[Helen] All students have the right to access, participate, and progress in the curriculum.
They can learn and achieve when provided with supports that meet their individual needs.
It's a requirement for schools to differentiate teaching and learning
so that every student is engaged and learning successfully.
To meet this requirement, schools must first recognise
the diversity of students who are in their school.
Understanding the diversity of students, means that schools have to respond to learners' needs.
They identify barriers to learning, then proactively plan to remove these barriers
through differentiated teaching and learning that becomes increasingly personalised.
[Tenille] So it's at the unit planning level,
and also during the delivery of the unit that teachers are provided with the opportunity
to support identified groups, or individual students through focused and intensive teaching.
So we unpack, "What is focused and intensive teaching?"
"Who is it provided to?" "When do we provide it?"
And, "What does it look like in the classroom?"
[Chelsea] Focused teaching is what we do when we support students who may be
having difficulties with understandings, or skills from particular content descriptions,
or extending students by addressing particular content descriptions in more depth.
So I use my formative assessment data to help me understand where my students are at in their
learning, which then helps me understand which students need more focused teaching.
So we have an agreed and consistent lesson sequence in our school
so there were already times scheduled in each lesson to fit in our focused teaching
while the rest of the class continues to learn independently or collaboratively.
Sometimes focused teaching is simply providing additional time,
or scaffolding how students access the content.
So for students requiring extension - focused teaching might include fast tracking the
learning and then providing tasks related to the content that greater enables a depth of learning.
Sometimes some students require additional teaching episodes
focusing on literacy or language demands of the curriculum.
Our students with literacy difficulties have benefited most from these literacy groups.
They are provided by our inclusion teachers and focus on particular
literacy skills such as reading, which is needed across all 8 learning areas.
I might employ different pedagogical practices and teaching strategies that
are more suited to the nature of the learner who are being provided the focus teaching.
So for example, rather than using paper-based resources, I provided
a variety of concrete manipulatives for a group of my students to support
their understanding of place value when learning to recognise and model numbers.
[Student] So I started off with... 3 tens. 10, 20, 30, and then 11 ones -
2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11. And then 4 bundles of ten and one 1.
[Chelsea] Good job!
[Elissa] Intensive teaching as the name suggests, is what we do with individual students when
differentiated and focused teaching has not met the learning needs, and we need to concentrate
a little bit more with greater intensity on discrete aspects of the students' learning needs.
So students who require this intensive teaching, they either need further
support with very specific understandings and skills from particular content descriptions,
or they're requiring an additional layer of challenge like an enrichment for the content.
So, we look to our monitoring tasks and diagnostic
tools to determine the skills that might require intensive teaching.
And when providing intensive teaching it may be that we draw on the general capabilities, or
cross-curriculum priorities to adjust the learning focus for a student who requires enrichment.
For example, we might draw on the critical or creative
thinking general capability to provide a student with more complex opportunities
in mathematics to think more creatively and broadly about solutions to mathematical problems.
Intensive teaching can also include employing alternative pedagogies.
A great example of this is when a student was having quite a bit of
difficulty understanding the concept of symmetry.
I organised for us to go outside and do some outdoor learning in the form of a symmetry hunt.
He explored the school grounds for symmetrical objects we found some leaves and a flower.
We also collected various objects and sorted them into two groups.
One with a line of symmetry and ones without.
[Student] When you fold the leaf in half... both of the sides match up...
[Elissa] And the are the...
[Student] ...same.
[Elissa] The same on each side. Beautiful.
So we can fold it along there so what's this called here?
[Student] The line of symmetry.
[Elissa] Good boy!
Intensive teaching means we sometimes need to collaborate with specialists.
I recently collaborated with our speech-language pathologist
to support a student learning to communicate using an alternative form of communication.
They required intensive teaching in the use of their pod book to enable
them to fully engage in the literacy and communication aspects of the learning areas.
Intensive teaching at our school is also provided to the students at the
beginning stages of learning Standard Australian English.
Our EALD teacher provides an intensive Standard Australian English program to these students
to support their access to the curriculum across all learning areas.
Making time to provide intensive and focused teaching, is something
we need to incorporate into our unit planning.
One way I create opportunities for focused and intensive teaching is by identifying where the
teaching sequence already affords opportunities to provide focused and intensive teaching.
I look at how I can organise the class into groups,
so that while they're completing independent tasks, I make my way around the class,
and work with the groups and individuals that require focused and intensive teaching.
Having a predictable lesson structure is really helpful.
Also, sometimes if there are multiple opportunities
to cover particular aspects of the achievement standard across the year,
and my students' formative assessment indicates they don't need that many opportunities,
then I make adjustments in the Year or Band plan and the teaching sequence.
So this frees up some time to focus on the content that my students need to consolidate
either through differentiated, focused or intensive teaching
[Helen] Schools are supported to provide differentiated, focused and intensive
teaching through a range of departmental resources available on the Assessment and Moderation Hub.
How might you provide focused and intensive teaching in your context?