Room+14

Jason Edwards

__ROUND ONE__ This week I worked alongside Jason in Room 14. He wanted to refine and improve his reading programme, have a look at what other teachers do and set up a modelling book for writing. It is always very beneficial visiting colleagues and indeed watching someone else teach your class! With feedback and encouragement, Jason 'toughened up' with expectations and deadlines in class and the students have risen to the challenge. We tried to achieve a lot of things during this week as it was the end of the term!

__ROUND TWO﻿__ Jason wanted to spend his next coaching week looking really closely at editing. He felt that his children weren't using the tools available to them (like spiral dictionaries, thesaurus, charts etc) to edit and improve their work. Firstly I got them to look at examples of writing by other children their age (that had been professionally published). They had to identify what was it about that writing that made it so good; the 'juicy words', metaphor, similes, variety of verbs etc. They compared many examples to the expectations in the Writing Standard. We talked a lot about what a successful Level 3 writer would 'look like' and worked backwards from there, 'plugging the gaps' they had in their own writing. Using the speeches they were writing at the time, I asked them to take one sentence that they didn't think was their best, and improve it. So they had to take something out or add in some more descriptive language. This really made them think deliberately about the purpose (to entertain or to inform) of their speech. We used Critical Friends to give specific feedback/feedforward which the children then used to further improve their writing. By the end of the week the children had a much better understanding of re-working their writing, and were motivated by hearing others read their 'before' and 'after' sentences. 