When teacher Natasha Jacobs wanted to enable her students to be actively involved in assessment, she set out to simplify the The Literacy Learning Progressions into language her learners could understand.
Natasha, a previous teacher at Irongate School, wanted to personalise her literacy programme. She was using The Literacy Learning Progressions within her mahi, and wanted her students to be actively involved in the entire process. This would require her students to access and interact with the criteria in a deep manner. Natasha realised the academic language of the progressions posed barriers to students' understanding, and saw the need to translate them into a language that students would be able to understand and interact with.
At Irongate, they were already using 'kidspeaked' learning intentions in their writing programme. The teachers appreciated how this allowed students to understand what they were learning, what the next steps would look like, and how they could master them. They also appreciated how this allowed them to easily plan for diversified and meaningful scaffolded learning for their students. As students shared how they felt this empowered and progressed their learning, teachers came to realise the obvious next step was to do the same with the reading progressions.
Natasha reached out to the Virtual Learning Network to enlist the help of other teachers who would be keen to help with the enormous task of translating the progressions into "kidspeak".
Several teachers joined the group and, using Skype to connect with each other as well as Google Docs to share documents, the group developed a set of generic phrases that students would be likely to understand and use, replacing the more academic language of the progressions.
They cross-moderated and checked for alignment, while throughout they ensured that the integrity of each criteria statement was maintained.
Kidspeaking the progressions
Watch Natasha discussing the benefits of making the progressions accessible to students, including:
Staff members discussed the collaborative reading document contained within the VLN, Literacy progressions discussion thread. The literacy team has since created a series of documents aligned to the Literacy Learning Progressions following the format of their writing documents.
View the recrafted reading and writing progressions:
Literacy progressions (reading) for individuals
(Word 2007 88 KB)
Literacy progressions (reading) for groups
(Word 2007 93 KB)
Select the image to view at full size. |
Select the image to view at full size. |
Select the image to view at full size. |
The results of sharing their translations brought many positive comments from beginning to experienced teachers. In particular, the students made comments about how they knew what they were learning, how this helped them to make their writing better for an audience, and how they enjoyed conferencing and the 1-1 time to talk about their writing. Most importantly their improved enjoyment of writing is reflected in the words of one student:
Irongate School's next steps are to:
View the recrafted reading and writing progressions:
Literacy progressions (reading) for individuals
(Word 2007 88 KB)
Literacy progressions (reading) for groups
(Word 2007 93 KB)
Read this related story:
Find out about assessment tools:
Out of this work the question also arose 'How can technologies support students literacy learning?'. Listen to these podcasts with similar messages: