In 2023, I am doing the Level 3 course which is certainly up a few notches for me. My goal this year is to be competent at Level 3, even if I have to repeat the classes in the second semester which is quite likely as I don't feel confident enough to be doing Level 4. We'll see how it goes though.
This semester I have actually started doing the mahi kāika that has been set and doing some study through the weekly kupu lists on Quizlet. I aim to use Quizlet every day to build my vocabulary and so far, I have reached a seven-day streak.
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| I was happy to be in the top three for our in-class Quizlet. |
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| Quizlet has a matching activity in it that times you and ranks you against other learners. This has been a great tool for my learning and challenging myself to get a quicker time. |
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| Our mahi kāika sentences to translate. |
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| My mahi kāika for one week. A couple of errors with a and o categories. |
This year we have many new tamariki to our hub who have limited knowledge and skills when using Google Apps for Education. This week we did some digital technology work integrated with our values focus.
We modelled how to create a Google Drawing inside a folder in our drive. We then went through how to insert text boxes, change sizes, background and filling a space with colour.
Instructions and steps were written in the comment section and students who had been in our hub last year were used as experts.
For our Term One Toolkits through the Manaiakalani Outreach Programme, I registered for the Level Up on Autism session hosted by Natasha Olsen. I thought this would be helpful for me as I currently have some students who are on the Autism Spectrum and present with a range of specific needs and characteristics.
Although the sound on the Meet wasn't working, I spent some time looking through the slide that was shared and the speaker notes which were really helpful.
I think I am at the 'acceptance' level on the Level Up Scale.
The estimated population of people with ASD in NZ is approx 50,000-100,000 (1-2%).
An autistic person may have difficulties with social communication and social interaction skills. This means that a person with autism might have difficulties reciprocating in conversations and social interactions, engaging in nonverbal behaviours (e.g., eye contact, gestures), and developing, maintaining and understanding relationships.
People with autism may also demonstrate restrictive, repetitive patterns of behaviours, interests, or activities. This might include an insistence on sameness (e.g., rigid, black-and-white thinking, difficulties with change) or engaging in behaviours that may be perceived as unusual. Sometimes, a person with autism might also show intense focus on objects or interests and possess sensory sensitivities (e.g., hyper- or hypo-sensitive to sights, smells, touch, tastes, and sounds).
Executive functioning
Executive functioning is a set of mental skills controlled by the frontal lobe of the brain. It affects our ability in two key areas – organisation and self-regulation. People with autism often have problems organising, prioritising, problem-solving, accessing working memory, thinking flexibly and self-monitoring, eg, difficulty following more than one instruction.
Strategies:
Use routines
Use visual support to aid organisation
Routine and predictability mean safety for someone with Autism
Give one instruction at a time
Plan for transitions
Understand children's signs of stress or anxiety
Teach children strategies they can use themselves
Make consequences clear. Explicitly lay them out
Anxiety
75% of children and 50% of adults with ASD experience intense anxiety.
Anxiety is an intense and often overwhelming feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome. It also has varying physical effects on our bodies, such as increased heart rate and sweaty palms. Often it results in people avoiding situations, preferring sameness, rigid thinking, social withdrawal, repetitive movements or noises, and sometimes anger or meltdowns.
Many autistic children meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder. For those who don’t, anxiety is still a common experience in their everyday lives and can make it difficult to make friends, focus at school or complete daily tasks as it can show as being ‘difficult’.
Strategies for anxiety:
Identity key stressors - environment etc
quiet/low stimulation spaces available
Keep your voice calm
Teach self-calming strategies
Build on strengths
Limit choices
Break cards
Sensory box
Communication
Communication is a shared experience in joint attention and this is a common challenge for the neurodiverse brain.
Strategies:
Make sure you have the child's attention
Avoid complicated instructions
Keep up your language polite, clear and factual without being patronising
Allow the child enough time to process
Supplement verbal instruction with visual information
Try to have important conversations in a quiet area
My next step is to attend the Term Two toolkit which will look specifically at interventions in the classroom that can increase engagement and help create an environment that best suits our learners.
Writing instruction contributes to the development of a wide range of skills and attributes. Teaching handwriting helps to secure letter knowledge in long-term memory; teaching spelling enhances decoding skill; and writing about what we read improves memory and comprehension.
More profoundly, writing has long been acknowledged as a tool for thinking, in that when writing we articulate reasoned arguments and gain opportunities for creativity and self-expression.
