Student Learning

PoLT Online Professional Learning Resource – Principle 1

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You Could Try This

    Designing and planning the learning environment

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    What whole school strategies impact on teacher actions?

    • School wide student support and welfare policies
    • The ‘hidden’ curriculum
    • Classroom codes of conduct
    • A variety of instructional approaches across the grade and years
    • Intervention approaches, e.g. literacy, numeracy, social skills, positive relationships, conflict
    • management, team work and cooperation
    • Curriculum integration across the years of schooling
    • Unconditional caring for students is an explicit value

     

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    Learning and teaching tactics and skills

    Tactics and teacher skill are directed to ensuring the classroom is safe, physically and emotionally. Positive identity, opportunities for friendship building, goal setting and personal competence are emphasised. Students recognise that:

    • my classroom is a safe place for me
    • I know what is expected of me in this classroom
    • I will not be humiliated if I make the wrong choice
    • our classroom is a fair place
    • I know my culture and first language is recognised and understood as being part of how I learn
    • time is allowed to celebrate learning as a group and as an individual.

    Web Link: Beyond Monet: The Artful Science of Instructional Integration. (http://www.beyondmonet.ca/ch3_6.html)

    Download worksheet: Productive Pedagogies™ (Word - 163Kb)

    Tactics can include:

    • establishing caring as an unconditional value to guide classroom interactions
    • being explicit and affirming that issues can be worked through
    • knowing and acknowledging the people in student’s lives who contribute to their feelings of security and well-being
    • designing classroom spaces that cater for physical comfort and basic needs of accessibility
    • developing democratic classroom practices where fair and consistent classroom codes and consequences are practiced
    • students’ active participation in setting, sharing, and reviewing classroom guidelines and codes
    • training paraprofessional staff in protocols that observe privacy, dignity and confidentiality
    • making use of the research of other education systems e.g. Productive Pedagogies - Social support has direct relevance to Principle 1.

    Download worksheet: Strategies and Tactics (Word - 160Kb)

     

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    Components of an effective lesson design

    • Opening
    • Teaching strategies
    • Materials and resources
    • Grouping
    • Monitoring and assessing student progress
    • Evaluation and reflection

    Download worksheet: Components of an effective lesson design - A checklist (Word - 157Kb)

     

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    What grouping?

    • Whole class
    • Small groups, structured or unstructured?
    • How are groups formed, e.g. what size, are they based on friendship, mixed ability, specialist support for explicit teaching?
    • What collaborative skills will be emphasized? , e.g. turn taking, clarifying ideas, disagreeing in an agreeable way, sharing, positive feedback, helping others, negotiating.

    Download worksheet: Groupings (Word - 158Kb)

     

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    Action planning with strategies in mind

    The teaching team through their ongoing research and planning ensures they are familiar with the recent research and literature on:

    • current gender debates, girls and boys issues
    • recent findings of cognitive science
    • what groups of students are at risk?
    • critical theory
    • multiple intelligence theory
    • the role of emotional intelligence.

    For more information see:

     

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    Reflection

    • How will I build on students’ past experiences, previous lessons taught?
    • Do I involve all students, actively in an atmosphere of support and cooperation?
    • Have I made the students’ involvement in the lesson objective clear?

    Download worksheet: Reflection (Word - 161Kb)

     

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    Other support

    Leadership teams provide strategic support to ensure time is allocated for teachers to benefit from peer support and collaboration. Opportunities include: time for informal and formal mentoring, curriculum audits, planning, developing scope and sequences.