APST 2 pertains to the content, and the ways it can be delivered, assessed and reported on for different types of students.
In the course of my placements and professional experiences I’ve been given many opportunities to present content in different ways. Perhaps due to my particular focus on younger years, a passion of mine is making content and lessons into games or fantastical scenarios (2.1). There is plenty of research backing the idea that presenting content in fun ways can help it stay with learner (Guirguis, 2018), (Allee-Herndon et al., 2021). Facts and concepts are more easily recalled by students who have employed games or interesting contexts.
I was working with a fourth grade class during literacy rotations, and one of the tasks I had students read a text and then respond to it in a number of ways. This can include answering basic questions by recalling facts, drawing their interpretation of a scene from the text, or relating the text to something in their own lives. It just so happened that the class was exploring climate change in their science unit, so I presented a task I had developed previously for an assignment, and retooled it for use with the class’s literacy rotations (2.2). I found a stimulus – an introductory document to issues related to the climate by Kids Britannica, but when it came to responding to the text, I decided to give the students a more novel option. They would design a Climate Superhero (boy and girl variants) with powers made to specifically combat one or more of the effects of climate change. For instance, the effects of deforestation could be combated by the ability to plant trees. I wanted the message to be clear that climate change was a global threat that had devastating, but reversible effects, and that these effects could be combated by proactive lifestyle changes.
Students took to the activity with enthusiasm, growing quite attached to their characters, and keen to give them more and more powers as they identified more threats in the text. Allee-Herndon et al states that appealing to student interests helps make tasks more engaging, and this was demonstrably effective (Allee-Herndon, et al., 2021). Their heroes would later be used as the basis of a writing task, where they would write a story about how their hero used their powers to combat a specific climate-related issues (2.2). Their ability to recall information from the text clearly benefited from the novel context, and this has gone on to inform how I try to prepare literacy tasks for my classes (2.1, 2.2, 2.3). Whenever possible I try to avoid having students simply answer questions recalling facts from a text (2.3).
