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For a long time we have been negotiating the curriculum, now we are starting to negotiate the pedagogy. We are going beyond negotiating the what and the why of what happens in the classroom, to negotiating how it all happens. This paper explores what has been happening in one particular English class at Nanango State High School over Years 9 and 10, which represents a happy convergence of our middle school program and the Innovative Design for Enhancing Achievement in Schools ( IDEAS) process.
Nanango State High School embarked on a Middle School program in 1999. The innovation aimed at improving outcomes in the early high school years, with a focus on improved pedagogy, cross-subject planning and teacher teams, social support and intellectual rigour. Early in Year 8 the class worked together to establish mutually agreeable norms of behaviour for the classroom, which remain central to the way the class operates and contribute to the success of this project.
In 2001 we began our IDEAS journey: IDEAS (Innovative Designs for Enhancing Achievement in Schools) is a program of school rejuvenation developed by the University of Southern Queensland, and owned conjointly with Education Queensland (the State ' s Education Department). The new school vision, Creating a Future Together, was followed by the development of a School-Wide Pedagogy (SWP), which is an agreed statement of the principles and practice of good teaching and learning in the Nanango State High School community. This was adopted late in 2002.
In 2002 I taught 8D both Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE) and English in an integrated programme, with a small team of teachers. I continued to teach the class for English and SOSE in Year 9, while negotiating with them quite a lot of the content of lessons (the what of the curriculum). In Year 10, I taught the group for English only. The make-up of the group has changed, with some students leaving and welcoming new arrivals. However, approximately fifteen of the students have remained over the (nearly) three-year period.
10D is a mixed-ability class, with a number of very capable students and a couple who have ascertained learning difficulties. There are students who have provided challenges through their behaviour or their disengagement from schooling. At times, early in Year 9 (2003), teaching the class was a struggle. My thinking was that the School-Wide Pedagogy should not just be used to plan lessons but should also be made explicit to the students, by allowing them to work with me to develop classroom activities - the how things happen in the classroom.
In Term 2 2003 both and students and I identified some ' staleness ' creeping into our operation, manifesting in ' ratty ' behaviour, ' boring ' activities, and general disinterest. Together, we decided we could make life in 9D better.
I began by running a workshop with the students that aimed to develop a group consensus of what good teaching and learning entails (the SWP workshop). This involved the students identifying moments when they really felt they had learned something and enjoyed doing so - moments or lessons when the classroom really came alive for them. From these individual experiences, the students extracted the elements that became the basis for our classroom pedagogy.
1. Common Elements of Good Learning for 9D:
A small group of the students volunteered to develop a statement that encapsulated these ideas. Interestingly, the language of the statement is all their own. The class agreed that this summed up their view of good teaching and learning.
2: Good Teaching and Learning for 9D
' Good teaching and learning involves a variety of new and exciting ideas for classroom activities. Where possible, activities should be hands-on, creative and set in different environments. At the beginning of a unit, students and teachers should set goals to be accomplished by the end of that unit. Where possible, students should be given choices because everyone has different interests and learning abilities. Students need to be respected and treated as equals. ' (by 9D, Nanango SHS)
The development of this statement was the first critical step in our journey as, for the first time, thirteen-year-old students were thinking about what teaching and learning is all about.
Critical to the whole process is the use of group discussion, followed by whole-class discussion to reach consensus. The small group discussion gives the less confident students the opportunity to express their ideas in a less threatening way, and the whole-class discussions allow for the development of consensus. This can often take quite some time but it is always worth it, and signals to the students that their ideas are valued and will be acted on.
Further group and whole class discussion led to a statement of student responsibilities: if the ideas behind the classroom pedagogy were going to work in practice, the students had to acknowledge their own responsibilities. It has proved critical over the two years of this project to return to this document to remind students of their responsibilities and to update it on one occasion.
3: Student Responsibilities for 9D
In order for good teaching and learning students must:
We then identified a number of key words from the classroom pedagogy that needed further definition. The students (in groups) brainstormed examples of these that were then collated by the core group of students. These four documents then formed the basis for the planning of work in English for Semester 2, and are referred to regularly and consistently. Key words included the following.
