Background – Part A
The school is in one of the less affluent areas of the city and has a larger than average (for Western Australia) proportion of unemployed or low income households.
The school has approximately 660 students enrolled in Kindergarten to Year 7 for 2009. It is staffed by a principal, 3 deputies and 41 teachers (33.6 FTE) of which 2 are level three teachers. There were 2 full staff meetings per term, held after school as well as a weekly staff meeting before school on a Wednesday. The school has developed Learning Teams that empower staff to make decisions within their teams. I was a member of the Year 6 and 7 Learning Team. The team was managed by one of the 3 deputies and we held weekly team meetings with the students on a Monday morning.
I taught a Year 6 class of 25 students although one student left the school part way through the term. The class was made up of 15 boys and 10 girls. There was a clear gender difference in academic and intellectual ability through the class. If I were to list the 10 strongest students academically 8 of them would be girls, and the top six are all girls; the remaining two of the ten girls however are in the bottom 5 students in the class. The range of ability in the class was very wide; my mentor commented that she had never had such a wide range in a single year class before.
Parental involvement in the school was encouraged and there was a significant number of parents (and other community members) available as volunteers to help in class or with extra literacy and numeracy activities etc, such as the Repeated Reading Programme.
BCPS has many programmes and initiatives operating to improve learning opportunities for students. The priorities in the school are English and Maths, Environmental Education, ICT and Cooperative Learning Strategies (particularly Kagan Structures). Specialist programmes include Getting It Right Literacy/Numeracy, Boys in Education, Aussie Optimism, and Family Links Program. The school is part of the Commonwealth Literacy and Numeracy Program (CLNP), whereby the Department directs supplementary literacy and numeracy funding to schools with a high proportion of educationally disadvantaged students. The school has been selected to be part of the Behaviour Management & Discipline strategy, a major Government initiative that provides resources to ensure that all students achieve significant learning and social outcomes.
My Philosophy of Teaching – Part B
My teaching philosophy has changed, or at least is changing, as a result of my EDU292 Professional Internment Placement. I was totally unprepared for the relentless onslaught of cooperative learning strategies that assailed me when I started at my PI school. In 2008 the school had invested much time and money in implementing Kagan’s approach to cooperative learning. From the first day of the placement I was able to witness cooperative learning in action and see for myself how the structures of lessons, on occasions, were completely transformed. I was instantly impressed with this and other approaches used in the classroom, and could understand for the first time why cooperative learning is considered to be the strongest of all methods for increasing academic achievement (Classroom Instruction that Works, Marzano, Pickering & Pollock 2001). Marzano and his colleagues suggest that cooperative learning tasks need to be well structured and teachers risk negative results if they are not. They promote structures such as those suggested by Kagan (Cooperative Learning, 1994). I experimented in my own lessons with different ‘Kagan Structures’ (strategies). My mentor was also using some aspects of Kagan for the first time, and it was clear that some things worked and others did not. Nevertheless there were lots of positives. Using regular reflection and reading I was able to reinforce the learning I was experiencing and move my comfort zone to new territory. More often than not, the pace of lessons was quicker; students were all engaged; students were working together to support and encourage each other in carefully selected groups of four; students were responsible for themselves and the other group members; more able students helped the less able in the group; each student was able to take responsibility for aspects of the group’s functioning and management. The benefits of cooperative learning have been widely reported. A summary is found at http://home.capecod.net/~tpanitz/tedsarticles/coopbenefits.htm .
As the placement progressed it was clear that some students struggled with cooperative learning, and sometimes I used different approaches. Still, I’m a convert. Kagan Structures are a powerful set of tools that could be used to more efficiently deliver any program. Using Kagan Structures I can align instruction with how students best learn, and deliver a second, embedded curriculum which includes social skills, multiple intelligences, character virtues, and emotional intelligence.