Intervention #1: Focus Lesson on key concepts

Evidence for a need to 'shift' my teaching.
Last term, I taught a unit on our community with a focus on significant places in our community.   At the end of the unit, students had to complete an assessment essay to show their learning from the unit and the many of the students answers were basic or did not reach an achieved.

When reflecting on why the kids essays were below standard, I wondered whether my teaching was part of the reason for these failures.  I don't think my teaching style had changed much as I have taught the unit many times in the past.  Although I used a number of strategies to support my learners, they were more for the scaffolding of reading and writing for the learners rather then looking at ways I could support my learners in my teaching approach.

This term, I want to implement strategies that I'd used at the beginning of the year whereby I purposefully and deliberately took away time spent on the context of a topic and used it to slow down the focus in a lesson to learn key concepts properly.  I also want to look at talking more about the learning too rather then trying to focus on having the kids write something down to show their learning.  Recently, I taught a lesson with these aspects in mind.

The Context
My year 9 Social Studies class are starting a new unit on understanding the Government and how decisions can impact on people and places.  There are a lot of different concepts that are complicated and challenging to understand and I wanted to use a technique that Jannie had taught me earlier this year to slow down the learning on new concepts and to discuss knowledge around the concepts.

Planning and preparing for the lesson.

The lesson time was a double period, 2x 50 minutes and it was after morning tea and before lunch.  To prepare for the lesson, I created a slide that had the concepts and their definitions on it.  I also wanted to test whether there was a shift in their learning, so I created a pre test and a post test that was mix and match exercise to measure if there was a shift in learning for the students (I will talk about the results in my next blog).   

Collecting evidence
I want to collect evidence to support how my change in teaching practice helped my learners to learn and understand key concepts in a more verbal and oral way.

Formal:

• Pre and post tests - I created a snap 'quiz' where students were provided with the 7 key concepts and had mix and match the correct definitions with the words.  
• Videoing myself - I want to watch the video to see how I teach in this style.  I have video evidence of me teaching in my default style of teaching (the old me) and I want to see 

Informal

• My observations of students - I want to observe the engagement of the students through the lesson and make mental notes of who is making a genuine effort as compared to previous lessons.  
• Student verbal feedback - I will catch up with students at the end of the lesson to talk about how they felt about the lesson.

The Lesson
As the students entered the classroom, I handed them the pre-test and a pen and said we will be discussing our learning today through 'talanoa' (discussions) and to leave their devices in their bags.  The students were given 5 minutes to complete the pre-test at the start.  I collected the papers in, then I asked them to draw their attention to the presentation. 

I started by reminding them about the brain being like a muscle and that when they energise their brain through learning new things, they are making them 'smarter'.  I also reminded them that we will be verbalising our lesson through 'talanoa' learning and that I hoped they will become confident speakers by the end of the year.

I asked them to read the instructions and we went through each one carefully for understanding.  I then put the slide with the 7 key concepts up for 2 minutes, where they individually had to say the words, then 2 - 3 minutes to a partner, then a group.  I then called for volunteers to stand up in front of the class and say the concepts fluently without stopping.  I modelled to them how I wanted them to say the words, with good posture and in a confident manner.

At the end of the lesson, I did a quiz exercise which involved asking students to tell me answers to the concepts, to further learn the concepts and to get them to say out loud the answers.  I then handed the post-test questions to students who completed them before the bell went.  I have recorded parts of the lesson below.

Reflection
My initials observations of the students as I taught them, was that they were engaged and motivated to give the learning a go.  I felt I had minimal behavioural issues and students were willing to try the concepts and learning out, and for the most part seemed happy.   I think this was because I was confident in my approach, I took time to allow students to try things out and gave them different ways for them to try out the learning.
Feedback from a student is that she felt it was a fun lesson and enjoyed the interaction with her classmates.

Next steps:

• I will collate the data from the pre and post test.
• I will watch the video of my teaching and analyse what I see
• I will try and collect feedback from students about the lesson.