S4 E8 - Instructional Spring Cleaning - Student News

We need automaticity and certainty in our lives , but there are times when it's just a good idea to take stock and check in about whether our old practices are still serving us . We're going to have a spring clean , if you will . In this episode , I'll be sharing a practice that I think it could be time to reconsider .

I want to send a big shout out to a terrific leader , ou , for the conversation that led to this particular episode .

Now , I'm not focusing on this practice in the episode because I think that it should be forever banished , or I want to criticise past practice, I've used this practice myself, but rather I'd like to encourage you to consider whether it is giving you maximum impact in your classroom . So , without further ado , grab your feather duster and let's dive in .

In this episode , I'd like us to consider news . News is that practice that's been a staple of many an early years classroom for a very long time . Can I tell you something ? I hate news . I hate it as a teacher and I hate it as a parent .

As a working parent , having to rush around helping my child find the perfect thing at 9pm because they have to have something to present is really painful . And , let's face it , the standard version of views often becomes a competition about who has the nicest and newest stuff . And then there's the educational value of this practice to be considered .

Standard weekly news time did help students practice sitting still, looking in the direction of the speaker and at least pretending to listen . It did give children the opportunity to practice oral language and communicating about everyday topics . It also encouraged children to ask questions , a practice that has been shown to positively impact reading comprehension .

But tell me if these three questions are familiar to you . Do you like it ? Where did you get it ? Where do you keep it ? These are the three questions that are asked the most often during news time . Let's think about this practice of news objectively and without getting caught up in the trap of absolutes . They rarely help us in our classrooms .

Here's my take on news . The intention of news was to have children learn to listen , engage and express themselves . My issue with it from an instructional perspective is that it may have provided the chance for some children to practice these things , but not all . It provided the opportunity to engage but didn't address actual instruction in speaking and listening .

It also didn't connect with the learning that was taking place in the classroom . In short , it was very often a wasted opportunity . From a social perspective , it just didn't work for busy families , and I'm sure that I'm not the only parent who has found the need to find things for their children to present on arduous . It also exacerbated social inequalities .

If you were the child with all of the latest stuff , you felt good about news . If you were the child whose family was struggling to put food on the table or even just an average home where you didn't get new toys every single week , news could be a source of shame and stress .

So how can we rethink news through the lens of structured literacy and social and academic inclusion ? We could say that the learning intention of this practice was to learn to share my own experiences , give a presentation to my peers , listen to the ideas of others and respond by asking questions . Okay , well , that's fine . How else could we achieve this ?

Here are some suggestions . Number one make sure we begin with an experience that every child can engage with .

This could involve a book the whole class has read a few times , artifacts from a recent excursion , photos from a school event , a photo from a key moment in a class lesson , such as art or science , or an object from the classroom that children interact with . This could even be a toy .

The second point is our first learning intention was about learning to share my own experiences . Every one of our text-based units has a step for making connections with our own experiences . And all of the options for the stimulus I just shared, well , every one of them allows every child to have something to talk about that they can actually connect with .

The sharing part can be achieved in so many ways , and partner talk can be one of them . Our second learning intention was about listening . Talking with a partner requires children to listen , if we include a mechanism of accountability in the task . In the old news days , a child could sit there every single day with their eyes glazed over .

They might have been looking in the direction of the speaker , but were they really listening ? Well , who knows ? Fourth in this is the idea of responding with a question ties in very nicely with the idea of the mechanism of accountability . But we can't forget about the need to instruct in all of this . It's not enough to say now ask your partner a question .

We need to scaffold the attending , listening and thinking processes so that we're helping students learn new skills , not just while away minutes passively . To scaffold this learning you could do the following . Number one have students practice thinking about how something they heard makes them feel or what it makes them think of .

If students can write , let them write a brief note on a board . Then have them identify what they heard makes them want to know . So they're going to be curious . So they can ask the question what am I curious about ? And give them the sentence starters to scaffold this in a discussion .

Examples could include: listening to what you said, I felt; as I listened , I was reminded of; I am curious about; I'm wondering why; could you tell me more about how ?

Now , my observation of these question starters is that , while we'll be introducing them in the general context of oral language learning , in fact these are all part of restorative discussions that we can help students have with each other . Perhaps if we taught our children to engage in dialogue , our future world might be kinder and a better place to be .

But don't just hand these prompts to kids and expect them to use them . Take a gradual release approach to the learning . You could start by sharing the question prompts with the students , and this can work even for the littlies . You'll just make sure that the language is friendly for their age . You could watch a short clip together .

You then model reflecting on the clip and asking a question . You can also support question generation with a questioning matrix in older grades . Then model sharing an experience of your own and have the students as a group use the prompts to think about and respond to you .

You can make the whole thing even more robust by including this in a content area lesson like HASS , English , Science or Health . Not only will you help students have better discussions , but you'll improve their comprehension of the subject area content knowledge . How do we help students share high quality recounts of their experiences across the grades ?

Well , that's where things like syntax , sentence combining and summarising come in . Improving oral language is not about assigning special oral time in the day . It's about making every lesson a language lesson . Okay , so what happens after you've done the gradual release introduction a couple of times ?

You could just have students talk with a partner , but it's good to mix it up and keep things fresh . A technique that I've used in the past in all grades is to divide the class into two groups . One forms an inner circle facing outwards . The other forms an outer circle facing in . In this way , everyone has a partner to talk to .

If you have an odd number of students , one of these pairs will be a group of three . The way this works is that you allocate a certain number of minutes for partner one to talk , then have partner two respond .

At the end of the time , have the outer circle move around so that they now have a new partner , set the timer again and have partner two share and partner one respond . Continue in this way until each person has spoken and responded at least twice . The beauty of this arrangement is that everyone is involved the whole time .

Nobody's sitting and staring into space passively . Time on task is maximised , which is one of our big goals . The other advantage is that students have the opportunity to repeat what they've said , with the chance to improve it after the responses they've had from their partner . The learning intention not yet addressed is presenting to a group . Well , that's easy .

After the circle discussion , have two or three students repeat their sharing to the whole group , who will then have the chance to think and respond as time allows . This routine can be adapted to the age of the students , the time you have available and the learning context in which it's occurring .

I think that circle talk based on a learning outcome has so many benefits that traditional news just doesn't . It doesn't bother parents . It's focused on learning . It's scaffolded so that every child succeeds . It's built around an expectation of active listening and response .

It improves oral language skills while being able to improve comprehension and retention of content learning . It ensures full participation , maximising time on- task for all students . It can be a wonderful oral rehearsal for recount writing and personal response tasks in English .

It's extremely low prep for the teacher and , finally , it can be used across the school in every subject area , because if we're going to get the ideation part of writing to be strong , every lesson must be a language lesson . News may have had great intentions , but it often fell short of getting all the children

involved in improving oral language . To help you implement this structure into your classroom , I have produced a quick guide for you . You can grab that by going to the show notes at jocelynseamereducation . com for this episode . You'll be able to download the guide from there . I hope that you have found this discussion of practices that could use an update useful .

If you have a go at any of the ideas shared in this podcast , please get in touch and tell me how it goes . In coming episodes I'm going to explore some other common classroom practices and share some ideas on how we can have a little spring clean . Sometimes we don't have to redo everything .

It may just need a little tweak to increase the effectiveness of our instruction substantially . Until next time , bye .