Accessing our Across School COL Teachers...

This week my class and I have welcomed both Nicola Wells and Donna Ryan, two of our Manaiakalani Across School COL teachers, into our learning space. 

Last term Nicola helped me to plan my science unit and not only shared her expertise, but also offered to come in and take a group of students through an experiment. The group of students working with Nicola were not only excited to take part in her lesson, but were also able to transfer their newly learnt knowledge and vocabulary to their inquiry sessions later in the week. 

Today Donna and I had a professional catch up. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to get her feedback about how I was supporting my high needs learners. She helped me to adapt my phonics program so that it is age appropriate for my year 7/8 students. Phonics is something my high needs learners need, but as they are eleven and twelve, using junior based resources is not the best choice to make. My teacher aid and I had already added our own twist to these lessons, and as we both had the opportunity to speak with Donna, have been able to build onto this. The best piece of feedback I got today was that our inclusive learning environment meant identifying these students was not something Donna was able to do immediately. 

I am now looking forward to seeing my learners work through the stages of carrying out a science investigation with Nicola, and to implementing the suggestions Donna made to help us meet the individual learning needs in our phonics program. A huge thank you to both Nicola and Donna for their professional support.

Tapping into one of our Across School CoL teachers...

Earlier this week Kiri and I went to Point England School to observe Matt Goodwin's reading programme in action. It was great to have the opportunity to chat to Matt about his practice and see how another teacher unpacks the learning for his students.

Listing the thinking points alongside the text is a brilliant idea as it really helped scaffold the discussion. When I think about my own practice I have a similar scaffold in place but as I used Google slides my learners need to switch between the text and the prompt, which means they have to hold information in their head from one slide, while processing what is being asked of them on another. I will also be taking away the teacher prompts of 'think about the question, read the question and discuss the question' as I see this as a great way to hook different learners in to the same task. Thanks Matt.