Student Learning

PoLT Online Professional Learning Resource – Principle 3

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Components Unpacked

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3.1 - Teaching strategies are flexible and responsive to the values, needs and interests of individual students

This component acknowledges that the classroom should be an interesting place and suited to a wide range of dispositions. Learning may involve a negotiation between prior views and knowledge and public knowledge found in the curriculum.

A range of student competencies and potential for future learning may be untapped in classrooms. This component emphasises the need to provide opportunities for these to be displayed.

This component is demonstrated by teachers:

  • regularly using popular media such as magazines and television, or popular fiction to introduce or challenge ideas
  • using students’ personal interests (sports, hobbies) and social/ethical concerns as the context of topics, or to link with social relevance of the learning and issues
  • using classroom strategies that acknowledge gender, personal and religious differences
  • encouraging students to respect the rights of others to hold differing views
  • valuing and building on the perspectives and experiences students bring to the classroom
  • creating an environment of encouragement for students to contribute personal stories to class discussion
  • providing a stimulating classroom environment that generates active interest in topics.

The component is NOT demonstrated when:

  • the focus of a unit is purely on formal knowledge, with few connections made to daily life applications
  • applicability of ideas are discussed, but they do not refer to the sort of situation students would normally be concerned about in their lives
  • the focus of the unit is based on a single view of the topic
  • knowledge is presented in a sequence that represents the structured discipline view of the material, rather than the connections that might be made with student interests and prior knowledge.

Examples to illustrate the component.

  • A physics unit focuses on sport, and investigations include the design of sneakers, the science underlying a tennis swing and experiments on soccer balls and their flight.
  • A history unit on medieval Europe includes substantial discussion of the way young people would have experienced life at that time.
  • A unit on festivals and celebrations embraces the diversity of cultural backgrounds within the classroom by encouraging students to share experiences of particular events unique to their own culture and events that are celebrated in a variety of ways by different cultures.
  • An astronomy unit is designed around issues students raise from a viewing of selected sci-fi video excerpts.
  • A unit on contemporary social issues requires students to analyse the lyrics of popular music.
  • Students teach a dance or game from their family’s culture to the rest of the class.
  • Students arrange a traditional indigenous games afternoon at a local sports carnival.

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3.2 - The teacher utilises a range of teaching strategies that support different ways of thinking and learning

This component refers to different ways students might approach learning, their different abilities and strengths, or their different perspectives on themselves as learners. It also refers to the variety of ways ideas are represented and the need to approach and demonstrate learning using different media and representational modes. The component implies the use of diverse approaches to allow students to experience diverse ways of learning and knowing, and targeted support for individuals, based on teacher monitoring.

This component is demonstrated by teachers:

  • varying the structure and delivery mode across a range of teaching sessions
  • providing for a range of learning styles or modalities within teaching sessions and from one teaching session to another in terms of both teacher input and student learning experiences
  • helping students to understand their own specific learning needs and providing choice to cater for the range of those needs
  • setting a variety of types of tasks during each unit and using a range of resources eg. print, visual, aural, experiential.
  • providing variations in tasks to allow student choice on mode of presentation or type of approach (e.g. using Bloom’s taxonomy, Gardner’s multiple intelligences and other higher order thinking tools to ensure variety)
  • ensuring each task has an open ended aspect that allows students to work at different levels and paces
  • arranging for time in each teaching session to give individual support to students in need of particular attention
  • providing opportunities to use a range of multimodal communications as they are used in the community.

The component is NOT demonstrated when:

  • the unit is structured with the ‘average’ student in mind
  • all students cover the same material with few opportunities for varied work
  • there is little variation in the teaching strategies used in any unit
  • there is little variation in the resources used eg. reliance on written texts
  • each teaching session has a similar structure
  • there is the same balance between student and teacher voice in each teaching session
  • all teaching sessions are based on activities with instructions and involve students negotiating what they do in the same way.

Examples to illustrate the component.

