
• Subject resources related to NCEA assessments are available - click on the relevant subject page.

What literacy knowledge and skills need to be developed?

• The Literacy Learning Progressions describe the specific literacy knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students draw on in order to meet the reading and writing demands of the curriculum. Teachers need to ensure that their students develop the literacy expertise that will enable them to engage with the Technology curriculum at increasing levels of complexity.

Massey High School - approach to differentiation

Massey High School is a large mid-decile, co-educational school in West Auckland, with a high Māori and Pacific Island population. The school incorporates over 50 different ethnicities and approximately 20% of students speak their native language at home.

The English department have had a focus on differentiation, led by the Head of Department, for several years. A key aspect of this focus has been the priority for teachers to know the learning needs and strengths of the students in their classes. By using ongoing qualitative and quantitative evidence, teachers adapt the teaching and learning programme to best meet the individual and collective needs of their classes by planning appropriate differentiated tasks.

Teachers are encouraged to build on students’ prior knowledge and strengths from other curriculum areas in their teaching programme. There is a strong emphasis on:

• students’ ability to choose tasks and to work at their own pace
• group and peer work - teachers deliberately select groups based on students’ strengths and learning needs in order for all students to be extended through peer and group collaboration
• establishing success criteria for tasks through group and peer checklists that build on students’ ability to identify the skill that they are working on.

Massey High School has used the Collins Writing Programme to teach writing skills. This is a cross curricular writing programme designed to give teachers processes to teach subject specific writing skills. It focuses on ensuring that specific skills are taught and assessed and builds on basic gathering of information - Type 1 - to a fully structured, edited and developed piece of writing - Type 5. Both lessons seen in this clip are focused on Types 2 and 3 of the writing process. Students focus only on those aspects of writing that have been taught immediately prior to the writing. Summative writing assessments are marked against a rubric which has been developed using the key skills in the curriculum document, translated into language students are more likely to understand.

Worth reading

Students read self selected [and teacher approved] extended texts, then plan and write about responses to ideas, issues or themes within their texts.

Learning Outcomes | Teaching and Learning | Assessment and Evaluation | Printing Version

Printing this unit:

• Worth Reading (ZIP 884KB)

If you are not able to access the zipped files, please download the following individual files.

• Worth Reading (Word 113KB)

• Resource A (Word 37KB)
• Resource B (Word 50KB)
• Resource C (Word 50KB)
• Resource D (Word 29KB)
• Exemplar A (Word 844KB)
• Assessment Schedule (Word 62KB)
• Sample Topics (Word 27KB)

Myths and Legends

TEACHER Anne Girven

Teacher background reading

• Make Kids' Writing Shine: Using Beginnings and Endings to Teach Craft
• e-asTTle - Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning

Resources

Electronic

• Animal Myths and Legends

Print

•  School Journals
•  Library books - School
•  National Library

Make available a good selection of myths and legends.

TEACHING AND LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Select and adapt these learning activities to best meet the needs of your students, and to fit the time available:

Learning task 1

Learning task 2

Learning task 3

Learning task 4

In this unit students will undertake the following:

Links for Students

Collaborative online projects:

• Fairy Tale/Folk Tale Cyber Dictionary

Assessment

Assessment Task

Students will brainstorm, draft their story, edit and proof read, teacher conference and publish their story.

Students will use the information they have gathered from their retrieval chart and their reading log. These charts should demonstrate awareness of origins, differences and similarities of myths and legends.

The written text will demonstrate an understanding of the structure and the special features of myths and legends and the use of language used to convey a message.

You can also use the ARBs or the NZ Exemplars to assess students' writing.

Exemplars

Close Reading Level 3

 See the retrieval2 (JPG 84KB)

Commentary:
 The best fit for Sarah's completed work is level 3:

• the chart and the story have been completed
• the myth had been brainstormed, edited and proof read by the author
• the chart demonstrates awareness of the origin, and differences and similarities of myths and legends
• the written text demonstrates an understanding of the structure and the special features of myths and legends, and the use of language used to convey a message

This student will continue to work within level 3. The focus for the teacher will be to encourage both oral and written development of language, the choice of words and phrases to describe feelings and perceptions.

Follow up

• Myths and legends were published in class book. This book given to other classes within syndicate to read during S.S.R.

Need to continue to focus and develop skill(s):

• summarising in order to retell a myth/legend.
• identifying and explaining meanings in text.

Professional support

This collection of resources is designed to support your work with learners in the English classroom.

Professional Learning

An integrated system of support for learners and schools
This system connects the everyday resources and tools available to learners, teachers, leaders, and schools for targeted and supplementary support.

Leading from the Middle: educational leadership for middle and senior leaders : This section on the Educational Leaders website describes the qualities, practices, and activities middle and senior leaders need to lead in ways that enhance learner outcomes.

National Library of New Zealand’s Services to Schools
The National Library of New Zealand’s  Services to Schools is a detailed exploration of what it means to have a reading culture and the role adults play in creating, supporting, and extending reading in students' lives.

How do teachers create a supportive learning environment?
In this clip, Carol Jarrett from Kelston Girls' College discusses Te Kotahitanga principles, and their application as essential elements for effective teaching.

Professional learning groups
In this clip, Mandy Irwin explains Tapatoru, the professional learning process that supports the community of practice at Edgecumbe College.

Leading a school-wide literacy intervention

Schools have different structures and resources, and unique student and teacher learning needs. Therefore, there can never be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ professional development model that will be effective in all secondary schools.

