Up-skilling and Empowering...

During this week's art lesson I noticed that a large number of my students did not appear to know how to blend colours. Wanting to make sure I taught these skills effectively and properly I reached out to Karen Ferguson for some guidance. I recalled her blogpost about her media experiments, the exact support I was after. What I wasn't aware of was that my class who are currently in Karen's tech group had asked to learn the exact same skills. As always Karen was more than happy to help out. So armed with my notebook I seized the opportunity for my own PD (I was focusing on Karen's language of instruction) and joined in with the learning. 

The students were so focused and extremely proud of the pictures they produced. From my perspective I now had a group of experts so I capitalised on this opportunity and asked them to share their learning. The success these students had experienced in their learning this morning empowered them to confidently support their peers to master the same skills. 

Each of these students rose to the challenge of being the teacher. I noticed that my 'experts' were modelling what they wanted their group to replicate, they were using the content language accurately and their instructions were clear and concise as you can see in the picture below. 

Visual Connections

Yesterday I was in Karen Ferguson’s class at Tech and was immediately drawn to the display she had on her back wall. Karen has created a 5ft x 3ft google drawing that breaks down the structure and language features of an explanation. Her display is specific to her graphics class but as I could see the potential connections that could be so easily made by my learners I immediately asked Karen if I could use her template to create an example specific to my learners. I have seen a lot of displays in classrooms and online that teachers have created to help their learners make connections, but the content, layout and size of this one completely nailed it!

                                    

The link to Karen’s blogpost where she explain her thinking behind this resource is here. As always Karen was happy to share work so my next step is to create my own version to help my learners cement their own connections to the structure and language features needed in explanation writing.