All the Strategies for Developing Your Copycats, Stickybeaks and Scallywags.

 

If you were to join our teaching staff at Barrington Public School this would be my message to you: 

 

Just get in there and teach the kids whose love of learning you will never quench, for they truly are Copycats, Stickybeaks and Scallywags, so best give it your very best.  Our school has over a thousand pupils but your Mini-School has a very manageable two hundred and ten, all of whom you'll get to know quite well in the next few years.  Your class is a Multiage classroom with your pupils’ ages ranging across at least three years, being nine, ten and eleven year olds.  At the end of each year a third of your class will move on and be replaced by a third of newcomers, the cycle meaning Followers becoming Learners becoming Leaders, and they will all Flourish as also will you. Your teaching partner is the very experienced Mr J.  Come back and see me in three years and tell me how much fun you have had!

 

• Start with the Accelerators and Inhibitors and expand these to infiltrate the structure of every aspect of each day’s structure.

• Use the Invitations Board to welcome your pupils to each day’s learning how to learn day.

•  Start each day with ‘Ooze In’ time.

•  Always start your work week on a Wednesday.

•  Model your day on the four Education Digestion Framework diagrams.

•  Manage each fortnight’s teaching with Learning Menus.

•  Plan at least one major celebration a fortnight.

•  Use ring back folders or single book formats for all written work and have pupils write short evaluation statements, and the time, after each activity.  Learning is their responsibility and they must have simple ways to show it.

•  Have pupils evaluate each day with a twenty-five word statement, orally first in the junior classes, for a parent to sign, without any other homework expected, apart from preparing for the following day’s learning adventure.

•  Gather the best examples of work into Kid Tracking Envelopes at the end of each term, signed off by their owners.

•  Don’t over-teach new pupils for the first term.  They will learn by observation and copying.  There’s a lot going on all the time in a Multiage classroom with two teachers (whenever possible) ensuring every day is challenging, and rewarding.

•  Break your year into four nine week learning chunks and plan special activities for the other four weeks in the year.

•  Tackle relationship problems head on with frank discussions, role play and dispute resolution with the “Accelerators and Inhibiters’ framework.  No class rules or codes of conduct are necessary.

•  Capitalise on the ease of starting each year with many ‘junior teachers’ eager to orientate the newcomers.

•  Emphasise the oral aspect of learning with opportunities for discussion and storytelling, not teacher talk and lecturing.

•  Incorporate the strategies of ‘Let Them Write Before They Read’ in all literacy development.

•  Ensure everyone succeeds with music as per ‘Music, Soul of the School.’

•  Ensure you place as much thought and effort into the “Out of Classroom Curriculum” as you do in all of your planning and preparation  

•  Stress that literacy and numeracy are tool subjects and should not be treated in isolation as an end to themselves.  They must intrude into all aspects of learning.

•  Ensure that the pathway a day follows can be described with a logical structure, the Education Digestion of Cow Gut model, not a subject to subject jump about all over the place, the dislocated lock step day.

•  Be able to describe all activities according to the four categories of Teacher Directed, Teacher Assisted, Self Actualised and Social, Sport and Recreation.

•  Allow lots of opportunities for Clinics, by invitation and by interest.

•  Promote the homework policy as described, to encourage time to review the day’s work with a parent and to share some reading time together.

•  Encourage parents to have direct input into homework so that each day’s work is clear to them.  Ask that they write to you in their child’s folder.  Be sure to reply.

•  Aim to have whenever possible all learning lead to a real life outcome with a perceived purpose.  Surely cooking fritters for lunch is packed full of Health and Maths and Reading and Writing and Science.

•  Ensure that parents, pupils and teachers have explicit advice on literacy and numeracy milestones as well as all of the other wonderful learning that you provide and are able to tick them off as they are passed.

•  Work a nine day teaching fortnight, using the tenth day for planning, preparation and professional development, with all of its benefits, as well as starting every day at eight and ending it at four.  That’s a forty hour week, every week, and refuse to do any more.

• Your curriculum is here, just three pages of general broad aims to assist you in your planning.  It's up to you and your pupils to put the meat on the bones.  

 

Oh yes, I nearly forgot.  Drinks and nibbles each Friday in the staff room at 3.30 to 4.00pm, and have a great weekend.  No marking or testing.  You’ll need a rest if you’ve kept up to all that your pupils will have wanted to learn.  We don't do NAPLAN, we just teach kids.  That's a lot harder you'll find, and a lot more rewarding for all.