E3

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E3. Guided practice requires high frequency student response to check for understanding and facilitate teaching for automaticity

Checking for Understanding (CFU)

Once students can demonstrate the task on their own, it is time to check their work. It is essential that teachers at Yarrabah check that students have it right before moving them onto the ‘You Do’ part of the lesson. It also provides the teacher with an opportunity to recap the key knowledge and steps by looking at some examples as a class. For many students this will take a long time before they are ready to work independently, and that is OK. These students require independent time, in areas away from the group, with a staff member, focussed on the 'We Do'.

Yarrabah Teachers have a variety of means for CFU. Within each class, there will be a reference to one of these. TAPPLE is but one of these means. Depending on the class, each class will have a version of TAPPLE on display.

Teaching to Automaticity

Yarrabah staff understand the importance of teaching to automaticity. Teaching to automaticity aims to provide a student opportunities to recognise individual letters, words or symbols automatically. It will provide a student opportunity to free up time and energy when focussing on what letters, words or symbols mean.

Teaching to automaticity requires repetition and practice. Yarrabah staff promote automaticity by asking students to practice using their language through ‘Getting It’ and ‘Using It’ activities. Teachers need to understand that it takes time to learn and that automaticity will not develop overnight or even after many lessons for our students. Some strategies to consider that promote automaticity include:

review/refresher/recycle activities
pair/group work for practice and clarification
choice, chance and self-pacing to maintain student motivation
personalized, positive feedback
Include Tasks (TBLT)
‘transfer’ what they have learned to new situations

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