Orewa College Classroom Observation and Practice Analysis, May 2016 Facilitator: Cheryl Harvey Teacher: James Appleby Class: Year 10 Assessment for Learning: Capability One – Building Learning Focussed Relationships, Capability 2 – Clarity in the Classroom Classroom observation: Recap at the start of the lesson and prior knowledge. Learning Intention: How workers are protected in the globalised world. Success Criteria: Identify how workers in NZ are protected by the government. Extension: research & summarise the issues NZ workers face. Students are given a website link and are working independently. Practice Analysis:

The Learning Intention and Success criteria were a generalised overview of the lesson. They were what the lesson was about. It would be helpful for some of the students in the class to have the skills that they are learning as part of the LI and SC. These may need to be scaffolded for some students.The purpose of the SC is to make clear to students what they have learned in the lesson and what they still need to learn.

From the practice analysis conversation, it is obvious that there are several problems to solve:

o “There is a group of disruptive students in the class”. 6 (?) of them are on the list of at-risk students. These students have no credits in social studies and the teacher is monitoring off-task behaviour. There is generally / sometimes a 25 minute class discussion which most of the students enjoy and participate in. This is when the group in question disrupt the class.The teacher is doing whole class teaching because of the common assessment ie there is content that everyone must know.

o Extension activities are given as an extra challenge for students who finish the work early but they keep quiet about it because they don’t want to do the extra work.

The co-constructed problem-solving discussion in the practice analysis conversation centred around alternative ways of doing things.

Find out what curriculum levels these students are working at (asTTle results) and set the lesson to these levels not just at the expected level eg levels 4 & 5

Scaffold the task more tightly for those at the lower than expected levels and adapt the resources accordingly.

If the students have low levels of literacy then they will need to be accelerated from where they are at to the expected level through literacy strategies and vocabulary work. See ESOL online for strategies http://esolonline.tki.org.nz/ESOL-Online/Teacher-needs/Pedagogy/ESOL-teaching-strategies

Use the SOLO taxonomy for extension work with an expectation that the student work/outcomes will match the multistructural and extended abstract domains. The students needing extension may not need to do the tasks set at the lower levels of the SOLO taxonomy but go straight into an extension type project where they can think at a higher level. The teacher thinks that a third of the class can work independently and a quarter of the class have high needs – these 2 groups could come together for part of the lesson for peer teaching.

Discussion with the whole class is rarely effective for all. Students can discuss in groups which the teacher has set up ie sometimes mixed grouping and sometimes ability grouping or whatever. They can then report back through Google Docs or whatever app you use but there should be a task which makes it necessary for everyone to take ideas from each other

Student Voice (groups):

1. What are you learning? Globalisation and the interconnectedness of countries.

2. Why are you learning this? I don’t see the point in school. To know about globalisation.

3. How are you finding this task? Pretty easy – reading and answering questions or searching the internet. The questions range from unistructural to relational.

4. What are you learning? Globalisation and what it is but I wasn’t paying attention.

5. Why are you learning this? Don’t really know – comparing to other countries?

6. How will you answer the questions? Google key words. I guess the questions will be easy. I don’t know how to answer questions and explain stuff.

7. What do you do if you don’t understand? I actually skip it. We just work together.

Goal to focus on: Differentiate the learning to engage both the lower achieving students and the students who should be achieving at a higher level.