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Teaching English - Teachers Talk Teaching
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| At the time of this interview Judy Wiggins and Kate Northam were team-teaching grade 7 English and SOSE at Claremont High School. Because there are a number of deaf and hearing impaired students in their classes, Judy, the subject teacher, and Kate, the teacher of the deaf, worked closely together. A highly experienced teacher who has inspired many colleagues, Judy has been teaching for thirty years in Tasmania and has covered the range from grades 2 to 7. Kate has taught for four years. She graduated from Melbourne University and taught in London before completing post graduate studies in Deaf Education and moving to Tasmania. |
 Kate and Judy |
| Judy and Kate have worked together before with primary students, but this is their first experience of high school English teaching. Their large double room has been set up as a colourful, well-organised and language-rich environment for students. Below, Judy and Kate explain how they organise their classroom, the program they have designed to cater for their students’ needs, and the strategies they use to involve parents. | |
- bilingual teaching
- using a predictable routine
- catering for different students’ needs
- public speaking
- visiting speakers
- providing extra support for students
- assessment and reporting, TLOs
Judy:
At first, coming from a primary school, we were a bit worried about the actual set up of our classroom and about taking a few risks. Now when we look back, there wasn’t any need to worry. I think the most important thing is that when you set up your room, you make it a bright, happy place to be.
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We have a resource bank in the centre of the double room with scissors, paper and everything students might need. There are bookshelves with novels and books that are related to the unit of work that we’re doing at the time. We have Big Books in our room as one of the ways in which we teach grammar. The layout of our classroom is different from most high school classrooms. There are tables and chairs around the walls, but when we want to work with the whole class, all the students sit on the floor in front of us. Kate and I regard that as our teaching position. Because the students are close by and we have good eye contact with everyone, they stay focused and we never have any trouble with discipline. When students start individual or group work they move to the desks around the walls and Kate and I can then move around and help individuals and supervise. We’ve found this very successful. |
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| We both think it is essential in an English classroom that the children are immersed in language. There has to be literature all around and there have to be things that they can use for reference. We display lists of words, descriptions of different writing genres and how to create them, posters, and the students’ work. The students who are in our classroom are surrounded all day, by meaningful displays. They’re surrounded by their own work, they’re surrounded by language all around the walls and this makes for a happy learning environment. |
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We were told that the students wouldn’t sit on the floor. We were told that the students wouldn’t like all the things hanging in our classroom. But students think it’s great! Students from Years, 8, 9 and 10 who have visited our classroom always comment on what our classroom looks like.
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We encourage ownership of the classroom by the students. We have paint, pencils, textas and paper and allow the students, for example, to paint our windows to fit in with a learning topic. We have a fish net hanging from our ceiling. At first we hesitated because we’d been told that students might take it down, that students might not like the displays, but it isn’t true. The students helped put displays up all along our corridors and down the stairwells. They are very proud that their work is on display. We haven’t had any graffiti; we haven’t had any people putting the displays down. |
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| We also were told that we would lose the books we had on the shelves in the classroom — but we haven’t. The students record when they’re using them. We are very open about the fact that if books are damaged, students need to tell us, and we can do something about it and so damage hasn’t become a problem in our classroom. | |
If anyone is thinking of organising their classroom like
this, my advice is to just take a risk and do it. Discuss
with the students why you’re doing it, that you’re
setting things up to make the environment a happy working
place for them. I think you need to trust the students.
If you let the students have ownership of the room, you’re
paid back twofold.
For more information about classroom organisation see Classroom
Culture.
Kate:
Ours is a bilingual classroom. The two languages that the children are exposed to are English and Auslan (Australian sign language). There are always two teachers in the classroom — a subject teacher and a teacher of the deaf — and there are always two languages in use — English and Auslan. If the subject teacher is teaching, she uses English and the information is interpreted into Auslan for the deaf students. Alternatively, the teacher of the deaf will teach in Auslan and then the information will be voice interpreted into English for the hearing students. This means that all of the students in our classroom are learning two languages - the deaf students are learning English as their second language and the hearing students are learning Auslan. They are also exposed to two cultures — the hearing culture and the deaf culture.
