Learning Matter Symposium
Key Note One - Sarah Brown - Systems Change
MTSS in not about interventions.
1 Focus on the framework
- Effective and equitable universal support (curriculum, standards, reporting rubrics etc)
MTSS pyramid - think about all of the resources
Tier 1 - high quality teaching across all literacy sessions
Tier 2 - extra time with teachers, ALL, front loading
Tier 3 - intensive support on top of usual teaching sessions / differentiation
T2 and T3 are intended to be supplementary in nature, not instead of. Important for children to be exposed to T1 learning. Access to the rich language and background knowledge development important in order to be able to access curriculum in secondary school.
- Impactful assessment (how are we using the data to inform?)
Ask good questions about the data, this is crucial as the next steps will depend on the questions that we ask.
- Targeted intensification
- Collaboration for success
2 Be flexible with the Resources
T1 is standards based instruction, science of learning, behaviour expectations, data-driven differentiated instruction, universal screening, daily formative assessment, curriculum embedded assessment.
T1 is preventative, this is where the most growth happens in a school.
T2 is targeted and supplementary. Diagnostic assessment is needed. Frequent and regular progress monitoring.
T3 are intensive and individualised. Does not mean one to one. Diagnostic assessment as needed. Grouping for similar needs. Frequent and regular progress monitoring.
The goal of interventions is to accelerate student performance toward curriculum level expectations. When instruction is targeted to student’s needs, they make better growth.
3 Start with the System
What can we ask?
Avoid only student level questions as that will not impact school wide system questions.
**Do we have more students who need intervention that we can reasonably serve? Versus Which students need additional support?
System Level Class Wide Intervention (T1) - really just means extra practice. Can be challenging as it needs to be everyday for it to be effective and it has be to high quality practice. Gets the greatest growth in schools, according to US research.
High Quality means: guided practice with corrective feedback, high dosage of opportunities to participate, materials and skills that accurate with (but not yet mastered), reinforce motivation and engagement.
**How effective is our teaching? Are more than half of students in the group on track to meet their goal? School wide data and team wide data.
Take a group perspective first before drilling down to individual students and deciding how to intensify resourcing.
4 Empower educators to meet learner needs
Regular and purposeful team meetings
Agenda and data protocols
Model strategies
Observe each other and provide feedback
Share successes and barriers
Coaching towards successful implementation
My Wonderings from Keynote One?
What data do we have at present ? How is it being used to inform teaching? When do we collaborate and look at this data ? Team Meetings on agenda ? Tuesday afternoons, whole staff? What are our agenda and data protocols currently ? (Do these need a refresh with helpful data driven questions)
Writers Toolbox for Tier Two? What does tier three intervention look like - teacher with these students, whilst other students work independently and LA roves to support? How much class wide intervention time (extra practice time) do we have at present each day? How much time in team meetings is dedicated to talking about the progress of groups of students vs individual students. Tuesday afternoon PD - when do we schedule time to discuss groups of learners across the school and group teachers across teams.
Key Note: Brendan Lee - Effective Teaching Transfers Across Subjects
Bk - Reading for Life - Lyn Stone
Pamela Stone - Australia - Science of Reading
Why do students fail? Motivation, not enough practice time, not enough corrective feedback/help/guided practice, it is completely new, it is too hard.
What is the purpose of my lesson and what is the prerequisite knowledge?
Instructional tactics and stage of learning aligned = learning happens.
Instructional Hierarchy: Stages of Learning. (Haring and Eaton, 1978)
“The connection between assessment and instruction”
Acquisition - goal is to learn how to complete the skill accurately and repeatedly without assistance. Explicit instruction sits here. Scaffolded practice stage.
Fluency - Maintain accuracy while increasing speed.
Generalisation - Able to use the skills across varying settings and contexts.
Adaption - Continuous and has no exit criteria. Use in real life settings.
1 Acquisition
This is the first step not the whole learning process.
