Wednesday, 23 January 2013

Active Exploration (21/01/2013)


Group Members: Heather & Vanessa

Our Active Exploration team has been focusing on integrating our ECEC Grant Proposal (Creating Spaces that Inspire Students to Talk) with effective PLC discussions to further the work.  As the ECEC Grant requires the writing of an article to be published for next year, we spent time discussing the collection of data and planning for the students’ participation in the coming weeks.  We don’t currently have student work as part of this project but did take the time to consider students language development, as these are the students for which this project is designed to help.

Since our goal is “Creating Spaces that Inspire Students to Talk” we have decided to focus on the TEFR Principle 4 – Strong Relationships Exist.  Much of this principle is about listening, relating, and conversing about our work.  We realize that many of our students are on different points on this continuum, and are aiming to move them forward by:

« Grouping with stronger role models (language skills)
« Small group work with our SLP and SLA and practicum SLP and teachers to converse/value the steps it takes to complete their work (i.e. focusing on the process) and to modify or improve their work as it evolves
« Provide workspaces that inspire/allow artworks to evolve (art studio) which will be the basis of our conversation groups
« Providing materials that are ‘special’ and valuable (not just in a financial sense!)
« Providing resources (books, art prints, etc) to trigger conversations and for the students to model their work on, and to learn strategies for completing their work (procedural reading/retelling)
« Students interact with each other about ideas in which the dialogue builds on each other’s ideas

For next PLC time, Heather and I will be collecting audio recordings of conversation with our 3 focus students (low, medium, high) as a starting point from which to collect data.  From a group art activity project, we’ll talk to students with the following prompts:

« Tell me about it.
« Tell me about how you made it.
« Tell me where you got your ideas from.
« Tell me about the materials you used.
« Did you have any problems making this?
« How did you solve them?
« What do you like best about your artwork?

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