Year 9 Sos: Working in the Goldilocks zone #2: Balancing content and skill.

For year 9’s this year, I am looking at the less is more approach: less content but with more in-depth learning on specific contexts and less ‘just writing’ and more scaffolds to support the learners to craft their writing.  The reason for this is that I’ve found that students weren’t providing enough quality writing that showed their understanding of what they’d learnt because we spent a lot of time on learning about content itself. 

Our year 9’s learn about 3 theories of Migration and have to identify and describe which one could be the most true and likely theory, based on the information provided and their own research.  We had 2 lessons for the learning of the content, one lesson for the learning of the skills of writing a paragraph and one lesson for the creating and sharing of their learning.  Students could also work on their paragraphs for homework.

Learn … about the theories

We went through a discussion of each of the 3 theories (Hawaiiki, South America and Asia) and I tried to provide the same amount of learning time for each.  I allowed for questions to be asked and for students to discuss their ideas with their peers.

Create … paragraphs that show their understanding of the theories

Students were then encouraged to use key bullet points from each of the theories to write a paragraph to share with their peers.  At this point I decided to teach about the  skill of writing a paragraph writing using our T.E.X model to help scaffold the students writing using a template that supported essay writing in Social Studies.

Share …their learning in a blogpost

Students were to create a blogpost about their learning.  Unfortunately we ran out of time so I had hoped to get them to blog when we have time.

An example of the change in writing before and after using the TEX model

Reflection

Normally I would have taught this part of the unit in two periods but because we had an extra 2 periods to craft their writing and to allow them to process and create their understanding of the learn, they were able to produce some good paragraphs.  

Linking this lesson to my inquiry:

Creating a sense of achievement by providing enough time for everyone to get the paragraphs done