  • A teacher surveys students to determine their learning preferences and styles. Students are identified as predominantly visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners. A variety of tasks is then developed using Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences as a guide. Negotiated tasks further increase student choice.
  • The teacher employs a flexible whole class - small groups - whole class strategy for teaching. This allows for explicit teaching of like-need groups and/or one-on-one teaching.
  • Reading groups are strategically formed to cater for the different stages of reading competence.
  • The teacher establishes a peer support network so that learning needs can be strategically supported. Cross-age tutors offer another means of support.
  • The teacher employs a mix of group based and whole class discussion and activity.
  • The teacher moves between open discussion in which students’ ideas are freely explored and more focused dialogue which brings disparate views together.
  • The structure of planned teaching sessions is varied to allow for different mixes of student activity and input.

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3.3 - The teacher builds on students’ prior experiences, knowledge and skills

Contemporary learning theories emphasise the importance of prior knowledge and beliefs in framing learning. This component emphasises the need to explore and monitor, and build on students’ prior learning. This exploration is important for students also, to support their own understandings of their learning.

This component is demonstrated by teachers:

  • actively seeking to establish students knowledge, beliefs and skills as part of planning
  • utilising students’ particular strengths and experience in supporting learning
  • building on students’ prior learning, that may have taken place outside the school bounds
  • explicitly linking new ideas with the language and perspectives students’ bring to the classroom.

The component is NOT demonstrated when:

  • planning assumes students’ prior experience and knowledge is immaterial, and probing of prior knowledge is not explicitly planned
  • student opinion is not canvassed
  • no attention is paid to bridging between everyday and expert language.

Examples to illustrate the component:

  • a design task is preceded by a smaller task to explore the level of students’ skills. Special attention is then paid during the design phase to accommodating the variety of levels of skill.
  • a mathematics lesson on triangles begins with an exploration of what students understand to be a ‘triangle’, including physical objects of a variety of types. The discussion is guided towards a class consensus on the essential characteristics of a triangle as an abstraction from these concrete examples, with the teacher monitoring the variety of student views as the discussion progresses.
  • prior to a year 8 unit on force and motion, students’ beliefs and understandings are explored using a variety of probes including ‘concept cartoons’, predict-observe-explain sequences involving practical events, and response to scenarios. This raises a number of questions which are then explored further as the basis for the learning sequence.

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3.4 - The teacher capitalises on students’ experience of a technology rich world

Students come to classrooms with a variety of experiences of and expertise in contemporary technologies. This component encourages the exploration with students of their interest and expertise and the meaning they assign to technological communication, design and representation. It is about enlisting students’ capabilities and interests associated with contemporary technologies.

This component is demonstrated by teachers:

  • incorporating contemporary technologies into learning sequences in ways that are meaningful for students
  • planning to acknowledge a diversity of student technological expertise and to take advantage of particular student expertise to support learning
  • talking about the purpose of texts, how they work and how meaning is organised, drawing examples from a variety of contemporary media and texts (websites, newspapers, TV commercials, films, magazines, lyrics, journals, video clips, online games and chat).

The component is NOT demonstrated when:

  • teachers do not incorporate contemporary technologies in ways that take advantage of students’ interests and experience
  • teachers do not acknowledge students’ capacity to engage with technologies at a high level
  • teachers refer to and teach only traditional print literacies.

Examples to illustrate the component.

  • The exploration of ideas involves student collaboration on contemporary technology use including internet searching, multimedia presentation of findings, email communication and chat rooms etc.
  • Students examine the language of SMS messaging and debate its impact on the future spelling of words.
  • Students explore the way in which language and images are manipulated to convey positive or negative messages in order to produce their own advertisement.
  • Students design and create their own video clip with a particular audience in mind and conduct a school survey to evaluate and analyse responses to the clip.
  • Students discuss the social purpose and identity issues related to chat room behaviour.
  • Students design a strategy for the communication of school events to staff, students, parents and the broader community.