my name is Jody Parsons and I'm an educational leader at sunshine College
any charge of curriculum from seven to twelve so it's under on college all our
math classes are differentiated from years seven to ten differentiation
players are really important role in the program here at sunshine college we know
that if we want our students to work within the zone of proximal development
that the tasks have to be just right for them I was working in a year 7 class
alongside another teacher so not in the same classroom but we had adjoining
classrooms next to move on and you could see that there was clearly different
things happening in our classroom I had the top end students as such and Yvonne
had more of a numeracy class so Yvonne I decided to join our classrooms up
together so in fact it it really did enhance student learning but enhanced
our teaching practice as well because it meant that I could be working with a
range of students over a range of abilities and the same as a violent gang
us a potential to have much more of a greater professional conversation this
program came about because of the need to improve our outcomes for students the
precursor to the net plan results was the aim data here in Victoria and we
look carefully at those and we knew that we needed to address the low outcomes
for our students and I was lucky enough to have two teachers come to me and say
I would like to try something new so I gave them to go ahead to start a new
approach and what we found really really worked was the developing lessons based
on our students so finding out really what our students were capable of and
finding out that range of students in our classrooms and then designing
lessons around those once we have developed enough curriculum to meet all
our students needs and all our classrooms needs we actually remove the
textbook we trialed the program with one campus within one campus and then we are
sourced it to the other campuses a lot of ongoing refinement to the program
over time and I think you'll find that the program isn't stagnant at the moment
that we are trying to improve it at every opportunity we get today's lesson
was about students collecting data as a means of looking at our fractions
decimals and percentages ok so today's activity
in maths we're going to look at creating valid surveys okay just like the
learning intention States and then we're going to look at how we can represent
that using mathematics each differentiated maths lesson at sunshine
College begins with a warm up the main intent of the warm up is for engagement
the differentiated approach is when a teacher walking to the classroom with
one activity but pitched at a minimum of three levels so they'll have the one
learning outcome that all students will be learning towards however the
activities that teacher takes in there are at a minimum of three different
levels providing all students an opportunity to learn to help you decide
whether you want to pick a one star task a 2 star 3 star I want you to think
about the types of skills that we might be using in that so if you're beginning
to collect data and write a good valid question maybe a one star task is a good
option for you to start asks for students who are really good with
fractions okay starting to understand their fractions quite well 3 star for
students who were can convert between fractions decimals and percentages
during that time students will be working in pairs or in threes on a
specific learning outcome and the teachers will walk around the classroom
teaching at the point of need if you've got a survey 25 people what happens if
24 people have something different
brilliant you could have an option called other students who were doing a
3-star task could not collect either a 10 a 20 or 25 pieces of data because we
wanted them to work from numbers that were a little bit more difficult for
them and students who are working on a to start task needed to collect 25
pieces of data
volleyball once they'd collected their data they filled in their fractions
decimals and percentages table students then needed to represent their
percentages that they've collected on that strip graph so you're 25 centimeter
strip how many pieces do you need to divide it into Wi-Fi okay does need to
have five different options are they going to all be the same size the
question we get asked often is how do you make sure that students don't pick a
task which is too easy for them and we actually find us the opposite students
will often choose a task that's too difficult for them if at the end of a
lesson of Student Rights a reflection and they might say well I've not learned
anything that day it gives me as a teacher an opportunity to have a
discussion with them about the choices that they made at the beginning of the
lesson in order to enable them to learn so if you've just made a discovery or
just had an idea I want that to be your reflection so at the beginning of each
unit students fill in their student capacity matrix we also assess our
students four times a year using the on-demand testing over time we're able
to track our student progress using this on-demand data using our NAPLAN data and
also using this student capacity matrix our students are improving at a rate
which is greater than expected when we compare our students to at the average
Victorian student our students are improving at a greater rate than they
are