S4 Ep8 - Instructional Spring Cleaning - News

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Hello and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people.

Every teacher in every classroom has practices that have been a staple of their teaching forever and a day. These practices are taken for granted and done just because it's how we do things. That's a good thing. We need automaticity and certainty in our lives, but there are times when it's just a good idea to take stock and check in about whether our old practices are still serving us. We're going to have a spring clean, if you will.

In this episode, I'll be sharing a practice that I think it could be time to reconsider. I want to send a big shout out to a terrific leader, Lou, for the conversation that led to this particular episode.

Now, I'm not focusing on this practice in the episode because I think that it should be forever banished, or I want to criticise past practice, I've used this practice myself, but rather I'd like to encourage you to consider whether it is giving you maximum impact in your classroom. So, without further ado, grab your feather duster and let's dive in.

News

In this episode, I'd like us to consider news. News is that practice that's been a staple of many an early years classroom for a very long time.

Can I tell you something? I hate news. I hate it as a teacher and I hate it as a parent. As a working parent, having to rush around helping my child find the perfect thing at 9pm because they have to have something to present is really painful. And, let's face it, the standard version of news often becomes a competition about who has the nicest and newest stuff.

And then there's the educational value of this practice to be considered. Standard weekly news time did help students practice sitting still, looking in the direction of the speaker and at least pretending to listen. It did give children the opportunity to practice oral language and communicating about everyday topics. It also encouraged children to ask questions, a practice that has been shown to positively impact reading comprehension. But tell me if these three questions are familiar to you.

Do you like it?

Where did you get it?

Where do you keep it?

These are the three questions that are asked the most often during news time.

Let's think about this practice of news objectively and without getting caught up in the trap of absolutes. They rarely help us in our classrooms.

Jocelyn's Thoughts

Here's my take on news.

The intention of news was to have children learn to listen, engage and express themselves. My issue with it from an instructional perspective is that it may have provided the chance for some children to practice these things, but not all. It provided the opportunity to engage but didn't address actual instruction in speaking and listening. It also didn't connect with the learning that was taking place in the classroom. In short, it was very often a wasted opportunity.

From a social perspective, it just didn't work for busy families, and I'm sure that I'm not the only parent who has found the need to find things for their children to present on arduous.

It also exacerbated social inequalities. If you were the child with all of the latest stuff, you felt good about news. If you were the child whose family was struggling to put food on the table or even just an average home where you didn't get new toys every single week, news could be a source of shame and stress.

So how can we rethink news through the lens of structured literacy and social and academic inclusion?

What about the learning intention?

We could say that the learning intention of this practice was to learn to share my own experiences, give a presentation to my peers, listen to the ideas of others and respond by asking questions. Okay, well, that's fine. How else could we achieve this? Here are some suggestions.

1.

Make sure we begin with an experience that every child can engage with. This could involve a book the whole class has read a few times, artifacts from a recent excursion, photos from a school event, a photo from a key moment in a class lesson, such as art or science, or an object from the classroom that children interact with. This could even be a toy.

2.

The second point is our first learning intention was about learning to share my own experiences. Every one of our text-based units has a step for making connections with our own experiences. And all of the options for the stimulus I just shared, well, every one of them allows every child to have something to talk about that they can actually connect with. The sharing part can be achieved in so many ways, and partner talk can be one of them.

3.

Our second learning intention was about listening. Talking with a partner requires children to listen, if we include a mechanism of accountability in the task. In the old news days, a child could sit there every single day with their eyes glazed over. They might have been looking in the direction of the speaker, but were they really listening? Well, who knows?

4.

Fourth in this is the idea of responding with a question ties in very nicely with the idea of the mechanism of accountability. But we can't forget about the need to instruct in all of this. It's not enough to say now ask your partner a question. We need to scaffold the attending, listening and thinking processes so that we're helping students learn new skills, not just while away minutes passively.

To scaffold this learning you could do the following.

Number one have students practice thinking about how something they heard makes them feel or what it makes them think of. If students can write, let them write a brief note on a board. Then have them identify what they heard makes them want to know. So they're going to be curious. So they can ask the question, what am I curious about? And give them the sentence starters to scaffold this in a discussion.

Examples could include:

• Listening to what you said, I felt...
• As I listened, I was reminded of...
• I am curious about...
• I'm wondering why...
• Could you tell me more about how...

Now, my observation of these question starters is that, while we'll be introducing them in the general context of oral language learning, in fact these are all part of restorative discussions that we can help students have with each other. Perhaps if we taught our children to engage in dialogue, our future world might be kinder and a better place to be.

But don't just hand these prompts to kids and expect them to use them, take a gradual release approach to the learning. You could start by sharing the question prompts with the students, and this can work even for the littlies. You'll just make sure that the language is friendly for their age.

You could watch a short clip together. You then model reflecting on the clip and asking a question. You can also support question generation with a questioning matrix in older grades. Then model sharing an experience of your own and have the students as a group use the prompts to think about and respond to you. You can make the whole thing even more robust by including this in a content area lesson like HASS, English, Science or Health. Not only will you help students have better discussions, but you'll improve their comprehension of the subject area content knowledge.

How do we help students share high quality recounts of their experiences across the grades? Well, that's where things like syntax, sentence combining and summarising come in.

Improving oral language is not about assigning special oral time in the day. It's about making every lesson a language lesson.

Okay, so what happens after you've done the gradual release introduction a couple of times? You could just have students talk with a partner, but it's good to mix it up and keep things fresh.

Jocelyn's Technique for Sharing

A technique that I've used in the past in all grades is to divide the class into two groups. One forms an inner circle facing outwards. The other forms an outer circle facing in. In this way, everyone has a partner to talk to. If you have an odd number of students, one of these pairs will be a group of three. The way this works is that you allocate a certain number of minutes for partner one to talk, then have partner two respond. At the end of the time, have the outer circle move around so that they now have a new partner, set the timer again and have partner two share and partner one respond. Continue in this way until each person has spoken and responded at least twice.

The beauty of this arrangement is that everyone is involved the whole time. Nobody's sitting and staring into space passively. Time on-task is maximised, which is one of our big goals. The other advantage is that students have the opportunity to repeat what they've said, with the chance to improve it after the responses they've had from their partner.

The learning intention not yet addressed is presenting to a group. Well, that's easy. After the circle discussion, have two or three students repeat their sharing to the whole group, who will then have the chance to think and respond as time allows. This routine can be adapted to the age of the students, the time you have available and the learning context in which it's occurring.

I think that circle talk based on a learning outcome has so many benefits that traditional news just doesn't.

It doesn't bother parents.

It's focused on learning.

It's scaffolded so that every child succeeds.

It's built around an expectation of active listening and response.

It improves oral language skills while being able to improve comprehension and retention of content learning.

It ensures full participation, maximising time on-task for all students.

It can be a wonderful oral rehearsal for recount writing and personal response tasks in English.

It's extremely low prep for the teacher. And, finally,

It can be used across the school in every subject area, because if we're going to get the ideation part of writing to be strong, every lesson must be a language lesson.

News may have had great intentions, but it often fell short of getting all the children involved in improving oral language.

To help you implement this structure into your classroom, I have produced a quick guide for you.

I hope that you have found this discussion of practices that could use an update useful. If you have a go at any of the ideas shared in this podcast, please get in touch and tell me how it goes.

In coming episodes I'm going to explore some other common classroom practices and share some ideas on how we can have a little spring clean. Sometimes we don't have to redo everything, it may just need a little tweak to increase the effectiveness of our instruction substantially. Until next time, bye.

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