These choices are not particularly radical and sometimes do not fit under the heading we would expect, but this is how this particular group of (mostly) thirteen-year-olds saw it at the time. Throughout the project, their choices of topics to study have not been particularly radical, either. It is the process that is important.
Initial Planning: At the beginning of Semester 2, the Year 9 students and I worked together to plan the what of the semester ' s work - students individually, and then in groups, wrote down what they would like to do or study for the semester. These were collated. The most popular choices were a bit of a surprise (though perhaps not - they were drawing on their experiences of nine years of English classrooms and probably confined their thinking to what they had done before). The next step was to work with interested students (usually half a dozen) to discuss how we would go about making this happen in the classroom. These students - all volunteers - decided to meet with me at lunch every two or three weeks to make suggestions about what types of classroom activities they would enjoy, and which would enhance their learning.
This became the method we employed in all subsequent negotiation - first getting a class consensus and then meeting with smaller volunteer groups in lunch hours to plan in more detail, before taking these suggestions back to the whole class for ratification. The numbers in these volunteer groups have varied but now we usually get seven or eight students to each meeting - one-third of the class. Interestingly, the students who come to these meetings tend to be the most able students and those who find school the most challenging. The students ' in the middle ' are less represented.
In those initial meetings, we decided that the semester ' s work would be based around fantasy fiction. The first part of the unit would be a film unit based around fantasy films, and we began by developing goals for the unit and suggestions for films to watch. The Fellowship of the Ring was the unarguable first choice by all the students on the planning committee.
This was the second truly pivotal moment in the evolution of the process and of the students ' growing understanding of teaching and learning. For the first time, they were confronted with the question: ' Why do you want to do this? ' The students unanimously answered, ' Because it will be fun! ' They then needed to look beyond the idea of fun to articulate the educational outcomes of watching this film. Some real growth in understanding and the generation of new knowledge occurred here - and the question has never had to be asked again.
The students also suggested activities like role-playing a new ending to the film, questions for class discussions, ideas for descriptive writing based on the film, making models or maps, and developing parallel stories to the film.
THE UNIT. After watching the film and reading some fantasy short stories, and determining the common elements of fantasy tales, the next step for students was to write their own fantasy short stories. Planning for this began with students drawing up character sheets, plot outlines, looking on websites to find hobbit and elf names, exploring Tolkein websites and drawing maps of their fantasy world.
At that stage, a change of direction occurred. In a planning meeting, one of the students suggested creating their fantasy worlds as a website, rather than on paper. This generated great enthusiasm and made the process of planning their short stories a much more interesting and attractive proposition than it had been. In general, Year 9s do not like to plan their stories! This took more time than expected - first, they had to plan their websites! However, the results in terms of engagement in learning, learning outcomes and enjoyment on the part of the students, made the divergence well worth it.
The fantasy websites were presented to the students ' parents at a morning tea, where students took their parents through their websites. Parents also looked at the work of other students, asked questions and had a thoroughly enjoyable hour with their children. The imagination, creativity and volume of the writing produced were remarkable. The fantasy stories produced were beyond my expectations, both in their complexity and their obvious understanding of the fantasy genre. Students who previously had resisted putting pen to paper were happily developing intriguing and well-plotted stories that were a pleasure to read.
This indicates another of the strengths of the process - and one of the challenges. It is very helpful if the program is flexible enough to incorporate these serendipitous moments that come from the lateral thinking of individual students, but this can cause chaos with assessment timetables and deadlines. Nevertheless, some of the most successful learning experiences over the last eighteen months have come from these flashes of creativity from students and the program would be all the poorer for not incorporating them.
WHAT ' S HAPPENING IN 2004: The classroom pedagogy has continued to be the basis for planning our learning in what is now the Year 10D classroom. Increased student involvement in the lunch time planning sessions, and even greater enthusiasm for the process, have developed two highly successful units of work, with a high level of student engagement in their own learning. The synopsis of one of these units follows.
PLANNING. After negotiation, the students opted for a unit based on mystery and crime, which they titled ' Clueless ' . One of the lessons of the programme has been the importance of letting the class choose the title for the units, as a symbol of their ownership of the process.
