Professional Development

Professional Development I have completed outside of school hours.

• Attended Sign Language courses at Otago University Unipol every Monday night from 6.30pm to 8.30pm for 10 weeks. Approximately 18hours (I could only attend nine sessions out of the ten). 
• From the sessions I am now able to say my name, the alphabet, question words, counting, where i am going, colours, what i am wearing, physical characteristics, personal qualities and much more in sign language. It was such a worthwhile course and I now have a wealth of knowledge surrounding both sign language and deaf culture. 

• Attended a lecture presented by Paul Taylor about Autism. 1.5 hours. 

Due to previous papers I have taken for my degree, I already knew alot of the information presented about Autism. Dr. Taylor presented some good ideas about how to approach children with autism, however there were aspects of the lecture that I didn't agree with. After taking a paper on inclusive education last year, I have a firm belief that all children have the right to and can be included in all aspects of the classroom. Teachers must presume competence in all children and not associate deficit thinking with any child.

• Attended a seminar relating to teaching english in the classroom. 3 Hours

Notes taken from the Seminar:

It makes you wonder...a school's writing story. Presented by Gail Loane. 

Gail talked about how she has changed how writing is taught at Hawea Flat school. When she first went there, the children were dependent on teachers to help them with writing. The year six's consistently used the same structure and often used sentence starters provided by the teachers. There was no evidence to show the children had progressed in their writing ability since year four.

Gail said that writing doesn't necessarily need to be exciting, it just needs to elicit a response from the reader. Teachers need to use writing as a tool for learning other things and as a way for students to present their learning.

In children's previous writing at the school there were problems with:

• Focus - There was often no real focus. 
• Purpose - There was often a fake purpose. The writing should have been focused on recording something about their life or someone else's life, not just about using full stops for example. Students should explicitly know what the purpose of their writing is. 
• Pace - Shouldn't be consistently action based, needs to be a mix of pace. 
• Lead - Children would use all the leads given in the first sentence, they didn't space them out. 
• Voice. 
• Reflections - Children didn't reflect, they only presented action to action to action. 
• Dialogue - Children often didn't use dialogue. 

As teachers we need to model what we want children to learn. therefore when using language in the classroom, we need to make sure we don't say things like "I'm not a writer". Writing has to be able to help students in their world in order to communicate. We can't just use writing as an activity to give children.

To help children respond to the world in their writing, we need to ensure they are responding to all writing territories.

• Personal - What's going on in my life? 
• Local - What's going on in my community? 
• National - What's going in our country?
• Global - What's going on in the world? 

Teachers need to take the opportunity when it comes available to talk about these territories. Eg. at Hawea flat school, the students saw a hawk flying over the grounds. The teachers took this as an opportunity to talk about it and therefore this reflected in their writing.

The human condition is focused on wondering, having opinions and retrieving memories. Teachers need to focus on promoting this in children's writing. Writing teachers must draw on three distinct areas of expertise  We must know: Our students, how to teach and something about writing itself. Right from day one, the best descriptions come from using specific nouns. Therefore teachers can't let children be general in their writing.

Teachers also need to be explicit to children that authors write things for a reason and that they have a purpose behind their writing. Gail advocates teaching writing through looking at works of other writers.
Eg. Gavin Bishop  and his book "Piano Rock: 1950's Childhood". She uses this text to show children a memoir of a childhood.
This text can also teach other concepts such as:

• Dialogue - different speaker, different line, that you don't have to state speaker, how to use speech marks etc. 
• Semi-colon - Can be used instead of a full stop, makes our writing more creative. 
• Lists. 
• Using 'When's' in a sentence. 

For this, the LO could be : We are learning to use other authors as our teachers.

What teachers should be looking for in writing:

1. Mileage - Writing enough each term to be learning. 
2. Purposes - Have a purpose. 
3. Evidence of students going back to edit and craft. 
4. Teacher presence - looking at books, creating a helping circle where teachers listen to students assessing their own work eg. put your finger on the part that shows talking. 
5. Models - Using a model piece of writing to have a go at their own writing. 

Teachers should remember: If nothing happens for the writer, nothing happens for the reader. Therefore all writing needs to create a response. Encourage students to become observers where they look closely, notice and respond.

Resources mentioned: Jeff Anderson, "Mechanically Inclined".

Overall this presentation gave me some great ideas for writing in the classroom. I mainly learnt that when teaching writing, I must focus on children writing experiences that create a response and to use authors work as a means to teach aspects of writing.

David Elliot - Working with the word witch. 

I really enjoyed David's presentation as it allowed me to see into the mind of a illustrator and all the things they think about when creating the pictures to go with a text. His illustrations are amazing and I think his books will be a real hit with children. 

Resources: 

The Moon and Farmer McPhee - Margaret Mahy and David Elliot. 

The Word Witch - Margaret Mahy and David Elliot. 

