Acknowledging that many schools are utilising team leaders to ensure that quality lessons are available to students and that these lessons are being given to all students, opportunities for choice may be the most ideal strategy to incorporate within the existing system.

Creating opportunities for meaningful choice-making can deepen student engagement. Assuming a common, rigorous bar for mastery is applied, structures such as choice boards can be used to give students autonomy and allow them to work at their own pace.

Allow students to choose how they will demonstrate their knowledge using a variety of delivery methods. For example, let students choose between writing an extended response, creating a presentation, or preparing a video or audio to answer a question from a lesson.

In addition, students can be offered opportunities to extend their learning in a given task or content area. For example, colour-code your choice board to align with different levels of rigour. Green activities cover basic concepts and require basic mastery, yellow activities require students to apply their knowledge, and red activities require students to go deeper, evaluate or create. The teacher feedback could also be to challenge students to attempt an activity from a particular colour if they feel students are capable of a greater depth of understanding.

It’s important to evaluate how accessible your online content is to your students. Your students have a variety of needs, skills, and interests. In turn, the ways in which they access content and engage with learning can vary greatly. Offering a variety of entrance points, supports, and even timing for your content can help your learners further their understanding and mastery. Some students may learn best through interactive online experiences, while others may enjoy reading articles and writing about their learnings. Even when you’re using multiple entrance points to your content, you need to always make sure that all students are working towards the same common goal.

Don’t stick to only static slides for your presentations – embed videos, graphics, external links, and audio in addition to text to craft a richer learning experience and help your students deepen their understanding. Combine written or verbal material with visual material to help them make important connections within the content you are presenting.

Consider how you can make your digital content more accessible for students with accessibility features like text-to-speech options, image descriptions, or enlarged fonts.

NOTE: the following strategy while beneficial will take some time to implement.

Record any live lessons and add captions to help students follow along with the content. Consider some of the auto transcribe options that are available or create caption files using tools as simple as speech to text using Google Docs. Upload recorded video with captions to your Google classroom, or other platform, so students can access the material whenever they need it. This strategy benefits students who may be hard of hearing or students who are learning English – and it helps all students as a general learning aid to improve focus and support comprehension.

Model texts are an effective way that discipline teachers unfold the conceptual knowledge of their subject whilst building student understanding of typical text features including structural form, vocabulary and grammar components that they may encounter whilst reading and be required to use when sharing their knowledge in science.

Holy Spirit Bellambi year 8 science students are exploring the scientific explanation. This style of text is something that is often experienced in their science academic reading, as well as the students’ scientific writing.

An example of how to use model texts in the online learning world is through this ‘work with me’ style video that promotes rehearsal activities whilst students engage in text reading to boost their subject specific knowledge on:

• Sodium Chloride

• The use of Sodium Chloride in our everyday lives, both currently and in the past

• The positive and negative effects of Sodium Chloride use, with a focus on cause and effect relationships

• The use of causal process academic language to explain these relationships

• Scientific definition writing in introductions when outlining a phenomenon

Reading texts are one way teachers choose to build students' field knowledge, both in the classroom and online. To best engage students in their academic reading, St Joseph's, Albion Park have designed some generic templates that teachers can use to deepen students' reading engagement before, during and after the reading process.

Reading templates:

• Comprehension template

• Comprehension google form template

• Reading for understanding template 1

• Reading for understanding template 2

• Science example_Hard corals and soft corals_ Venn diagram activity comprehension for comparison

Writing to shape meaning and understanding is important for learners of all ages. This includes planning the purpose and audience of any piece of writing. The online world is no different.

• Try these handy sentence starters and writing genres (styles) from St Joseph's, Albion Park, to give your learners purpose and audience when sharing their learning.

• This planning/ thinking rubric helps students get ready for writing (St Joseph's, Albion Park).

Interweaving conceptual knowledge learning and literacy instruction builds students' discipline knowledge and literacy simultaneously.

St Joseph's, Albion Park have been extending their science students' experiences during their online learning.

Model enhanced literacy lessons with outcome alignments include:

• Year 10

• Year 9

• Year 8

• Year 7

In addition to recording all sessions, provide students with a copy of your notes for specific synchronous learning sessions where you might cover new or potentially challenging content. This allows students to supplement their own notes with a structured, higher level of focus and insight into the lesson and can provide extra support to students who may have been unable to attend your live lesson.