Students only learn when they are engaged. In order to engage our students, we need to gain and hold their attention. We do this by making ourselves irresistible, presenting activities that are just too amazing to ignore. Once we have a student’s attention we can add in the learning.
Signature Practices are key practices that are visibly present in all class rooms for all learners.
Create Irresistible Invitations to Learn
Provide Repetition with Variety
For our students to learn new skills, they need lots of and lots of practice. We must provide plenty of variety in what this looks like, so students don’t become disengaged. Some of our students also have difficulty transferring their learned skills between different settings and contexts, so we need to repeat the learning opportunities so that they can be generalised.
Focus on the Process not the Product
Students learn by doing, being engaged, making mistakes, thinking, problem solving and having the space and support to take risks. Therefore, during learning activities staff support students to focus on what they are doing in the moment, not what the end result looks like.
Visible Structure and Routines
We put these in place to help students successfully navigate their day, with as much independence as possible. Visual timetables and supports are used to help student understand what is happening, when, where and who with. When students understand clearly what is expected of them, anxiety is reduce and they are more likely to be in the zone for learning.
Be a Reflective Detective
Our teachers all set high expectations for their students and adopt the ‘teaching as inquiry’ process to elicit the very best outcomes for their students. At the classroom level, this is very much about teachers knowing who their students are and how they learn. It requires teachers to view learning as a two-way process, continually reflecting on the impact of their practice on student learning and vice versa. Teachers take this information and use it to guide future learning interactions.
Show and Share the Learning
Visual thinking is a strength for many of our students, they ‘learn visually’. This maybe because visual information lasts longer and can be more concrete that spoken or heard information and our students need longer to process information before responding to it. We can support this strength by using visual supports to aid understanding and by showing or modelling a task or activity to a student.