Given the importance of learning to write, low rates of achievement in many countries are cause for concern. A contributing factor appears to be the continuing influence of process writing – Donald Graves’ approach to teaching writing that was influential during the 1970s and 1980s, despite a lack of empirical evidence to support it. While the term ‘process writing’ has now fallen out of favour with classroom teachers, research suggests that use of some of Graves’ methods is still widespread.
Here I present five such methods for learning to write – common in many classrooms – that limit student progress in writing. For each of these methods, I also present an evidence-based alternative. Practising this suite of small changes could positively transform student achievement in writing at your school.
Graves told teachers that personal experiences were the best inspiration for writing. Yet this kind of writing encourages an unsophisticated ‘recall and write’ process, and often results in a boring story.
Instead, set tasks that relate to the big, wide world: reports about dinosaurs, volcanoes, apex predators or the solar system; narratives set under the sea, in a dark forest or among ancient ruins. Plan these tasks carefully. For non-fiction topics, integrate writing with other curriculum areas so that students work with the knowledge before writing about it. For narratives, prepare your model carefully and consider the challenges your students will face as they come to write their own.
Graves told us that writing was a staged process: plan, then draft, then edit and finally publish. As part of this process, the first draft happens in a ‘free flow’ way.
In contrast, empirical researchers have described the writing process as a ‘juggling act’. Skilled writers plan and modify their planning, even as they come to write their final paragraph. They re-read and revise throughout the drafting process – from the very first sentence. This continual checking and refining increases self-awareness, which leads to higher-quality writing for both surface and deeper features.
So, instead of encouraging free-flow drafting, we must teach students to think of a sentence, write it and check it immediately, asking questions such as: Does it sound the way I want it to sound? Does it have a capital letter at the beginning and a full stop at the end?
Theorists such as Graves de-emphasised the importance of teaching handwriting and spelling, telling teachers to instead prioritise the expressive aspects of writing.
However, numerous empirical studies have shown that if a student does not master the technical skills, implementing them will occupy all of the student’s working memory and make it impossible for them to focus on anything else (including the ideas they wish to express).
So teach handwriting and spelling every day. Teach these skills explicitly and closely monitor your students as they practise. This will have massive pay-offs for writing achievement and motivation, and will support reading development too.
In many classrooms, when students ask how to spell a word, the teacher tells them to listen to the sounds and write what they think. And while it’s true that listening to sounds is a good starting point for spelling, what happens if a student doesn’t have the knowledge to record those sounds? At best, this approach leads them to record an incorrect approximation. At worst, it’s a killer for motivation, as the student sits anxiously, reluctant to try in case they make a mistake.
A much better option is to use co-constructed spelling. When students ask you how to spell a word, support them to segment the word into sounds, prompt them to apply their existing knowledge of sound–letter correspondences and then show them the rest of the word.
Graves told us to have students cross out errors instead of erasing, supposedly to keep up the ‘flow’ of the first draft. However, skilled writing is not free-flow writing – checking and correcting are important skills in the writing process. Unfortunately, crossing out makes checking difficult as the page becomes cluttered, messy and difficult to read. This practice can also be a problem for motivation as many children want a tidy page and feel self-conscious about sharing writing when all their errors are still visible.
So teachers, it’s time to bring back the eraser. Keep one in your pocket for the first few months of the year and give students their own when they are ready.
Process writing practices are so pervasive that teachers and leaders often take them for granted, failing to consider other options. But rates of student achievement are at an all-time low, and many students are reluctant to write at all. Have a go with these suggested changes and watch your students thrive. Teaching writing will feel exciting, and writing lessons will become a highlight of every school day.
Dr Helen Walls is a professional learning facilitator and educational researcher, with 20 years’ experience working in schools. She is committed to raising achievement in writing by sharing evidence-based, practical methods to engage every student. Helen is managing director of The Writing Teacher, a consultancy that provides writing workshops and resources for teachers, all accessible online. She is also a member of the Massey University school support team. For her PhD thesis, Helen conducted two empirical studies into the teaching of writing, which included a trial of the Fast Feedback Formative Evaluation System outlined in this book. She has published with The Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties and The Education Hub
February 2023
After what feels like a very long time, I have just had a great session of learning about new tools within Google for Education that excite and intrigue me.
Last year my teaching partner and I signed up for some Google learning but then found that it clashed each week with other commitments so we didn't engage. Tonight, I received an email with links to a recording of the new Learn With Google monthly webinar for 2023.
I watched the recording and very quickly found myself excited and mind-blown by the amazing range of tools that Google has available. I now have a refreshed interest in developing my learning further and will be using these webinars to further my learning.
