Clip 5: Jo and Leslie's learning

Jo:

The biggest challenge would be being able to combine increasing my literacy knowledge and at the same time building myself as a mentor, as a coach – and juggling those two aspects at the same time.

When I first started working with Leslie, I asked her to complete a questionnaire around her assessment practice, how she might be using literacy at the moment, and then met up with her to discuss her answers. And it was really through spending a lot of time having learning dialogues with her to find out where she was at. And for her to realise that she actually knew more than she thought she did.

Leslie:

I hadn’t done any formal … looking at it, but I did know there was a lack of knowing how to go about writing, and analysing, and getting information from text, from my students in an adequate sort of a way – in a way that I felt was, was thorough, and of real value.

Jo:

We used a needs analysis of the requirements – the challenges – of literacy at NCEA. And we looked at where that was actually being taught in her curriculum, in the junior curriculum. And then that really helped get her buy in, in that she realised that she had made assumptions what students could do in year 11 – which is easy to assume that another subject is teaching them how to do this and you don’t need to do this in yours. So from there she was very quickly able to actually start analysing her junior units of work and seeing where it could fit in.

Leslie:

I’m a lot more aware of the sorts of texts and things that I give to my students and how I’m going to structure a lesson so that we can elicit the right information from the text. And also just a lot more aware of how students can understand why artists do what they do. And the focus now is getting them to understand why.