Programme in action
"This has opened my eyes to teaching"
You don’t have to be with James, Philip and Carolyn for very long to feel their energy for what is being achieved with literacy and numeracy at Waiariki Institute of Technology.
James (at left) a carpentry tutor (Level 3 & 4) based at the Tokoroa campus is new to tertiary education and training.
“I want to be a better teacher and this has been a total transformation for me”, he says about the literacy and numeracy professional development and support from Carolyn Bourke, Co-ordinator for Embedding.
Now James says he is much more aware of his relationship with the students, their literacy and numeracy needs and is even more alert to the impact of the changes he has made in his own delivery.
Several strategies that he uses in his sessions pay deliberate attention to the new technical vocabulary for the carpentry students. Moving away from “chalk and talk” there is now much more interaction in the theory work and a range of activities used to “warm up” students’ prior knowledge and get them reading and learning from each other. “Having these tools has really helped me as a teacher” says James.
Another example he now uses before introducing the trades workbook is to take the table of contents, reprint it, cut into strips and ask pairs of students to put the headings into the right order. It creates opportunity for discussion about how texts are structured and about vocabulary and comprehension. Regularly using glossaries and creating word maps results in the students making stronger links from the words studied in class and what they need to know on the job.
Carolyn’s role is to lead the professional development work and to support tutors to make these changes to their delivery to strengthen students’ literacy and numeracy skills. She notes that results from the numeracy diagnostic from the Learning Progressions resource books indicate that there are common areas emerging within Steps 5 and 6 of the numeracy progressions that are proving to be difficult for the students. One of her next goals is to provide resources and support to tutors in these areas.
“I was pretty reluctant at first but now at a personal level I now think more consciously about the level of literacy and numeracy within a programme and what I can do about it. At the collegial level we are building an embedding culture within our school”, says Philip Bright, business lecturer. “After participating in the cluster literacy and numeracy is on the agenda. It crops up at whole school meetings. We see this as a vital component of retention and success”.
Philip and his colleagues have redesigned their work folders to include activities that support students to read and understand the material and the students themselves used their computing skills to assist with this.
“The ‘concrete’ literacy and numeracy activities where students learn together and from each other has reduced my “blabbing” in front of the whiteboard, so my class is much more interactive and it’s much more fun”.
“We are also more careful about the wording of assessments, not dumbing them down but choosing assessment tasks that encourage writing whole sentences and paragraphs and raising our expectations of the students’ writing”.