Writing Professional Development

Over the last year, our school has been receiving professional development around writing from Team Solutions. Our facilitator Anna meets with us twice a term and works with us to improve our writing program and teaching. 

My Teaching as inquiry this term has been around 'allowing for targeted independent learning that will result in my student's academic learning to increase”. I have focused on what my students are doing away from workshops during their independent writing time (Last years results showed that my targeted workshops had shown an increase in student achievement - with a large increase of students meeting the National Standard compared to that of the year prior- so I wanted, to start a new focus).

Last year I saw improvement in my writing program through the following;

• Gaining student engagement through; Langauge experiences,  Curriculum Integration and students ideas.
• Having a close link between Reading and Writing - Allowing both curriculum areas to drive each other.
• Modeling Books (Have learning intentions, success criteria that have been coconstructed, and an annotated example)
• Following a lesson plan of - I do, we do, you do.
• Focusing on specific learning needs (Gap analysis)
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I have been working on Questioning (to extend thinking away from teacher lessons), using an Annotated modeling book that has the appropriate learning intentions, success criteria, and annotated example, buddy checking and using Individual goals to consolidating learning.

After my PAC conversation with Anna, I saw that I need more of a focus and to tighten up my Modelling Books and the buddy check system. I am wanting to display my learning intention on the board and have students names underneath them so students know what their focus is for the week. I am going to strengthen my buddy feedback system by teaching 4 strong writers how to effectively give feedback to their pairs- This will allow me to activate pairs as learning resources. They will then slowly model to other students how to give that effective feedback. I will be videoing the students doing this to ensure that it is at a high standard and that it is actually effective, the videos will allow me to gather more feedback and areas I may need to focus on around the buddy check system. I will revisit this reflection next term to check in on my progress.