Shared Leadership in Developing Change in Numeracy
View other videos | Read the transcript of this video
This video requires an up to date version of the flash player and javascript turned on.
This video has captions. Click on the CC icon in the top right hand corner of the video player to turn them on and off.
Transcript
The Good Shepherd Primary School in Amaroo, ACT, has taken a holistic approach to the way numeracy is taught in classes, making changes which have had a positive effect on students and teachers. The school has also implemented the Numeracy Intervention Program developed by the Catholic Education Office. This program has been highly successful in New South Wales trial schools, and has shown great results at Good Shepherd.
We really looked at what was best practice, and best practice was we used a fellow called Asuza, and read widely about what he’d been proposing. What he was proposing was really to change the way that numeracy is taught in our schools. We would begin to segment the lesson, and the first part of the lesson would be an explicit teaching block of maths whereby the teacher alone spoke. This is unheard of nowadays. That would go for five or so minutes, and then there would be opportunities for children to share their learnings, implement their learnings, and then have some sort of cognitive closure at the end of it.
The Leadership for Schooling Program, which is part of our status as a National Partnership School, it’s one of the things that we have to implement with the teachers and staff at our school. We’ve really enjoyed developing that because it’s modelled on distributed leadership. So our entire school has changed the way we talk about curriculum, the way we look at curriculum, and the way we make decisions within our school. We’ve started a numeracy team with eight teachers and a co-ordinator, and the team works together to make decisions about how our school is going to look at numeracy and teach numeracy. It has been a fantastic journey this year.
Well the program has provided particular benefits to those children who are being withdrawn on a daily basis. We connect it with the old reading recovery model, which is one-on-one teaching, really honing in on particular needs that the child has, and as a consequence the child – or the children, because there’s more than one – have really grown in confidence. These are children we targeted that for some reason or other just weren’t quite meeting expectations in the classroom. We felt that they had a reasonable grasp of a concept, but they just weren’t able to make the link in classrooms. These children, through the program, through the partnership program, have really come on tremendously.
Well actually all of our children, when they come to us for the Numeracy Intervention Program, have lower self esteem because they haven’t experienced too much success in the area of numeracy. So with our individualised instruction we can give them that confidence and let them see how talented they really are. Then as they build that confidence they’re taking on more and more responsibility for their learning, and they want to learn more and more. The children are coming up to Grade level, so they’re coming back to their classrooms, and the teachers are reporting that they’re raising their hand and that they’re really participating. I’ve never really felt that much change, as a teacher, in one concentrated area before in my entire teaching career.
Some strategies, and split strategies. The last time I didn’t know what division was, that very good, and now I do
It has really been a well structured, well considered program. Every teacher, even when we’re here very, very late a night – and there have been a lot of times when the teachers are working very late – have said how lucky we are to have been given the opportunity to participate in this program, and what a difference it has made to learning at Good Shepherd. So I guess one thing I would say is that we are eternally grateful for the opportunity.
Other videos
TAS
NSW
- Successful Language Learners
- Using data to improve school and student literacy and numeracy performance
- Australian Early Development Index (AEDI)
VIC
WA
SA
- Taking data seriously at Port Pirie West Primary School
- SA Teaching for Effective Learning Framework
- Parental Engagement in Schooling in Low SES communities