Situation Year six class at a middle class state school that has a bring your own device policy. There are twenty-seven students; three on Individual Curriculum Plans (ICPs), three English as a Second Language or Dialect (ELS/D) two on the autism spectrum and four who are on behaviour plans. The class is co taught for Mathematics and HASS the teacher next door takes Maths and the teacher (and myself) teach HASS. In this particular situation I am teaching HASS as a unit with an assessment piece at the end.

The task is to teach students about diversity and look at how to explore, organise and engage in content that can be tabled and plotted on a graph (Artifact 3). I had 6 lessons all done in power points with some board work, there was new terminology taught and worksheets as well as bookwork to be done. Each lesson had a review of the previous lessons learning to make sure I didn’t have to go over content, the lesson objective and success criteria were always displayed at the beginning of the power point presentation. I asked on several occasions what the students think the success criteria would look like and typed it in for them.

Action Students were working both on worksheets and in their workbook using information shown on the power point presentation where they plotted information on graphs from tables about things like population, gender, area, etc. They were also using graphs to show in a table. This is where the gradual release of responsibility comes in (Fisher & Frey. 2013). Students enjoyed the task at hand as there was always something new to do.

Results showed that the majority of the students were at level as I marked and gave back their work the next day and they could see where they went wrong or given feedback such as you need to provide more space in your graphs to allow for clear representation. There were two students who needed to go to a higher level and they had to make up a table with a chosen country and list three comparable pieces of information with two other countries. Those that struggled I asked the teacher aide to work with them in a small group as there were only four of them.

Reference

Fischer & Frey. (2013) Engaging the Adolescent Learner: Gradual Release of Responsibility Framework. IRA Essentials.  Gradual Release of Responsibility Instructional Framework (keystoliteracy.com)