In groups, we brainstormed possible concepts the students wanted to study, classroom activities they wanted to learn from, and the pedagogical principles behind the planning. The lists they produced follow.
Persuasive speechesVocabularyShakespearePoetryBook reviewsMovie reviewsBetter writingDramaNovelsWriting storiesWrite playsDebatingNon-fictionCartoons
Multiple IntelligencesLessons outsideExcursionsOralsChoiceCross-curricularUse computersHands-onRewardsVisual activitiesIntra-personalIndependent workVarietyDifferent levelsLinks with previous workOwnershipFunChallengesRelevance
Again, elements may not fit into the categories as we would see it, and some concepts were a bit vague, but they show that the students have learned a great deal about teaching and learning in the time we have been working on negotiating the curriculum and pedagogy. Certainly, at least some students were very aware of the importance of concepts such as relevance, the need for work to be targeted at different levels of ability and the importance of variety and fun. These lists provided the stimulus for whole-class discussion and the subsequent plan for the unit.
THE AIM (student devised). ' To become more critical writers, readers, speakers and viewers, through developing an understanding of the mystery genre, looking at how to create suspense and mystery in writing and TV/film ' .
THE UNIT. The unit developed around mystery stories and novels, TV drama and a crime scene activity that became the culminating activity for the semester. This was the brainchild of the students and involved heterogenous groups of five students developing a murder scene, photographing it, drawing a plan of the murder scene, writing a brief forensic report and writing witness statements and other documents (including newspaper articles).
The photographs and documents were then posted on a forum on The Learning Place (an Education Queensland website), where other classes could access them. Each group had to jointly solve another crime by reading the documents and examining the other evidence, as well as interviewing witnesses and suspects. Finally, they made an arrest and individually wrote a report outlining their investigations and the reasons for their decision.
Apart from the writing skills developed in different genres, the interview skills and the IT skills that the students acquired, probably the greatest learning experience was the trials and tribulations of taking on such a major task in groups. This was a very important outcome and one commented on frequently by students in the evaluation of the unit - both the organisation needed, and the tolerance that had to be developed, figured prominently.
This is very much a work in progress, and I still don ' t know where it will lead. I do know that these students are excited about the prospect of learning and feel that are having real choices, and a real say, in what they do in their learning. Some previously disengaged students are enthusiastically making suggestions for activities, and satisfaction and confidence are high.
An interesting challenge will be to work the process with a new group of Year 8or 9 students next year. There has also been some interesting flow on to other classes and teachers at the school that we ' d like to further develop.
The last eighteen months have reinforced my belief that giving students choice is vital for their engagement with learning. There has been a marked improvement in classroom behaviour - this was obvious very early in the project - and a much greater level of engagement with learning by the students. Students are keen to come to English and get on with the work they have planned.
This greater engagement can be seen with all students. The less able students are finding success and enjoying what they do in the classroom, and therefore their attitude to their work has changed. I have also seen improved academic results from almost all students. The more able students are challenging themselves to do better, and taking on complex tasks and projects that require high levels thinking skills and expanding their literacy and ICT skills.
So what have we learned from the project about how students learn? To begin with, that:
This understanding was confirmed in late 2003 by interviews with the students by Education Queensland and University of Southern Queensland researchers, who found that the key elements for the success of the project (in the eyes of the students at least) were:
(from interviews with students by USQ & EQ researchers, Oct. 2003)
Yes, it does take time, but the rewards justify the effort! The enhancement of team building, class culture, thinking skills, problem solving, communication skills and social learning, on top of the academic outcomes, are testimony enough.
Mr Ian Fraser is Head of Department, English and Drama at Nanango State High School, in Queensland, Australia. He has taught at several other locations throughout Queensland, including Charleville, Toowoomba and Warwick, and has also participated in a teaching exchange to Cornwall, in the United Kingdom. As well as his teaching duties in English and SOSE, he is the director of the school ' s annual musical production. He has been a school facilitator for the IDEAS (Innovative Design for Enhancing Achievement in Schools) process at Nanango SHS, where the emphasis has been heavily on student input. He has a BA (Hons) and Diploma of Education from the University of Queensland.
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