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Judy: Kate and I decided early on that we would continue teaching in the primary school mode, in that we would actually teach the students grammar, teach the students spelling, work on lots of different genres of writing, do lots of work with oral language and have lots of time for silent reading. This has worked because the students are happy to be within a routine; the whole time they’re in the classroom they know what’s going on. |
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| They
know what to do at the beginning of each lesson, they
know which books to use when it’s writing time,
they know where to be in when it’s writing time,
where to be when it’s teaching time. The students
are grouped according to their needs and are happy to
be having success. For more information about using predictable routines, see a clear set of expectations in Classroom Culture. |
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Judy:
Kate
and I soon realised that we needed to plan different activities
for different groups of students, according to need. We
talked and planned together and now for literary study the
students read different novels and have different tasks
to complete around the novel. We spent a lot of time at
the beginning of the year with Heather (the English curriculum
officer) deciding on novels and looking at books that may
be suitable for different levels. We spend a lot of time
reading high interest books to the students, particularly
Big Books. We use these to teach a lot of our grammar, punctuation,
etc. The students benefit from actually seeing the language
in context.
For more information about catering for defferent students‘
needs, see an accommodation
of difference in Classroom Culture.
Judy:
We do a lot of public speaking. We’ve tied in with our SOSE program where the students have presented talks in our English program but using the current SOSE subject. For example, students have just completed talks on islands that they studied in SOSE. We treated this as a public speaking program. We had someone come in to speak to the children about public speaking, we used a stand and encouraged the students to use cards. It was very successful. We wrote a report on their talk and read that back to them just as they would in a formal public speaking competition.
Kate:
An important aspect of our English program is the number of visitors that we invite into the classroom. I think it is important for teachers to acknowledge that they’re not experts on everything and that there are people who know more about different things. So if we’re going to do public speaking, we’ll invite somebody in who does a lot of public speaking in their career.
Kate:
In
Third Term it became clear that there was a group of students
who were really struggling in terms of their basic literacy
and numeracy skills. We spend a great deal of time talking
about and discussing what we should do with these students
and it was decided to set up a specific literacy and numeracy
program. Some students are in both of the programs, some
students are only in the literacy program and some students
are only in the numeracy program. They come out of other
classes twice a week and work with one teacher on an individualised
literacy program. The program includes spelling, reading
aloud, silent reading, comprehension, any activities that
we think will improve their literacy and therefore enable
them to participate better in all the other curriculum areas.
For more information about catering for different students‘
needs, see an accommodation
of difference in Classroom Culture.
Judy:
Kate and I spend a lot of time talking about the students and the students’ needs in our classroom and consequently we keep a lot of records of evaluation. We record their spelling results, we use the TLOs, we record work that they do in literature, talks, homework, so the students actually know where they’re going. As well as giving ratings, we write comments and we sometimes highlight the actual TLO statement that focuses on what the student has demonstrated with a piece of work.
Kate:
Each student in our classroom has what we call a reporting folder. They are just kept on the table in the classroom and every time the student does a piece of work that they’re particularly proud of, it’s kept in their reporting folder. When we’re writing reports or talking at parent-teacher interviews, we use these reporting folders as examples of the work that the students have done.
If
the students do a piece of work that we feel highlights
a particular TLO, we staple the TLO statement onto the front
of the work. That’s then put in the reporting folder
and kept until the end of the year. We use this to help
us when we’re writing our reports and when we’re
reporting on the TLOs for the school TLO assessment.
For more information about assessment and reporting see
Assessment, Recording and Reporting.
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Judy: We use a lot of parents in our classroom. Because Kate and I had a big parent program at Claremont Primary School we were able to tap into this resource and bring parents with us. We now have 21 parents working on a parent help roster and 8 parents who are working with parent tutoring. Earlier in Term 1 we spent some time talking to the parent about what to do so that they felt confident. They have their own folders and work with individual students or maybe groups up to three. |
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| This has been very successful for the students who are quite happy to come out of their classes to work with our parent tutors. Parents assist with testing students on their spelling, listening to students read, filing, putting up displays, cutting card —they’re happy to work with us in any way. | |
Judy:
It took a bit for the parents to actually come in to a high school. They had been in the habit of dropping students in car parks and leaving. Now we’ve had morning teas for parents, we’ve had a grandparent day where we had over 100 grandparents visit our school. We invited our parents to assemblies. We can actually show them what the students are doing.
Every Thursday morning at Claremont High School it’s an open morning for parents to come and walk around our school. We started off by inviting some of the parents from our current Grade 6’s at Claremont Primary, Abbotsfield, North Chigwell, Roseneath and Collinsvale to have a look at what’s actually going on. We don’t do anything any different from any other day. This has opened the school up and let parents judge for themselves what’s going on.
