Strategy 2 – Use Examples & Models of Strong and Weak Work:

   

Setting out your learning targets goes some way in making learning intentions clear to both students and teachers, but using examples of strong and weak work clarifies this even more.

Providing actual work samples for students to discuss and analyse further adds to the picture of the expected learning that we are developing with our students.

The learning intention is the start of the process, but using work samples enhances the conversations around what constitutes strong and weak examples of the expected learning. This information informs students and helps them to identify aspects of the work that are strong, aspects that are weak, and aspects that are missing. It is making the expectations explicit, giving the student more information that they are able to use in their demonstration of the learning intention.

My reading group needed to develop fluency in their oral reading so we talked about what fluency was – what you had to do if you were reading fluently. We came up with some areas that we thought were important:

We googled “fluency rubrics” to see what experts believed were important aspects of fluency and found that we had come up with many of the aspects ourselves. Next we decided on the wording of the rubric ourselves – and put together descriptions of each element.

We listened to examples of students reading and together we discussed what elements the reading showed and where the reading would fit on the rubric we had made. We repeated this over a number of days so that students could develop a clear vision of what fluency looked like, sounded like and was made up of.

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