Monitoring

Planning how to monitor, record and refine my intervention. 

• What is the intended change for a learner?  

That my learner is focussed and participates willingly.

• How are they experiencing the intervention?
  Student Voice: Using the Zones of Regulation and AAC to check which emotional zone they are in before, during and after the task to ascertain their mood and
  
  

• How will they engage differently? How will you know?
  Present in the learning activity. Not escaping or running away. Joining in with others in the learning space.
  
  

• How will you know whether the intended ‘treatment’ was the same as the actual treatment?
  My learner will be learning literacy concepts i.e. poetry and keywords through dance movements

• How will their outcomes begin to shift? How will you know? Engagement and participation in activities for a longer duration of time and key concepts being grasped.

Setting Formal Checkpoints

“Formal checkpoints allow you to check systematically how learners are experiencing the intervention and whether it is beginning to have the impact on learner outcomes”

How do I plan to monitor the effectiveness of the intervention? It will be through student voice and looking at how they express themselves before, during and after our scheduled learning sessions (Literacy integrated with Dance sessions).

1. Before Literacy/dance session: using their communication system to signal “yes or no” for buy-in and participation.
   If student indicates “Yes” = it expresses they will join the session.
   If student indicates “No” = it expresses they are not interested in session.
   Monitoring: Checking for frequency of their answer between "Yes" vs "No"
   
   

2. During the Literacy/dance session: using their communication system to check for continuation of participation.
   If student indicates “More” = it expresses they want to continue with the session.
   If student indicates “Finish” = it expresses they are not interested in the session any longer.
   Monitoring: Check for the duration of time the student is actively engaged.

3. After the Literacy/dance session: using their communication system to check for enjoyment and emotion after the session is finished. If student indicates “Happy” = it expresses they enjoyed the session. If student indicates “Sad/Angry” = it expresses they did not enjoy the session. Monitoring: Checking for frequency of their answer between Happy vs [negative emotion]

Formulating an Hypothesis (Hunch)

A whirlwind of thoughts and wonderings:

• If I gain my students' interest areas first, then I can plan my term topics to get them engaged.
• If I integrate curriculum areas that are more connected with my students’ interests than they are more likely to engage in learning.
• If I introduce elements of music, dance, drama and movement into my literacy lessons, I will be able to entice my learners attention.
• If I merge Literacy with different components from the Arts and Science curriculum areas it will make the activities more enticing for my students.
• I will need to find and explicitly inject activities that will capture and hold their attention to support their ability to stay focused.
  
• Potentially it’s around needing to plan more cleverly. Get to now what inspires them and link/connect what I have to teach them within those curriculum areas.

Design for learning from the students interest areas

Understanding the learners interests before planning their needs. Currently, I have lots of student challenges around engaging and learning.

Focusing on the process not the product

Students learn by doing, being engaged, making mistakes, thinking, problem solving and having the space and support to take risks. Therefore, during learning activities staff support students to focus on what they are doing in the moment, not what the end result looks like.

Creating irresistable invitations to learn

Students only learn when they are engaged. In order to engage our students, we need to gain and hold their attention. We do this by making ourselves irresistible, presenting activities that are just too amazing to ignore. Once we have student’s attention we can add in the learning.

The hunch to pursue: “If I integrate different components from The Arts and Science curriculum areas to supplement teaching keywords and concepts for Literacy content, it will make the activities much more enticing for my students, who will then be more interested to engage.”

Team Planning with an Integrated Approach

In one of my previous blogs, I had contemplated potential ways forward for teachers at Sommerville by suggesting deliberate use of our termly "Team Release" days to plan collaboratively within our pathway team. 

This was a successful session alongside my colleagues where we approached our Term Topic: Wind with an interdisciplinary lens. We started off the session by first asking ourselves the big question "What key concepts do we want our students to know and do across the main curriculum areas for Numeracy, Literacy and Science?" By identifying how the element 'Wind' would align within each discipline, had us looking at targeted areas that we can interconnect:

- Literacy: Poetry, Drama and Dance - Using poetry features alongside body/gesture to mimic wind conditions, patterns and movement. 

