Deliberate Acts of Teaching

It's been great to get some clarity.  Deliberate acts of teaching (or D.A.T.S as they are sometimes called), are a party of teaching and learning that have long been a requirement, but actually narrowing these down to definable strategies we are able to discuss and inquire into has been refreshing, to say the least.

Looking into our Gisborne Intermediate School Curriculum, after we explored the components of Deliberate Acts of teaching during a Team Meeting, I decided to try to make them really explicit in my planning for my Target Writing Group students.  I began with a document I could use when planning for the kids and decided it would be great to be able to add these documents to the target group modeling books / learning scrapbooks and make notes about evidence throughout my inquiry into the impact it could have.

Find this document here

Following this, I was interested in learning more about the strategies and located a copy of Clarity in the Classroom, which our DP kindly leant to me.

I copied the section on the DAT strategies and decided to add notes to enhance my understanding of them.  What I was really looking for were examples and language that I could employ with our kids.

In the process, our DP also mentioned that most of the information around DAT's had come from Effective Literacy Practice, which I already have and know well.  Not well enough, apparently, as this great text is full of information around DAT's, which is part of what I'll unpack next.

I enjoy the learning.
Now to put it into Action.

Learning in the Fast Lane

I love this book!

I'm so enjoying going back over it! Rae Black introduced it to us in Waimata in 2016 when she was studying ALL (Literacy) and it was great to have it brought to our attention again this year.
I particularly love the section about Success Starters and am always reminded to go back to that when I feel my reading programme has lost its spark.  It's so easy to get hung up on getting the work done, that it's easy to leave off this great ignition in the beginning and really not fire the lesson up.

This time when I went back to the reading, it was the TIP Chart that resonated with me.  I heard Carrie mentioning a TIP chart when working with her Enrichment kids the other day and so when I read about it again, my interested was piqued.

I was thinking about how great a TIP (Term, Information, Picture) Chart would be for the frogs reading unit I'm going to run with a group of my boys who aren't that fond of reading.  There will be a lot of terms within our frog readings (amphibian, chorus, cold-blooded, habitat, predator) that will require them to develop an understanding and this will be a great tool to help with this.

Further to this, as I kept reading, I realised that some of the Success Starters would be particularly useful in this context as well.  I'm excited to see how they work for us this week, now that we've finished our speech planning and can focus in more strongly on our reading programme this week.