I went to another CoL meeting today. Part of me was thinking with my big picture hat on about how we can best utilise the resources of Alison Davis at Grey High across all of our learning areas and all of our teachers. As Alison filled the board with her enthusiasm and samples of the work she could do with our CoL teachers, another part of me was noting all the strategies and thinking that I should be doing lots more meta-cognition with my year 13 class.
I am now one month into teaching a new course called English for Academic Purposes to year 13 students who wish to pursue a university pathway but know they need more support to bring their literacy skills up to speed. We developed the course in response to the significant numbers of students who needed to upskill on their literacy for university but were not interested in the study of English Literature. "No more metaphors" was one message I received when gathering student voice :). We are required to assess one standard in Term One for all senior courses at our school, a policy which I understand and support, even though it can be quite challenging at Level 3.
We are focusing on our reading skills this term, and will be assessing the reading standard at the end of term. We have looked at a range of texts and practised the various useful skills described in the standard. We've looked at tourism in New Zealand, texting & driving, NZ's stunt school, a baby killer and the school starting age. More details are on my class blog. I am looking ahead to being able to support students with their assignments in other subjects, and have collected assignment sheets and exemplars today for Business Studies, Biology & Health.
I had run from teaching EAP313 and setting relief for my students for the second part of their double lesson so I could attend the meeting, and I knew that I didn't have the formula right for the class. As a new course, and given that students often chose the course because they couldn't work out what else to take, or they knew they needed it but kind of wished they could ignore literacy, none of us has a radiant vision of what this course could optimally be.
I'm not sure yet what my big picture next steps are for altering the course design to make it more connected and engaging, but I know my small picture next steps are to incorporate more meta-cognition in my activities with the class, and get them using their strategies in a practice assessment. Although I've identified my Level 2 class as my inquiry focus at this stage of the year, all my classes need focus, and all of them need meta-cognition development. Alison Davis today talked about lifting the bar on teacher's default settings, the strategies they resort to when they are exhausted and short of time. I could see how making more and more meta-cognition integral to my classroom work could lift my default setting performance.
On the upside, we ran multiple workshops at our Toki toolkit yesterday and teacher voice was really positive about the practical focus. Strategies + practice + choice = engagement + achievement.
