“I’m finished!”

“What can I do now?”

“Done!”

These comments are all too familiar in classrooms. They are the words that are so often heard from the ‘early’ finishers, those who have completed their work in record time before others in the class, and who eagerly await extension, the next work sheet or perhaps free time in acknowledgment that their learning on that particular task is complete...

This year I wanted to further incorporate Thinking Routines into my English classrooms to improve my students’ understanding of the class texts. Over three terms this evolved to focus on the use of Think-Puzzle-Explore as a way to replace mundane chapter questions. I was hopeful that this would lead to a greater understanding of the novel, and in turn improve students’ performance in writing an essay on it.

The three terms it took me to get to this point were spent trying to incorporate a variety of other routines, with varying success, into the novel study. As is often the case, after plenty of frustrating reflection, the simpler approach has turned out to be the most workable.. After careful (and often loudly critical) consultation with the boys in my class, opinion is still mixed about the benefits of this change. But I will speak of that in more detail later....

Over the course of the last three years, I have found Web 2.0.  That is, I have begun to use wikis as part of my Year 8 History course. These wikis do not just take the form of simply carrying data, documents etc. to store for student use. That is part of their function, but it is not the primary use. Their main use is to encourage greater student involvement in responding to key questions. Focus questions are put to students and they are invited to post a comment on the wiki. Students are also encouraged to respond to other students’ comments, offering additional reasons to either support a position or to refute a suggestion....

Paul speaks politely, yet dismissively: “I like computer games. We had a barbecue at Scouts. School is just normal. Now I think it should be Winston’s turn.” He makes a game-show host’s gesture of passing to Winston, then sits back in his chair with his arms folded. I ask him if he can tell us a bit more about the games and he mentions the names of some of his favourites. I sense he does not want to elaborate further, so I thank him for his contributions and move on. 

How can I help Paul to be more willing to contribute so that his moment in the spotlight is not so excruciatingly painful? What can I do to draw out his thinking and to make it both visible and audible?

In the beginning.

On his Science exam at the end of Year Eight, Cornelius was asked to give an example of where he had seen / experienced / observed a number of the big ideas that act as throughlines for our course. One of those ideas is that “truth survives challenge”. His response was,” At the start of year seven we made a list of what a good scientist is and after two years of new Data this list is still correct.”

My initial delight at what he wrote stemmed from the validation of my efforts that his response seemed to give. This boy had made reference to something that his class had worked on a long time ago; at least it was a long time for an early teenage boy.

Welcome to country.

The thirty Year 10 students sat in table groups, surrounded by 1.4 million acres of endless blue sky, beautiful gorges, inviting water holes and rugged pastoral land. They were creating “About Me” posters, as a means to introduce themselves to each other and to staff. I made my way over to Natalie. She had written her name in beautiful big curly writing. But before I could comment, she covered her work, and with fierce determination said, “I don’t like it when teachers look at my work. Stop looking at my work.” Ten minutes earlier I had seen another staff member working with her; and I wondered what made me a “teacher” in her eyes, while the other staff member clearly fitted into a different category? Yet less than two days later, I was talking with Natalie about a Colour Symbol Image1 she had created with one other friend on her home town of Derby. What had changed in those two days?

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