Burst and Bubbles- Celebrating success

With one of my boys refusing to even sit an easTTle writing test at the beginning of the year and repeatedly say I hate writing, to where we have come today , its been a long way and I wish my students could be here this afternoon to share their awesome attitude change towards writing as well as their accelerated progress..

6/6  boys were not working within their writing curriculum level. Most of them, had the potential to make accelerated progress in their writing. My challenge was to change their attitude towards writing.

 I had strengths in teaching TESSOL strategies,  and If I could hear from my students what their real issue was, and somehow change my practice to suite them, then we would be a win win situation.l.

The changes I made in my teaching were focusing on strengthening my students knowledge on each of the different components of writing. An intense vocabulary building programme, lots of mini lessons often enough to help scaffold and build on what they had. 

I came across Steven Williams’s writing titled, “Using spaced repetition with ESL classes”, and he said this is basically a way to ensure vocab is constantly revised in class, rather than consigned to a vocab notebook and left to rust.

Overall I would rate the changes in student learning as extremely encouraging. The evidence for my rating is that:

• 4 boys moved from not working within the writing curriculum at the beginning of the year to working within the curriculum at the end of the year which I would say was very encouraging.
• 2 boys moved from not working within the writing curriculum at the beginning of the year to actually exceeding the curriculum level at the end of the year which I would say is acceleration.

• When I learned that my boys don't like writing whole stories, I changed my programme to focus on shorter writing. They asked me, “mister can we do more hamburgers?( that's the model we used a lot to teach paragraph writing) and I said if it’s going to help you, why not?

• Their student voice said , mister when we do reading, the words are all there and we just have to read it, but with writing, we have to think of which words to use and its hard for us. So I changed my teaching to build vocabulary. We amplified the language by providing high quality vocabulary and through a process of spaced repetition involving a variety of activities, students were able to acquire those vocabulary words and make it their own.

 The most important learning I made about inquiry was:

• That you can change the attitude of boys towards writing

• Just as training builders to become confident in building each part of the house, which leads to a better quality house, so too if our students get  Intense teaching in the different components of writing, so too will they be happy to write a complete story and do a good job at it as well.

• No matter how exciting your lesson is, if you do not use a very basic teaching teaching principle of spaced repetition, your students will quickly forget what you have taught them. So introduce them to it today, bring it up tomorrow and again next week  and even next month and students will enjoy it and even remember it.

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