Building Capacity – Seeing Is Believing
I have recently been brought into a project sponsored by the Ministry of Education under the edugains umbrella (G.A.I.N.S. stands for Growing Accessible Interactive Networked Supports.) I am working with educators from within my board on a literacy initiative seeking to build capacity among teachers who are still new to cross-curricular literacy development strategies.
The project is a simple and wonderful idea. Over the course of the semester, the teachers in the program will focus on thoroughly implementing at least one literacy development strategy in our “at risk” level classes. Literacy strategies are geared towards helping students develop the complex skills required for effective reading, writing and oral communication. Many literacy strategies teach students to be metacognative, reflective, creative and critical thinkers while they are reading, writing and speaking.
As a strategic implementation, the project teachers will be following a “gradual release of responsibility” model (Pearson and Gallagher, 1983) to shift the balance of responsibility from the teacher to the student. The process includes:
- Modeling: teacher assumes responsibility and demonstrates the use and thinking behind the strategy
- Shared Practice: students participate in the strategy while the teacher provides explicit instruction and feedback
- Guided Practice: students use the strategy almost independently while the teacher provides targeted support
- Independent Practice: students use the strategy independently while the teacher gathers assessment information and provides some support if needed
The Literacy GAINS project leaders will come into our classes and film our students at various stages in the implementation process above. Ultimately, this project will culminate in a video production demonstrating how the teachers involved in the GAINS program helped their students develop useful literacy skills by embedding literacy strategies into the curriculum.
I am very excited to be involved in this program. I think that providing teachers with a short video in which they see how a literacy strategy can be applied across subjects and at different levels will be the best way to build their teaching capacity. It is often true that teachers who are resistant to new strategies (whether it be to instructional technology, cooperative learning, or literacy development) are usually unable to imagine what the new strategy would look, sound, and feel like. I have heard many teachers say things like, “that wouldn’t work for my students – they’d never go for it,” or “that stuff doesn’t work in Science/Math/Phys. Ed./etc.” Only when they see the strategy implemented do they truly “get it” – Hence, the video exemplars!
Having recently recognized how important it is for teachers to see other teachers in action, I have been thinking about how I can encourage my students to support each other in the same way. For so many students, their skills are hidden. If a student is a particularly good reader, it is difficult for others to see what it is the good reader does while they read that makes them so good. This is also the case for problem solving skills, study skills, time management, essay analysis skills, etc. From the perspective of the Literacy GAINS project, students could produce instructional videos that demonstrate their skills for other students to watch and learn from.
Encouraging students to create “how to” videos for their classmates would be an empowering and enriching process. It would require the presenter to reflect on what exactly it is they do when they are performing a task (such as solving a math problem), they will need to break the process down into manageable steps, and they will need to communicate their process in a concise way (which are all great literacy skills to develop anyway.)
Web 2.0 tools are giving our students a platform for personal expression unlike ever before. As educators, we need to teach our students to use their voice in productive and meaningful ways. We need to provide them with avenues to share and contribute their expertise. I recall in an keynote presentation at Leading Learning 2008, George Siemens made the point:
“It is not the value of what the individual knows that is important, rather it is the value of how it connects with others.”
I think that all classrooms would benefit from incorporating new approaches to building capacity among students – especially by empowering students to help and support each other as a community.
Photo Credit:
TATRA fire engine instructions: Step 4
Dunechaser
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dunechaser/3696762736/
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