Big picture literacy demands: Thinking deeper
Hopefully, you’ve started thinking about some of the concepts that we use in the Learning Progressions. Again, don’t worry if some of the terminology is new or seems strange.
You are, in many ways, learning a new trade and it’s important to know the names of things.
Here’s what we’ve covered so far:
- An introduction to mapping including a look at what literacy and numeracy demands are.
- Things you need to know about the Learning Progressions including how they are organised
- What your resources and reference materials are for mapping as well as support material for teaching activities.
- The terminology for the literacy progressions.
We still need to get started on mapping the big picture demands for both literacy and numeracy. Then we’ll drill down to the specifics of your course materials.
Time to do some work
Let’s pause here for now. Here’s what you need to do next:
- Download the worksheet, or use the chart below to get started on mapping the big picture literacy demands for your situation.
- For each progression, say what it is in plain English and then rate it for importance for you. Justify your rating.
- Then if you’ve rated a progression as important, say which tasks or what kind of work is affected. This might include work in the classroom or more practical work in other kinds of environments.
This task is not assessed, but it will help with the first part of your assessment.
Writing up the big picture literacy demands
Make sure you keep your notes as you’ll want to refer to them when you write up your answers to the first part of Assessment 3.
In your assessment template, in section 3.1 you’ll need to identify the top two overall literacy skill demands for your teaching. Remember, at this stage, we are just interested in the strands and progressions that are relevant in broad terms to your teaching programme.
You’ll also need to answer the following questions:
- Why are these literacy skill areas so demanding?
- What does this affect?
- What does this mean for learners?
- What does this mean for teaching?
- What does this mean for programme design?
If you’ve done enough thinking about this and you want to skip ahead to the assessment module and get started on section 3.1 you can. Just download the assessment template and go for it. Then come back to here and carry on with the next stage.
If you want a bit more time to think about it, you can download the questions and some prompts as a worksheet here. The questions are the same as in your assessment template in section 3.1. The worksheet is the same as the image below.
We’ll repeat this process for numeracy next.
