Category Archives: Teaching philosophy

Teach better now – Where’s the new content for Assessment 6 of the NZCALNE on planning and facilitating embedded literacy and numeracy?

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Kia ora and welcome to Collection 6

If you’re reading this then you are up to Assessment 6 in the new and improved NZCALNE (Voc).

Good work…! This next part is heart of the programme. The focus is on planning and teaching embedded literacy and numeracy as part of what you do.

Like the other content, it will be live on Pathways Awarua as soon as possible. And as always, you can find on Graeme’s blog first.

If you do stop by the blog, we always like it if you leave the odd comment. This is a useful way of telling us what’s useful and what’s not, especially while this material is in draft form.

We’ve taken the best parts of the teaching practice part from the old qualification and beefed them up for this new qualification. This work is now worth a bunch more credits overall, which is the way we think it should be.

The focus here is on doing the teaching. Everything that you’ve thought about, brainstormed and worked on to date, should inform your planning and teaching here.

There are three sections in Collection 6:

6.1 Planning

6.2 Just do it: Teaching

6.3 Supporting evidence

You already know most of what you need to know, to go and do this work. Probably, you’re already doing it.

If you find that you already know what you’re doing for a particular part of this collection, then feel free to skip ahead to the next relevant section.

Or start with the assessment template and dip into this material as you need to. Email us if you don’t already have the template and checklist.

Follow the links below

All that said, here’s the new and revised content for Assessment 6.

6.1 Planning

In this module, we look at everything you need to plan your embedded literacy and numeracy teaching.

This includes revisiting in more depth a couple of things we covered earlier including learning outcomes.

6.2 Just do it: Teaching

Here the focus is on your teaching and what you need to do to document it for this programme and qualification.

6.3 Supporting Evidence

Last we have a look at some of the different kinds of evidence that you might provide as a way of supporting your work for this part of the qualification.

If you’re stuck, please get in touch with us by email here: assess@alec.ac.nz or by texting or calling Graeme on 0800-ALEC-1-2

 

 

 

 

 

TEACH: Session 3 in review

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As well as details of where and when your third session took place, here are the questions you should respond to again. Use the sentence starters if you like. Otherwise, ignore.

There’s a PDF version here that you can print and write on. Also, as before, remember that these same questions are in your assessment template.

What went well today?

Overall, here’s what I think went well …

How has your teaching responded to some of the needs that you identified earlier?

I think that  …

What has worked best to really engage your learners in these sessions?

My learners have responded best to …

They were really engaged when …

What has worked best in terms of making your teaching more learner centred?

One approach that worked well was …

Another was …

What about the different frameworks? How have they informed your teaching over these sessions?

In terms of a Māori framework, I think that …

As far as the Literacy Progressions, I …

With regards to the Numeracy Progressions, …

TEACH: Session 2 in review

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As well as details of where and when your second session took place, here are the questions you should respond to. As before, use the sentence starters if they’re helpful. Otherwise, you can ignore them.

There’s a PDF version here you can print and write on if you need it. Also as before, remember that these same questions are in your assessment template.

What went well this time?

Here’s what I think went well in this session. First, …

What about how you managed the delivery of today’s session? How was that?

I think that …

What kind of feedback did you get from your learners today?

It was …

Did you feel that your learning outcomes were on target?

The learning outcome for literacy …

The numeracy outcome …

Any thoughts on what you could improve for next time or future sessions?

One thing is …

TEACH: Joining the dots – approaches, assessments, evaluation

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Joining the dots

In real life, a lot of your planning happens in your head. Sometimes this is explicit. In other words, you’re aware of what you’re doing as you go about planning how you will teach something.

At other times, your planning process might be much less explicit. Planning is a bit like literacy and numeracy. It’s there, but sometimes it’s just not visible.

Because this is a professional development programme for tutors and teachers, we need you to have a go at making it a bit more explicit and visible for us. Otherwise, we (and you) can’t actually see what’s going on.

This brings us to one final part of the planning process. We’ve dealt with lesson planning, activities and resources. And to finish things off we’d like you to make it clear in your assessment how you’re planning three other aspects of your teaching.

These including how you are planning to:

  • Use some of the approaches and concepts we discussed earlier.
  • Assess learner progress for literacy and numeracy.
  • Evaluate the work that you’ve been doing in this project as a whole.

Let’s take each of these in turn. There’s a worksheet you can download to take notes in as you go. You don’t have to use it. As always, it’s just there if it helps you move things forward.

What approaches am I planning to use?

In Collection 2, we looked a range of approaches and concepts from both mainstream education and Te Ao Māori.

What we need you to do next is tell us how you plan on using some of these to help you teach in a way that is more learner-centred. At the moment, it’s just planning. But later, you’ll need to reflect on how it went.

You can pick any approaches that you like. Also, you may want to refer back to what you wrote in your Assessment 2 for this course. It’s normal if your thinking has changed or shifted around.

