Teachers at Gordon Primary School and Bonython Primary School in the Lanyon Cluster of Schools, Australia, recently developed a Learning by Design learning element for students in grades 5-6 (ages 10-12 years). This was an interesting collaboration as it really started out as two separate projects.
Hiroshima
Firstly three teachers, Emma Ross, Les Longford and Shane Carpenter volunteered to participate in a national Becoming Asia Literate project. This involved developing a learning element and participating in action research. Their learning element, Hirsohima – an empathetic look or The day the sky exploded, focuses on developing empathy and respect in students as they study the Japanese involvement in World War 2 and the effects of the atomic bomb on the Japanese people. Japanese is studied by the students for an hour each week and the learning element is designed to develop a greater understanding of Japanese culture and ultimately develop a more positive attitude by the students towards learning Japanese. The action research is being documented on the Lanyon Cluster Teaching and Learning wiki.
A the same time as this learning element was being developed, teachers at Bonython Primary School, led by Robyn Kiddy, were developing Learning by Design placemats which focused on reading. These teachers were also participating in action research as part of the Lanyon Cluster Teaching and Learning projects. They developed a series of placemats, all focusing on different reading strategies. To support the Japanese teacher at Bonython, Robyn Kiddy and I developed a placemat based on the picture book, Photographs in the Mud by Diana Wolfer and Brian Harrison-Lever. Set on the Kokoda Trail in Papua-New Guinea in 1942, it tells a story from the point of view of two soldiers, Jack and Hoshi, who meet in battle and discover how much they have in common. Its main theme is the personal human tragedy of war for the soldiers and their families.
In our design we wanted to focus on the inferring reading strategy and also included other strategies such as connecting self to text, predicting and codebreaking. These were embedded into the learning design using strategies based on Cooperative Reading developed by Dr Glenda Raison. As the text is a picture book we could focus on both the visual and linguistic grammar of the text. This was highly engaging for the students as they could infer from the choice of colour, especially the soft pastel colours and the change in mood once the soldiers are injured. There are frames within frames to emphasise the importance of photographs for memories and for survival. Also the framing reflects how the characters become closer. In the linguistic text, the words used to describe the actions of the Japanese soldiers are very aggressive while the verbs to describe the actions of the Australian soldiers are not. The cumulative effects of these choices by the author subtly position the audience to be more positive towards the Australian soldiers.
The Japanese teacher at Bonython Primary School began teaching the placemat and commented how engaged her students were and how the placemat took away so much pressure in lesson planning. I also trialled the placemat with a couple of year 6 classes at Charles Conder Primary School and realised how powerful the text was. After talking to the Gordon Primary School teachers they decided that all of the year 4, 5 and 6 teachers would also teach it to complement the Hirsoshima work that the Japanese teacher was doing. At this stage we decided that it would be highly useful to add the placemat to the Hirsohima learning element.
Collaboration is a powerful way of developing a learning element, firstly in the creative design process and also in ensuring the documentation is completed to a high standard. Including purpose and teaching tips on the teacher side ensures the communication to teachers using the learning element is clear and detailed. The learning element provides so much more information than the placemat, making the design explicit, including objectives and assessment, and providing teaching tips to support implementation.
This learning element was taught to 16 classes in three Cluster primary schools so the effort in designing and documenting the learning element has paid off already and will be of value in future years. Further it has supported the high number of early career teachers in our schools by showing them how to address diversity, create student agency, focus on multimodality by explicitly teaching the grammar of texts, and ensure learner transformation.
It's all about learning 