BRIEF end of term reflection on Professional Standard 6 for Teacher Check Point Survey

Professional Standard 6: Teach and respond to learners in a knowledgeable and adaptive way to progress their learning at an appropriate depth and pace. How have you adapted your program to meet the needs of high or low achieving students?

There are so many ways that I can demonstrate this standard because essentially it sums up my job and what is expected of me. I have therefore only chosen a few examples.

Learning is personalised so that students can meet their individual learning needs and this is particularly evident in Reading and Maths. Students have quite a lot of choice over their learning and how they manage themselves.

I have a combination of needs based groups and ability groups in my class. This works well for me. My needs based groups are often mixed ability too. For example in reading, I have a group who needs to focus on inference but within that group, the students are not all at the same reading level. They all have the same gap in their learning but their overall level is different. Basically I utilise many strategies to adapt the learning to suit the different levels in the group. Firstly, oral language is a strong focus so there is no barrier with actually reading the words. But secondly, you can provide a rich task that challenges all members to think and they will each get out of it what they need for the level they are at.

Often teaching reading is more about developing thinking skills than it is about decoding words, especially at this level.

In Maths for example- I may teach the same strategy across four different levels. Students opt into the lesson at the level they can engage with and many challenge themselves to do more than they would expect and are pleasantly surprised (this causes acceleration with their learning). They can stay or move on from the group whenever they are ready and can join in at the level they feel appropriate for them. They also choose which aspects/levels they wish to master and practise after the teaching is done. If they realise the teaching was too hard for them at the higher level, they can opt to practise the learning at the lower level but they were still exposed to the higher level and can see the progression and where they are heading.

Students know that they can learn from others and the teacher is not the only authority for knowledge. They are also often given the option to learn fast or slow depending on what they prefer and can repeat lessons if they need clarification on a strategy.

Students apply their learning to projects that have a real life context where appropriate and often have cross curricular links.

The above practice is also combined with collaborative work. Students are sometimes accountable for their own learning and sometimes accountable to group with specific learning tasks or goals.