AtoL Expo
AtoL Expo 07, arranged by Massey University was packed out today with teachers from around the country. It was hosted at Havelock North Intermediate School with two excellent keynote addresses, the first from John Hattie from Auckland University and the second Erika Ross, Manager of the Literacy, Numeracy and Assessment team in the Ministry of Education in
Wellington. More about them in another post or two.
What I would like to talk about now is Regan Orr, from Russell St. He talked about students creating their own criteria/ matrix. When I read it I thought ‘oh, he means success criteria from the Learning Objectives’, but it blew me away when he actually meant what he had written. He talked us through how his Y5/6 class spent the whole term on ‘Procedural writing’ but for the first two weeks they did no writing at all. But talked and discussed what a procedure was, what were features of a good procedure? He pulled out of School Journals a variety of examples and the students highlighted different parts of them a discussed what each feature was. From there they looked at what an ‘expert’ would create as a procedure, then what a ‘novice would be doing than then the ‘practitioner’ in the middle. The students, over the first three weeks had created (with some scaffolding and support) their own matrix for procedure writing. From there they each got a copy and for each of their own procedures highlighted on their copy of the matrix where they thought that piece of writing fitted. Genius.
My class are doing Explanation writing this term. Hope he stay in touch, I want to do this thing the best that I can.
Reminds me a little of the Aussie First Steps programme. A really cool way of creating interest and assessment all in one.
Allanah, you are right, that is the discovery procedure in the First Steps Writing Resource book. It is also described in Writeways, both are fantastic resources for writing, from Australia. I teach all my procedural writing following this discovery approach, having children identify an effective piece of writing from an ineffective one and then making a rubric. Check out the books they are well worthwhile (a bit expensive) but available online.
Yes, this is an excellent way of encouraging students to produce their best writing. It ensures they fully understand how the genre is structured etc and they can self or peer assess their own work to the criteria THEY made.
I use this approach in my classroom for specific genre writing – and it has been very powerful – we are starting to write “explanations” soon so you have reminded me I could teach my 3rd year student teacher how to do this!