Key roles in leading a school wide literacy intervention

• Literacy Leader(s)
• Principal and senior management
• External expertise

Literacy leader

It is important that there is a person or team with designated responsibility for leading literacy in your school. Being a Literacy Leader in a secondary school is a challenging and pivotal leadership position.

Key tasks a Literacy Leader might undertake include:

• using evidence to identify student and teacher learning needs
• developing a professional learning plan to address identified needs
• facilitating focus-group and whole-staff PD sessions
• observing and giving feedback to focus-group teachers.

School leaders

The principal and senior management team have a critical role to play in any school-wide professional learning intervention.

The Best Evidence Synthesis of School Leadership (Robinson, Hohepa & Lloyd, 2007) identified that leaders ‘promoting and participating in teacher learning and development’ can have a large educationally significant effect on student outcomes. No intervention can be effective without strong and active senior management support.

Key roles for the Principal and Senior Management Team include:

• providing resources to support literacy professional development
• actively promoting and participating in the professional learning
• asserting the pivotal role of literacy learning in all aspects of the NZ Curriculum
• publicly supporting and promoting the status of the Literacy Leader
• ensuring that the literacy focus aligns with the school strategic plan and all other initiatives or PD
• ensuring that school structures and systems support the implementation and ongoing effectiveness of the project
• involving the Board of Trustees and wider school community.

Principal leadership is a key to success. While this link relates to  Principals’ leadership in implementing NZC, it is highly relevant to literacy.

External expertise

It is useful for Literacy Leaders to have access to people outside the school who have expertise in literacy and who can offer alternative viewpoints. You may be able to get help from your local School Support Service or other provider, or join a professional development programme such as the Secondary Literacy Project.

Other ways to enlist external expertise include:

• participating in the Secondary Literacy Online forum 
• post-graduate study (study awards and study grants are available via PPTA)
• establishing a cluster with Literacy Leaders from neighbouring schools
• professional reading
• subject associations.

Structuring professional learning

There is no single model of professional development that is suitable for all secondary schools. Much will depend on the existing culture and organisation of professional development in your school. 

School-wide level

While whole-staff workshops alone are seldom sufficient to positively change teacher practice, they are an important part of any school-wide professional development intervention.

Such meetings can send a powerful message that literacy is highly valued in the school and that all teachers are expected to be effective teachers of literacy. They are also an opportunity to present and discuss analyses of school-wide student achievement data and evidence about teaching.

Some schools use whole-staff meetings to promote common literacy approaches that ensure students get consistent messages about literacy in all learning areas.

Fostering a school-wide literacy culture

Approaches would be selected on the basis of identified student learning needs and might include the following:

• setting a target for increasing the amount of engaged reading and writing students do in each class
• when introducing a text for reading, teachers being expected to make links to students’ prior knowledge and to draw students’ attention to the way that text is organised
• when introducing writing tasks, teachers being expected to help students understand the:
  • intended audience and purpose
  • content language
  • structure
  • expectations in terms of surface features
• having a ‘word wall’ that displays key topic vocabulary in each classroom.

Some literacy leaders regularly include literacy tips or examples of easy-to-use literacy activities during staff briefings. These can help remind teachers of the ongoing literacy focus and be a useful addition to more in-depth PD.

Working with smaller groups of teachers

One approach that some secondary schools have found effective when they begin a literacy intervention is to do some more intensive work with a smaller ‘focus group’ of strategically selected teachers.

It is useful for focus groups to have a natural unit of organisation – something the teachers all have in common already. Two ways to group focus teachers are by:

• a class or group of students they all teach in common. For example, the mathematics, science, English and social studies teachers of 9Wi, 9Jh and 10Al
• subject area. For example, literacy in mathematics and literacy in science groups.

Advantages of the common-class approach are that:

• students rather than subjects are the focus of the group’s attention
• teachers can work collaboratively to address identified needs.

One limitation of the common-class approach is that teachers may need additional support to apply learning to their specialist subject areas. For this reason it may be best to take a two-pronged approach. The diagram below illustrates a model that combines a common-class with a subject-specific focus.

In this model, all the teachers of 10AL meet to examine student achievement data, carry out collaborative inquiry, identify common learning needs, and trial common teaching approaches to address common needs.

10AL’s mathematics teacher also regularly meets with other mathematics teachers so they can focus on specific issues of literacy in mathematics such as teaching students to abstract relevant information from word problems with an unfamiliar context.

Working with individual teachers

Ideally you would also be able to work with individual teachers in their classrooms to:

• observe lessons and give feedback
• collaboratively plan lessons, units, or programmes
• provide tailored PD to meet their own specific needs.

Leading professional development

In an effective professional development programme teachers will be provided with a variety of professional learning activities such as:

• direct teaching
• guided professional reading
• Literacy Leader modelling instructional strategies with teachers participating as learners
• Literacy Leader or peers observing and giving feedback
• analysing exemplars of effective literacy teaching such as those modelled by the Literacy Leader or in the ‘Making Language and Learning Work’ DVDs
• discussions with other members of their professional learning community
• conducting focused inquiry projects
• collaborative activity/lesson/unit/programme planning.

Whatever professional learning activities you decide to include it will be essential to:

• keep the focus on student literacy learning
• maintain an inquiry focus.
• maintain a focus on deep learning

Teachers often demonstrate an appetite for easy-to-prepare practical teaching activities they can use with their classes tomorrow. One risk is that teachers use potentially useful activities in inappropriate and unhelpful ways. Therefore, it is important that teachers see how new activities fit in the inquiry framework:

• Can they identify when students would be likely to benefit from this approach?
• Can they evaluate how effective it actually was?
• Can they see a fit with the  Guidelines for effective adolescent literacy instruction?