Teaching and learning

The dimensions of teaching and learning

The five dimensions of teaching and learning form the basis of Coppabella State School teachers’ professional practice. At its centre are students. Each dimension links to and supports the others. No one dimension exists in isolation.

There is no fixed starting point — teachers begin by considering the mandated curriculum while taking into account what students already know and the best teaching strategies to support learning. Teaching involves selecting the curriculum for students, developing appropriate methods of delivery, designing assessment tasks and evaluating students’ understanding of what they have learned. Critical to this process is consistent and on-going feedback to ensure students are aware of their learning goals.

Explicit instruction at Coppabella State School

At Coppabella we are an explicit instruction school, with our signature pedagogy being explicit instruction/teaching.

Warm up (activating prior knowledge)

• Review prerequisite skills/knowledge,
• Revise or make connections to previous related work
• Quick and focussed

Learning intention and success criteria

All lessons begin with a clear learning intention and success criteria–

• WALT (we are learning to)
• WILF (what I am looking for)

I do (explicit teaching & modelling of concept/skill)

• Define concept/skill to be taught
• Explicitly model skill/strategy being taught, demonstrating and describing thought processes using concise ‘think-alouds’
• Break down into clearly defined steps

We do (guided practice)

• Students provided with prompts/scaffolds as they all work through the same example/s.
• Several opportunities e given for students to practice skill/strategy and experience success
• Scaffolds gradually withdrawn [gradual release model) to develop student independence

You do (independent practice)

• Students perform skill/strategy that was modelled - individual activities that every child should be able to do independently
• Teacher constantly CFU and providing individual feedback
• Differentiation evident - work given at their level

Review and plough back

All lessons require a review or plough back. At this point teachers must review purpose, goal and critical content – students should be able to articulate ‘what they learnt’ or purpose of lesson, chant back steps or answer questions.

Checking for understanding

Checking for understanding needs to occur throughout every step of the EI lesson. The goal of feedback is to close the gap between student’s current responses and the desired response.