Focus Area 2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area

Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the concepts, substance and structure of the content and teaching strategies of the teaching area.

Focus Area 2.2 Content selection and organisation

Organise content into an effective learning and teaching sequence.

Focus Area 2.3 Curriculum, assessment and reporting

Use curriculum, assessment and reporting knowledge to design learning sequences and lesson plans.

On my second professional experience placement I taught Year 9 English at an Independent co-educational secondary school in Toowoomba. The student cohort was relatively homogenous in terms of social, cultural, and linguistic background, however there were several low literacy students in the class. I planned and delivered a sequence of lessons that explicitly taught essay writing, requiring me to demonstrate substantial content knowledge (2.1) and how to organise and sequence the learning effectively (2.2). This lesson sequence was backward planned to prepare students for their summative task – an analytical essay on the novel, The Outsiders to be completed as an in-class exam. (2.3)

I designed a highly scaffolded lesson sequence of explicit teaching that reinforced the PEE (Point, Evidence, Explanation) essay framework preferred by the school’s English department (2.1). Scaffolding and explicit teaching are both high impact teaching strategies that structure and link content through transparent learning intentions and clear instructions (Hattie, 2019), and are evidence based strategies for effective teaching of writing (Stein et al., 1994). As a previewing strategy, I commenced the first essay writing lesson with a clear introduction of the purpose, relevance, and structure of essays (2.1) (Artefact 2.1). Previewing of the content is useful when students do not have prior knowledge of content, prompting students to think about the elements of essay writing before learning the skill – a critical-input experience (Marzano & For, 2007).

My USQ supervisor was observing this lesson and provided positive feedback to the Secondary Specialisation Convenor regarding my confident and competent lesson delivery, which was relayed to me via email (2.1, 2.2) (Artefact 2.2).

My lessons were based on engaging Powerpoint resources that built on previous lessons and integrated new content and multimedia to provide students with opportunities for revision and multiple exposures to the content (2.2) (Hattie, 2019) (Artefact 2.3). Over the course of four lessons, I progressively demonstrated a worked example of essay structure using a familiar topic to students – pizza (2.1) (Artefact 2.4). This graphic organiser was used to address each component of essay writing in small chunks (introduction, plot summary, analytical paragraphs, conclusion) using worked examples, giving students the opportunity to actively process the content through critical input experiences (Marzano & For, 2007).  

I used a range of engaging small-group activities throughout the lesson sequence to meet the needs of adolescent learners, who prefer peer interaction and active learning experiences (Caskey & Anfara, 2014). One of these was a paragraph puzzle exercise where pairs of students had to arrange sentences in PEE order to re-construct pre-written paragraphs (Artefact 2.5). This activity also gave me the opportunity for formative assessment for differentiation. I could identify students who understood analytical paragraphs, direct them to start drafting their own paragraphs, whilst I could spend more time working with those who were yet to master the content (Tomlinson, 2005), ensuring all students were adequately prepared for their assessment task (2.3). This process (from highly scaffolded teaching with examples, to small chunks of individual sentence/paragraph re-constructions, then independent writing) was designed using gradual release of responsibility principles specific to the teaching of responding to texts (Webb et al., 2019).

At the end of the lesson sequence students submitted a draft introduction and analytical paragraph for feedback, prior to their exam (2.3).  I marked and provided qualitative written feedback to individual students on the structure and content of their paragraphs using the task rubric. Timely, specific and actionable feedback is an effective method of informing students of their progress relative to the learning goal and helps to identify learning gaps and redirect attention to areas for improvement (Hattie, 2019).

Upon reflection, I am proud of this lesson sequence and the effectiveness of my teaching of a difficult unit to a challenging year level. As a teacher, I hope to have greater influence on the chosen texts and subsequent essay topics; it is likely that students would engage more readily if they could write about more authentic topics. The Outsiders is a dated novel with limited contextual relevance to contemporary 14 year old Australian students (Bahr, 2017). On the back of a male student’s essay paper I found a list of pros and cons comparing two different vehicles – obviously this student is interested in cars (Artefact 2.6). I suspect he may have written a far more informed, engaging essay on the comparison of these two vehicles than he did about The Outsiders!