Ako

I had a great day yesterday. I was full of energy even when I reached home after school. I could help my daughter get the tools that she needed and also help her with her engineering project, run around the chores at the same time and still feel fresh and energised. Surely I had a great day at school and this was because I had enjoyed modelling a writing lesson for Ottilie who is a beginningTeacher at our school.

Ottilie was finding it hard to move some of her students in writing. They did not use powerful words for impact and this was the reason they did not score well.
At the end of the lesson I could motivate enough to make a difference to three of her students who are not at the Standard. There was one students in the group who was particularly too shy to participate. She barely lifted her head up to answer simple questions about her writing. She was not very enthusiastic about being in a group as she had very low self esteem.

I knew instantly, I needed to make them believe that they could be successful like all the other students in the group. For the purpose of modelling we chose mixed ability students so that students could learn of each other. so I buddied up my low achieving students with some students who were average in Writing.
We talked about sharing and helping each other in the group and said that their learning was not complete if they had not explained their work to a buddy or had not helped another student to be successful in the tasks that they were working on.

So I set them on a group worthy task where they had to write all powerful words for the word 'big'. At this point I noticed that the higher ability students immediately started talking to the lower ability students. The low ability students felt cherished when they saw their work being valued. They all participated eagerly and contributed to the discussions.

Later they used the powerful words to write descriptions about the sky tower.

They wrote their descriptions about other pictures using powerful words and felt successful.
To built up their confidence further, Ottilie today used them as an expert group to write a narrative about the picture that we had worked on. Ottilie said that all the students in our expert group helped the class out to use powerful words, and most importantly, the ones who had low confidence, were today, teaching other children in the class to use powerful words in their writing!

Intrinsically motivated! I would say.