GP #3 - Teacher Commitment to Student Care and Development

Academic Interventions

Part of my duties as a year group supervisor is to focus on students whose levels of academic attainment are in need of support; a particularly successful intervention programme that I implemented was one with second formers in 2016. I was the coordinator for that stream and I was able to assist students in that programme, through motivation and individual learning plans to improve their academic performance. One of the findings made available to the principal was that the pace of teaching needed to be slowed so that the students could perform at the deep learning phase rather than surface learning. See a variety of artifacts from these interventions below:

In 2017, I did a follow up intervention with this same group of learners, but this time the focus was on content area literacy. Ms. Kesha Shirley who was then Literacy Coordinator at MOE Region 6, and now Education Officer in Region 7 was invited to provide expertise in strategies that we could use to aid these set of learners in a greater way.

Learning Theory Summaries

As you would have noted thus far, in particular in Students' Exhibit #4 of this portfolio, I am a scaffolder at heart. I have done several interventions which highlight that scaffolding and incremental instruction are key tenets of mastery learning. As such Vygotsky's learning theory of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a cornerstone principle of my language classroom.

The Mastery Learning Model is another learning theory which is a corollary of the ZPD approach noted above. When skills are taught incrementally, and there is a focus on adding value and augmenting cognitive capacity in students, then ultimately, there is more than mere development of competence; learning attainments will be characterised by mastery as seen in outcomes in GP # 1 - The Teacher as Content Master.