Henry's Map - David Elliot.

• Attended a tour of the toi-tu museum in sign language as part of sign language week organised by Deaf Aotearoa. 1 Hour. 

I really enjoyed the tour of the toi-tu museum and it provided me with a large bank of information on the history of Dunedin. I feel this will be very beneficial for teaching as I can use this knowledge from the museum as part of lessons I may do on early settlers or Otago history. It also provided me with an idea of how toi-tu could provide an excellent LOTC trip for students. There were many interactive displays that I believe the students would be very interested in seeing. If I do accompany students to the museum I will also be able to provide students with extra information surrounding the exhibits to help extend their knowledge. 

Watching the sign language interpreter was also valuable as it helped me to remember and process signs that I already know as well as teach me some signs I had not learnt yet. I was also able to have some experience with the deaf community and watch people as they communicated with each other in sign. It was really amazing to see this. I wish I had of been more confident in my sign language to  communicate back with the people in the group. I feel as I develop more sign language I will be able to do this.

• Attended a lecture about teaching spelling to children through phonetics with Craig C Jackson. 1 Hour. Lecture notes below:

Craig C Jackson - Programme name: fonetike. Website: www. ezispel.co.nz. 

Craig's argument is that there should be spelling recovery for children as well as reading recovery. 20% of children in a school find it hard to master spelling and therefore writing. The government supports the whole language approach where it is proposed that skills in reading will go on to enhance skills in spelling. This approach accounts for 80% of a school who do develop normal spelling acquisition. 

However the other 20% will continue to struggle with spelling into adult life and therefore help is needed for these students that isn't accounted for by the whole language approach. It is important to seek this help for students as it will also help with their writing skills. Teachers often use spelling lists which involve visual processing. However this only works if students have visual memory and recall that will allow them to remember how words look and therefore are spelt correctly. 

Therefore a phonetic approach can be taken. 

1/3 of words are spelt how they sound and therefore students will get this 1/3 of words correct automatically through this approach as the spelling matches the phonetics of words. eg. words such as Esmeralda and 

Rodent.

other words may closely resemble their phonetical spelling and therefore students will  almost get them correct, they may have just one or two letter difference between the correct spelling and the phonetic spelling.

To help develop this approach for students there are two steps:

1. Break the word up into syllables by putting down syllable lines.

2.Teach the vowel sounds.

Vowel sounds are often taught through phonological awareness training in the first two years of school. Vowel blends are also often taught however there is over 40 vowel blends and therefore it is too complicated for remedial spellers to remember.

There are also over 40 conventional spelling rules that may be taught in schools, however they often don’t cover all spelling situations and are also too complicated for students to remember.

There is more than one way to spell a word phonetically but only one way to spell it correctly. If children are constantly told they are spelling wrong there confidence is diminished and they then stop writing. Therefore students must first be congratulated for spelling phonetically.

Students may then use a franklin spell checker that takes the phonetic spelling and finds the correct spelling  and meaning of the word. They then practice writing the correct spelling over and over, using both their visual and kinaesthetic memories to retain the correct spelling.

The aim is to get students writing to a decipherable level that they can then take and proofread and edit. This teaches them through phonetic spelling to get closer the real spelling.

There have been four field trials for this method and all have been successful.

Reflection: From this lecture, I believe this could be a viable way to teach students who are really struggling with their spelling. It reminded me of the reading I had done on spelling that helped me realise that learning spelling through visual means may not work for all students, even though it works for me. I believe students need to focus more on spelling phonetically as they get caught up in trying to get it ‘right’ and don’t take risks in trying to figure out how to spell it. I believe the franklin spell checkers could be very useful in classrooms as they are quick and accurate, especially in comparison to using a dicstionary.

Documentary screening at Toitu museum: The big picture: rethinking Dyslexia, directed by James Redford. 1 hour.

This documentary focused on what Dyslexia really is and how people who have Dyslexia adapt to this condition. It made me think about how people with Dyslexia, when supported and encouraged by others can overcome the condition and succeed in life. Many of the people featured in the documentary had attended college, became doctors, lawyers or other successful professions. they talked about how they worked during school to show those who didn't believe in them that they could succeed.

In the future as a teacher, I will support children with Dyslexia by supporting them and encouraging them to succeed. The documentary talked about how teacher need to give children with dyslexia more time to be able to read information in books, tests or homework assignments. To many this may seem like giving a child an advantage over others. However after seeing the documentary and how giving extra time significantly benefits students with Dyslexia and enables them to be on an even playing field with other children by having the time to read and process text.

The documentary also featured the importance of focusing on students strengths and not their weaknesses. A specilist on Dyslexia talked about how many people with Dyslexia, although they may have many weaknesses in reading and spelling, they have  many strengths including creativity and problem solving. In the classroom, it will be important to tap into children's strengths and create learning activities that extend these abilities to increase students' achievement.