Deliberate Acts of Teaching Continued - Collaborative Spaces

Leading on from the past post, my colleague and I got together, feeling like we might be more effective as a team in looking at our target group kids collegially.  This also made sense as we all need to know who our target group kids are and what we're doing with them, as they will rotate amongst us this term.  We felt concern around how we could support the kids as base group teachers when time is precious and it's tricky trying to fit all our learning in, even before we attempt to find 'additional' time to work with these targeted learners.

It was great to work smarter by being collegial.  We came up with a series of lessons we could implement with the kids as well as use across our Hub.  We wanted to keep the planning quite simple and ensure that we had all our resources ready to do and we could simply sit down with the kids every day and get some learning done with them.  Inquiry time is often quite useful for this as our learners are working towards a project that requires a lot of research.  In term three, they were creating art and inquiring into the reasons for The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as well as looking at Innovations such as the Great Ocean CleanUp to see what positive impacts individuals and projects have also had.  This was great timing for us to be able to work with these priority learners.  Scheduling the time with these students was what really made the difference as we were finding that otherwise they weren't getting any extra teaching time.

The planning we did included a planning and reflection sheet for the kids, to scaffold them to see how they were being positively impacted by the extra time too and to help us to use their student voice in future planning.

We were also feeling overwhelmed by the need to ensure we were utilising our Learning Pathways, OTJ Sheets, Achievement Objectives and the areas that covered both PR1ME and our learner pathways.  Mrs Barclay had also helped us to identify areas the students needed support on and we were keen to ensure everything was being covered without the need for everything to be done multiple times.  It was heartening to see there was considerable overlap and we were covering a lot more than we'd thought.  Planning in this way from the beginning helped us to see how the pathways and OTJ sheets aligned and we felt secure in the knowledge that we were meeting our targets.

It will be really interesting to see at the end of the year if we feel this has had an impact on the learners, as it certainly felt like it made sense during the planning phase.