Students: struggle to start tasks, find it difficult to discriminate relevant elements, may be unable to complete the task independently/consistently/accurately, hesitant and may not know why something is correct or incorrect. May be accurate but slow. Feel frustrated.
Expect a small group of students to not get there initially, record and monitor those students. Chunk the learning down, one thing at a time - minimises slow and faster finishes. Sequence in small steps.
Teacher needs to do
Explicit instruction (high levels of guided practice), fade prompts and scaffolds based on rate of accuracy. Use tools like mini whiteboards to measure rates of accuracy. Slides - use a document camera to project up and show them as it will look different on slides.
Frequent and immediate error corrective feedback.
Focus on accuracy. Be guided by the rate of accuracy from your students.
Let the silence land so the children can think and process what has been asked of them (resist the urge to keep verbally prompting). Trying to get to independence.
Differentiation through support. Guided / independent / guided. Release and bring them back as needed for more guided. Not more modelling. Teacher make this decision on when to release them, not the kids.
Mistakes that teacher sometimes make:
Don’t move to independent practice before they are accurate.
Using timed drills for novices.
Relying on discovery or unguided inquiry.
Assuming understanding without checking the data.
2 Fluency
How fast is fast ? Under two seconds for recalling basic facts.
Maintain accuracy and increase speed.
Students: shift from explicit modelling to high-volume practice.
Teachers: Provide multi opportunities to respond. Use timed drills and repeated practice routines. The rate is important! XXX/time
Feedback here to about praising speed and efficiency. Set goals for improved performance - it’s about PBs.
Teachers sometimes make mistakes by putting students under timed pressure too early, only implementing random practice sessions, making everyone practice the same sets of facts, confusing strategy with fluency practice, making it high stakes.
Examples: maths facts, letter-sound correspondence, science symbols …
Morning Side Academy in the US.
3 Generalisation
Students are: accurate and fluent in responding, goal is to apply the skills across settings/formats/contexts, proves learning is robust and not just a trained trick, performance may drop when question format changes.
Common mistakes: pushing students to generalise before they have achieved fluency, over-prompting, allowing students to be prompt dependent.
4 Adaptation
Students: use this skills/knowledge in useful and new situations, modify strategies to solve new problems, self-correct, evaluate own work and pivot. Combine skills to solve complex tasks.
Teacher needs to: be environmental curator not explicit instructor. Introduce tasks with missing info or multi solution pathways. What do we already know? Change contexts deliberately. Feedback is on decision making.
Build the foundation to be able to set the problem free.
Break complex skills down into component parts.
Data beats vibes! Know which stage of learning they are at.
A cookbook gives you the recipe, but a chef knows how to respond in time!
Think of how we teach someone to ride a bike? Scaffolding, deliberate practice before we fade away. Can then generalise and ride all bikes.
Wonderings after keynote two:
Seating plans - make sure you can get easy and quick access to to those who are likely to need more checkins.
Slides - how to ensure that what you want them to do looks just like the slide?
Remember that we are not always in the instructional/explicit phase - time for guided and independent practice. Teacher facilitated during this time.
Think about how to get more time back ie roll in the morning or afternoon (get the kids straight into fluency practice). Seating plan - no need to go through the roll laboriously.
Parent conferences - basic facts / text ie books and movies with subtitles screen time / sleep / food
A cookbook gives you the recipe, but a chef knows how to respond in time! At the moment our teachers need to follow the cookbook carefully to be able to get to a point where you are at adaptation and can be more responsive and give student what we need.
Keynote 3: Rhys Coulson - Templestowe Heights School, Melbourne
Tzedakah - Hebrew word meaning philanthropy and charity.
The why? Simon Sinek’s work.
Bk - Legacy (James Kerr). Lessons in leadership. Set the theme for the year or a challenge or a narrative or a proverb.
What is our why? B E S T. Opportunities for all learners and staff to be BEST.
Principal’s leverage. What is taught, how it is taught, what gets prioritised, how teachers spend their time, what becomes normal (culture). We dictate the “weather” of the school.
