Sabbatical Report - Oranga School Website

Sabbatical Report 2009
Independent performance (students’ use the strategy independently). The
teacher in this case has students at different levels of achieving competence
with the strategy and some children are working independently around the
room on the collection of action words and the inclusion of them into their
writing, while the teacher is still supporting others (i.e., a group on the mat
collecting action words using a given picture for stimulus and then thinking of
story ideas using these words).
Some areas of using the SRSD model are not exemplified by the transcript,
such as providing sufficient time within this lesson to memorise the steps of
the strategy. This may have been because it was the first of a series of
lessons. This teacher also did not show high levels of integration of
‘generalisation and maintenance’ steps within this lesson. This could have
been seen if there had of been evidence around discussion of students’
setting goals to use the strategy, the teacher explaining how to modify the
strategy for other situations and reflecting on the use of the strategy (this was
seen in teacher comment only around a previous strategy. Children did not
contribute to the discussion).
It should be noted that further observations would need to be made to confirm
whether or not all of the steps to the teaching of the strategy are being
implemented as per the professional development offered to this teacher.
Graham et al. (2005) suggests that students can be directly involved in the
evaluation process. This can occur through self evaluation, and it is important
for this to happen so that the students see evidence of the strategy at work
and increase their ownership over the strategy. Students could evaluate
whether they could write down, or recite the mnemonic/process and discuss
what each part means. They would also be able to evaluate whether they
have used the strategy by observing whether it was present when they had
finished a piece of written work. Students might also reflect in journal entries
(that the teacher sees) how well they deem the strategy to be working. This
would enable the teacher to provide further support or provide for more
independence.
Once independence has been gained, evaluating the effectiveness of the
strategy could be achieved through asking the students questions around
what they think about the strategy (e.g. “What did you like about the strategy
that you learned? What did you not like about this strategy? Did the strategy
help you write better? Why or why not? … What did you like about the
procedures used to learn the strategy?” (Graham & Harris, 2005)). It should
be noted that student evaluations are not always accurate.
Students’ work would also be evaluated for changes that would be in line with
the strategy taught. This should be seen in the amount of time devoted by the
student to ‘pre planning’ and could be measured by timing the students as
they put the planning strategy into use and also by observing the ‘plan’ after
Jonathan Ramsay
Oranga Primary - One Tree Hill - Auckland