Lia is a beginning teacher with a Year 5 and 6 class in a low-decile multi-cultural school. She uses the Assessment Resource Banks extensively in her instructional reading programme, particularly with her top two groups. Lia has many students in her class who are reading at or above their chronological age. Lia felt these students needed to be challenged in their thinking, rather than just answering literal questions about what they had read. “They needed more inference stuff so they could be bringing in their experience and their knowledge.” They needed probing questions that would encourage them to think about why they made the inferences they did when reading, and to have opportunities to talk and write about their thinking.

When planning her reading programme, Lia searches the ARBs using the key words “inference” (an identified need) and “school journal ” (as this is a resource readily available in the school). “I then check out whether the resources are appropriate. By that I mean for the age level of my kids and whether it’s what I’m looking for in inference.” Lia considers the questions are more important than the text itself and she will often select relatively easy texts if the questions encourage high level processing.

Lia introduces the text to the reading group and has a general discussion about it with them, asking questions to focus students and to clarify potential difficulties. Students then read the text on their own and answer the questions from the ARB that has been selected. Initially Lia was taking the students’ responses home to mark but found that they did not respond to her feedback, continuing to make similar mistakes. She now calls the group back down to the mat after they have finished their work. They re-cap the learning intention of the session, reflect on their learning and “mark” the work together. Lia can very easily identify any aspects the group is struggling with and these become the next learning steps, informing Lia’s planning. In this way she is using the ARBs both as a teaching resource and for formative assessment.

As a beginning teacher, Lia says by using ARBs in her reading programme she is able to save time both in planning and finding appropriate resources and can feel confident that the students are being asked searching questions about their reading.

Caro and her middle school students use ARBs to address particular reading comprehension needs. Knowing that her students are good decoders, but need support with their reading strategies, she uses the ARB English free-text search to find assessments that relate to specific teaching and learning points. She then selects particular ARBs that she thinks will appeal to students' interests, build on their prior knowledge, and are at a level to either support, extend, or challenge her students.

Caro explains how she uses ARBs with her reading groups:

'Using an ARB means that students can individually interact with the text, because they have the hard copy, and we can manipulate it. One of the ways we do this is by reading the questions first, before even looking at the text, and use highlighters to identify keywords in the questions. We might just read one question first, underlining keywords, and then read only a part of the text, underlining the bits that relate to the keywords. I have found this process helpful for my students to be able to summarise text, as well as comprehend it. Their responses indicate which individuals need extra support, so this feeds back into my teaching, and their learning. My kids know their next learning steps as their "learning points". They know what their learning points are for reading, as they do for all other areas, be it curriculum or social behaviour or whatever. So sometimes, knowing what their learning point is, a student may use an ARB independently. Again, the alignment between their learning point, the task purpose, and their responses, indicates whether they have achieved what they set out to achieve.'

The senior syndicate had decided to study mammals. The teachers were keen to base the unit of work on the BSC book, Mammals. They also wanted to explore what other resources were readily available to support their teaching. The teachers were familiar with using ARBs in their English programme but had not used them in science.

The teachers went into the science resource bank. They clicked on BSC Links to ARBS. They used the shortcuts menu to access the ARBs that link to the Mammals booklet.

For this topic there were a lot of ARBs. Teachers were able to use them flexibly, for a range of purposes.

LW0056, a Level 2 resource, lent itself to both introducing the topic and providing diagnostic assessment information. Students are each given a card with an animal on it. They find which other students have cards of animals belonging to the same group as theirs. They then work together to identify the features that characterise their group of animals. The co-operative nature of this activity makes it accessible to students with varying degrees of background knowledge. It also generates discussion and is likely to uncover existing misconceptions.

LW0073, LW0069, LW0068, LW0045, LW0020 provide pictures to use for sorting activities and post box activities.

LW0057 is an animation. Students work on-line putting animals into their correct groups. Staff felt this interactive resource would provide additional support for students with special needs.

LW0011 looks at the platypus and which of its characteristics are typical and atypical of mammals. This could be useful as an extension activity and a springboard for individual research.

LW0040 involves students reading Venn diagrams. It could provide useful support in the development of skills in processing and interpreting information. LW0034 provides students with practice in these skills as they read a key to classify different sorts of whales.

LW0004 looks at the differences between fish and sea mammals. It asks students to identify some of the characteristics of mammals. It could be a useful resource for summative assessment at the end of the unit.