- Science: Wind related experiments using observation and hypothesizing.

- Technology: Technological Product - Understand that technological products are made from materials that have performance properties.

- Maths Strand: Geometry - exploring 2D and 3D shapes (also connected to Visual Arts in creating artwork)

- Visual Arts: Represent the movement of wind in an artwork.

Team planning in motion:

Connecting multiple subject areas

Planning with an integrated approach is explicitly discussed in the article Integrated Curriculum: Increasing relevance while maintaining accountability by Dr. Susan M. Drake & Joanne Reid - Brock University, Ontario (2010) who state that:

"Integrated curriculum teaches core concepts and skills by connecting multiple subject areas to a unifying theme or issue". 

(S. M. Drake & J. R. Brock 2010)

They expand on this by emphasising that "planning for an integrated approach is a collaborative venture" and highlight explicit steps in designing an integrated curriculum within their Ontario case study.

1. Determine what learning is most important by scanning the relevant curriculum areas for recurring ideas. Vertically scan subject areas’ expectations, two grades below and one above the target grade. Horizontally scan expectations across subjects of the target grade. The similarities represent what is most important for students to know (core concepts or Big Ideas such as systems and structures, sustainability and interdependence), do (21st century skills such as research and critical thinking) and be (ethical issues in the context of self and community). Cluster expectations into meaningful chunks that describe the conceptual content (Know), skills (Do) and attitudes/beliefs (Be), the KDB.

2. Choose an appropriate issue or theme to study.

3. Brainstorm possible activities based on expectations. Create a concept web as an organizing graphic.

4. Finalize the KDB to act as an umbrella for the unit.

5. Create a rich assessment task for a culminating activity. Align this task with the KDB and curriculum expectations. A challenging but relevant assessment task – one that involves more than one subject and allows students to demonstrate that they have met expectations and achieved the KDB – is key to creating a meaningful curriculum.

6. Create two to three Big Questions. Organize daily instruction around them.

The article further indicated that:

● Core cross-disciplinary concepts and higher-order skills are taught by connecting multiple subjects to a unifying theme or issue.

● Students in integrated programs demonstrate academic performance equal to, or better than, students in discipline-based programs.

● Benefits include greater student engagement, increased teacher collaboration and professional growth and more opportunities to differentiate learning, all especially helpful for at-risk students.

● Creating integrated curriculum is not without challenges, often requiring a fundamental change in practice and beliefs.

Intervention Implementation

 > > Hunch:  “If I merge different components from The Arts and Science curriculum to supplement teaching Literacy/Numeracy concepts, it will make the activities much more enticing for my students, who will then be more interested to engage.” < <

Identified target learners (who demonstrate low levels of engagement):

• Student R

• Student Q

• Student M1

• Student M2

Term 2 Implementation:
I deliberately planned to deliver Literacy with Drama and Science with Visual Arts to pique the interest of of my low engagement students.

Intervention #1: Integration of Science and Visual Arts
By teaching Science (Topic: Fire) alongside Visual Arts to create artwork projects which explicitly teach the language of melting, boiling, heating, burning while using them as techniques to create a fire effect.

Intervention #2: Integration of Drama with Script Writing (Literacy)

The idea was to weave Drama and Literacy: Script Writing together to explore the story “Maui and the Goddess of Fire”. The focus was to bring this Maori myth/legend alive through drama features while building comprehension of the text (setting, character descriptions and emotive language). 

DRAMA:

• Expressions: To use facial expressions to demonstrate emotions; transition from one expression to another. 

• Body/Gesture: To use different bodily movements
  i.e. different heights and shapes; control my movements while travelling through the acting space.

• Tone/Voice: To use voice techniques in different ways to convey various expressions

SCRIPT WRITING:

• To use a range of descriptive vocabulary (wow/emotive/senses) to describe the setting and characters through exploration of the 5 senses: Smell, Touch, Taste, Sight, Sound

• To know features of a script (eg name; speech; narrator, action) and differentiate between narrator and characters.