Support

We can support learners in classrooms which offer opportunity for rich discussion and inferring & speculating about about new concepts. We can assist learners by offering them  21st century   tools for thinking, such as Tony Ryan's Thinkers Keys, Edward De Bono's Thinking Hats or Art Costa's Habits of Mind. First we TEACH, eg we coach students in writing skills, then we PRACTISE TOGETHER, before students HAVE A GO in pairs, triplets, groups, literature circles, writing groups or on their own - then we SHARE our learning... Students need to be trained in using group processes.  

We can assist students by asking rich questions and requiring them to reflect on their own learning - Thanks, Adrian Bruce and Marg D, for your wonderful scaffolds and Mike Gershon for your Assessment for Learning Toolkit power point - with such great ideas for immediate feedback in the classroom.  We know great descriptive feedback is critical to student success and students can be trained to give positive feedback. 

We know that we can assist by offering scaffolds and a jointly constructing a visual glossary for new topics. We can support VISUAL LITERACY and the art of persuasion with posters and explicit teaching. We can teach them study skills, as a passport to success,  so they can summarise information & make their own notes. We can offer them different options for expressing what they know - writing is not the only way. We need to decide what our programming essentials are - which things do we want every student to learn in a given topic?  Once we know what our foundations are, we can differentiate the learning...