This planning session reinforced the idea that assessment is an integral part of teaching and learning, rather than a “tack on” at the end.

Adapting a year 4 science plan to cater for students who are new learners of English

A year 4 class was studying the local river in science. The class teacher planned this learning outcome for the class:

• The children will understand how humans influence our natural environment.

In this particular class there were three students with limited English language. The teacher was concerned about how she could make this learning outcome relevant to these students.

Given the stated learning outcome, the focus of this unit of work for the whole class needed to be on the relationships between things within an environment, rather than on things in isolation. Any such study for young children should start with relationships that can be directly observed.

For students who are new learners of English it is especially important to feed in the vocabulary that allows children to think about the relationships, rather than just learning nouns. The vocabulary about relationships is important because students need it in all sorts of contexts. The nouns are likely to be specific to the subject being studied – in this case, the river. This focus on relationships though also allows the teacher to reinforce this vocabulary in every curriculum area and incidentally in class throughout the unit. This gives students more opportunities to use their new vocabulary.

What sort of vocabulary is it important to develop?

Sequencing events is an example of showing relationships at a very early stage. (First, then, next, after, last).

The next stage could look at cause and effect relationships. At a very simple level this would involve using the word “because”.

Learning outcomes for this unit, for students with limited English, then could be:

• The children will use simple vocabulary relating to sequencing events.
• The children will use simple vocabulary relating to cause and effect.

For these learning outcomes to be achieved it is important that these students have opportunities to talk, read and write using the target vocabulary. The objects in the relationships could be very familiar things. Sequencing pictures and then talking about them would be helpful. At a very early stage students might sequence just 2 pictures and say, “this is first, this is next”. Repetition is important.

By rewording the class’s learning outcome with a focus on the vocabulary of relationships these children can be involved meaningfully in the class programme and be working on their specific needs with little additional work for the classroom teacher.

One secondary teacher's nature of science (NOS) experiences

The following comment was written by Rose Gerven, a science and chemistry teacher at Onslow College in Wellington. We’ve included it here because we are in the process of shaping new ARB items that include NOS components. These will be hyper-linked to the ScienceIS website that Rose talks about. You can access it directly through the front page of the science community on TKI (http://www.tki.org.nz/r/science/science_is/).

Rose’s NOS comments

I was lucky enough to be offered the opportunity to work with the contract team developing NOS statements and activities, for the TKI website called Science IS. It was a huge change from classroom teaching – 16 hours to thrash out small details of what scientists do, and how that differs from classroom science. Those 16 hours were built on the shoulders of others on a 7 year journey. This stuff has been processed well.

As a result, 19 short statements (plus supporting information) were developed to support teachers – this NOS stuff is going to become a much bigger part of our teaching.

I found the process amazing. What amazed me more was how easy it was to integrate this stuff into ordinary teaching.

Day 1 with Year 13 science, doing a quick (?) summary of the world, the Universe and everything. The student question is "Have we been there?" (galaxies). The answer is no. "How do we know that scientists are right if they can’t see it?" What a gift!

My response went something along the lines of "Scientists turn their questions into science ideas that can be investigated", "Scientists design investigations to test their predictions", When an explanation correctly predicts an event, confidence in the explanation as science knowledge is increased", "Scientific explanations must withstand peer review before being accepted as science knowledge", "Over time, the types of science knowledge that are valued change" and so on.

Day 34, Year 10 Science, last spell on a hot day. Everyone is tired and hanging out for Easter – or the weekend – or even the end of the day. A video! Just what we need to help us through. The topic is "Forces and Motion", the video is …."If Earth Had No Moon". The link is tenuous but we had talked about gravitational forces last week. The video is full of changed theories of how the moon formed. A student says at the end "Why did we watch that – the scientists keep changing their minds. They don’t know the answers".

Another gift! My response included "All science knowledge is, in principle, subject to change", New scientific ideas often meet opposition form other individuals and groups", There may be more than one explanation for the results of an investigation", "Scientists think critically about the results of their investigations"… Before long the rest of the class were adding in reasons why ideas change.

The ideas and words are there. The statements don’t need to be quoted as written (and they weren’t in the examples above), but they form a framework that helps you leap from one idea to another. And as for all the differing explanations? – well that is the nature of science.

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