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One professional reading that has impacted me highly is ‘Learning in the Fast Lane’. This book provides strategies to help accelerate students who might come to class at a significantly lower level than the bulk of the class. The strategies in the book are applicable to all students. One strategy that has been useful to me is to transform standards into clear learning goals. One way I have implemented this is in our writing plans for the class. Our teacher group unpacked the level 3 objectives and reworded them as specific goals. We then used those goals to construct lesson plans where the learning intention and success criteria were framed around a specific task. This meant students created a portfolio of evidence of learning, rather than teachers sifting through each piece of work trying to find multiple pieces of evidence in each.
In this plan, we identified 3 objectives for our students to meet during their Information report task. For our first lesson, I explained to the students that they were creating 3 pieces of evidence for me. The first piece was to create a plan for their report that must address 3 questions. Once they provided me with that evidence, they would receive a tick, or I would give them feedback on what they needed to do to get a tick. This aligned with ‘Teaching in the fast lane’ by making the teaching explicit and making the students’ achievement easily accessible to them as well as giving them their next steps to help them drive their own learning.
In addition to this, I have taken part in professional development courses in DMIC (developing mathematical inquiry communities), Health and physical education, restorative justice conversations, spelling and reading, and reciprocal reading. These have helped me broaden my capabilities.
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