Rosenshine’s Principles. Tom Sherrington.
Responsive Teaching Model. (Circular) Teach (I), Guided Practice (W), Independent Practice (Y), Retrieve and Revise. See circular graphic with intervention around the outside.
The learning wars - there is a time for all of these.
Explicit vs Inquiry
Critical thinking and creativity
Background knowledge is the new frontier for reading comprehension
Novice vs expert learners
Move away from emotional discourse about how children learn to a scientific way. Get ready for the challengers.
Be a Lead Learner. Believe in your product - resourcing, curriculum.
Don’t subcontract the knowledge. Be part of the knowledge yourself.
Have an understanding of Cognitive Load Theory. Long Term Memory. Working Memory (limited). Load principal - complexity and unnecessary/distracting info.
Learning is a change in long term memory.
Mastery. Attention and Focus. Retrieving previous learning. Setting up physical environment. Take away extraneous load.
Learning and the Teacher’s Role - learning a change in long term memory
Teacher’ role - to cause learning
Differentiation - by support, not curriculum. Adaptive teaching. Where are we trying to get our kids to - when they get there - other learning to go on with to depend understanding.
Learner Agency - achievement drives motivation, knowledgeable expert in the room. Everything is recursive (revisited) and chunked
Wellbeing - wellbeing 101 is being able to access the learning in a lesson (chunked, guided practice, getting T1 support right first) environment calm, consistent and predictable. Routines and norms for safety.
Inclusion - harmful for none, essential for some - ie seating plan
Build a behaviour curriculum first. Get the culture and climate of a school right. Routines - what are our top six in our school?
Protect PL time. Stopped competing initiatives. Reallocated resources.
Visiting other schools. Used data publicly. Held implementation lines.
Start small and go slow. Champion things in one class/space and then scale up. Don’t try to respond to everything.
Reduce teacher cognitive load. Prioritise time.
Go with evidence based programmes.
In any term only have a maximum of two initiatives to focus on (within the Literacy PD plan)
Implementation of UFli @ Tempestowe:
Explore 6 wks
Prepare 4 wks
Deliver 6 wks
Sustain 8 wks
Professional Learning Sessions (short review)
Rotate instruction / curriculum / behaviour (straight from strategic plan)
Time to prepare intellectually about the delivery rather than plan.
Environmental complexity affect behaviour and learning massively.
The quality of the environment affects the quality of the behaviour.
A cluttered lesson produces cluttered thinking.
Ted Lasso’s success pyramid:
Sweat the small stuff. Get that stuff right before the big stuff.
Have a play book. Codify it (icons)
Have a mantra. Be Better Every Single Time.
Attention is the currency of learning.
Confusion (teachers probably don’t understand the why)
Compliance (being told to, not because they believe in it)
Fragmentation (things introduced in isolation, without fidelity)
Wonderings from Keynote 3:
What is your leverage as a team leader?
How could we include those icons in our slides so children can clearly see what is required of them - ie turn and talk ….
Routines - what are our top six in our school? BEST lessons ?
How to get our tier one curriculum really SOLID?
Mel - Start small and go slow. Champion things in one class/space and then scale up.
SLT - Sometimes teachers just want to be told - they want to get on and do the job - no need to collaborate on everything. NM/NC - assessment/whole school curriculum plan
What would our playbook look like in our school? How can we work with staff to create the playbook and codify it.
Routines, systems, behaviour. How learning looks and sounds. Culture of Learning.
Be a marigold and hang out with other marigolds.
Support others to build each other up.
Don’t be a daffodil.
If you can’t do it, we will support. If you won’t, this is probably not the school for you.
Psychologists reports - are ours all saying the same stuff?
Normalise in all rooms.
Remove distractions - fidget toys. Include physical movements.
Pick one High Impact Teaching in our school and … ask the eight questions from Department Stress Test. (see my photos)
Leadership Matters Before Programmes
Strong Tier One is Foundation
Codification Creates Sustainability
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