But if you not sure on what to pick, we can recommend these two for maximum effect:

  • Ako
  • Tuakana-teina

You need to write about at least two approaches or concepts that you’re planning on using.

How will I assess learner progress for literacy and numeracy?

We think you should tackle this in two different ways. These are

  • Planning to measure learner progress after the teaching sessions are finished by reusing the contextualised assessments that you developed earlier to give clear before and after scores.
  • Experimenting with a collaborative assessment. In other words, planning to get the group to assess themselves as a group.

Let’s look at each of these as well.

Reusing your contextualised assessments for literacy and numeracy

Unless there has been some major change to your circumstances, you should be able to just re-use your contextualised assessments for literacy and numeracy.

Refer back to the work that you did in Collection 5. It might be a simple as just reusing your pre-tests here as post-tests. If that’s it, then just tell us what you’re doing.

If it’s become a bit more complicated, then you should let us know what’s going on. If you can’t reuse your contextualised assessments we probably need to have a chat and figure out a way to keep moving forward. Just get in touch.

Doing some kind of collaborative assessment with the group

Group collaborative assessment is when two or more learners attempt to assess some aspect or aspects of their own learning together. In other words, the focus in a collaborative assessment is on what the group thinks they have learned.

We have a worksheet you can use or adapt here for trying a collaborative approach if it’s new to you.

Everything that you’re planning here for assessment is going to pop up again in the final assessment. Assessment 7 is where you’ll report on the post-test data.

How are you going to evaluate this project?

Here we’re talking about the whole package deal across the work you did in Collection 5, but also the teaching that you’re planning here.

You should plan to do some kind of short evaluation with your learners when the teaching part is finished. If it’s appropriate, it might be better if you arrange a colleague to come and do this for you. We’ll give you some examples of what this might look like in Collection 7.

You’re going to need three different kinds of evaluation data for the final assessment. This includes from your learners, from your supervisor and your own reflections.

It’s good to plan how you’re going to gather this now learner evaluation data now.

TEACH: Numeracy resources – Hundreds grid

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This is a blank Hundreds Grid. Again, it’s a resource that would lend itself to a wide range of numeracy activities.

Here are some ideas for activities using the Hundreds Grid. You could use it for:

  • Developing a visual understanding of basic fractions including half, quarters and three-quarters.
  • Developing an understanding of the link from basic fractions to more complex fractions and percentages.
  • Developing an understanding of decimal numbers and how they relate to percentages and fractions.

How else could you use or build from this resource?

TEACH: Numeracy resources – Place Value Chart

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This is a blank place value chart that you can print and use for a wide range of different activities. We think that you should really have a giant one of these across the top of your whiteboard. But this is a handy size that you can print and use with learners anywhere and anytime.

Here are some ideas of activities developing or practising place value. Use the place value chart for:

  • Showing how the place of the number determines its value.
  • Any calculations, but especially involving big numbers or really small numbers including decimals.
  • Showing how numbers shift left or right depending on whether they are multiplied or divided by 10, 100, 1000
  • Doing conversions within a system, such as from millimetres to metres for metric measurement.

You can refer back to the example we used earlier for planning a numeracy activity. This used a place value chart. Also, you can refer to any of the place value activities in the Learning Progressions. This resource would work with any and all of them.

How else could you use or build from this resource?

TEACH: Literacy Resources – Types of questions you can ask for reading comprehension activities

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This is a set of different kinds of questions for creating reading comprehension activities. You can use this as your own resource for developing different kinds of questions for any text that your learners need to read and understand.

Here are some ideas for different reading comprehension activities that you could develop depending on your learning outcome.

Use the list of question types to help you write reading comprehension questions that ask your learners to:

  • Identify something. E.g. “What year was the company started?”, “Which person has only one item of the list?”.
  • Fill in a gap or complete a sentence. E.g. ““New graduates must…”, “The aim of the study was too…”, “The purpose of this notice is to…”
  • Choose from multiple choice answers. E.g. Choose from one of four possible answers.
  • Choose from a forced choice. E.g. Choose whether something is true or false, correct or incorrect, or answer yes or no.
  • Underline or circle something in the text they are reading.

And then if you want to use the same list of question types to push yourself and your learners, you’ll need to distinguish between the following kinds of questions:

  • Inferencing required to answer. This means “reading between the lines” a little.
  • The answer stated explicitly. No inferencing required.

Inferencing is what you do when you can’t get the answer directly from the text. You have to “read between the lines” to get the answer or draw your conclusion. In other words, you have to infer an answer when understanding something that is not stated explicitly in the text.

Learners who can answer inferencing questions are usually at or above step 5 in the Learning Progressions for comprehension and reading critically. This is also often the way to tell who is a good reader and who is not.

When you’re designing a sequence of activities, you can consider how you want to make them easier or harder by using (or not using) inferencing questions.

How else could you use or build from this resource?