gail dyer

Last Friday I witnessed a master teacher working with students across all ability levels in class groups from 1 to 6. All the while under the spotlight demonstrating to an audience of teachers.

What a challenge, not knowing the students, where they are in their learning journey and having but an hour to engage and motivate them to produce a piece of writing.

The strategies used were:

Lots of talking, playing with words and literary devices expecting different / silly ridiculous enriched language, sharing ideas and work, role playing, thinking quietly and aloud. Playing with words, sounds, sentence structures and language structure. Much acting and doing the unexpected.

Giving students the time to think and develop their ideas, encouraging each idea that is different and novel. Non judgemental / joy at the ideas presented by students. Valuing all that was contributed, creating an environment where students have the freedom to take a risk and they are encouraged to have courage. Providing sentence starters for those who need them and challenging questions for those who need to answer them and need the higher order stimulation.

Writing was a group process, more powerful for sharing with the audience. Inevitably the ideas and writing presented grow with input from others making the entire process and product richer for the experience provided.

The teacher took writing from a solitary process to a social one. It is shared, discussed, deconstructed and then reconstructed to produce a new and richer piece of work.

Parallel thinking, that is, the thinking moves from the one to the group. The thinking becomes visible and through the power of the group the thinking has grown, expanded and ideas have been built upon to create new thinking.

Students of all ages were challenged to explore and to participate. They were encouraged to be part of the scene, to make decisions and to be in control of what happens in their story in the creative process. Literary conventions were introduced as the presenter felt the students were ready. All conventions were introduced seamlessly and as a natural part of the session presentation.

Role playing took the lesson to a different level which encouraged creative talking, listening and questioning by the students of the students after the presenter had scaffolded questioning and thinking. The role play began with 2 and grew as the presenter felt it was possible to include more and more students. The students, especially the older ones were deeply engaged, involved and in character.

The role play was used to move beyond physical description of the environment to exploring characters and relationships using questioning to stimulate character exploration and story line.

The initial part of the lesson was based on a static visual. When the visuals were actually used it was to add further enrichment and develop storyline, characters, comprehending, thinking about and inferring from the visuals.

The presentation was structured from beginning to end and followed a predetermined path to keep Tim Rylands /the teacher on track. The path gave the teacher the freedom to follow the needs, interests and abilities of the students in order to achieve outcomes. As with all good lessons it ended with a testing of the understanding of literary devices addressed.

The game MYST was used as visual stimulation, a springboard to launch ideas and wonderings by a quality teacher.