This week our team discussed how well we are reaching our students through implicit teaching in literacy and numeracy. After looking at the ACARA standards for teaching and learning time in these areas we felt that with Investigations taking up so much of the morning block we weren’t fitting in as much as we thought. With this in mind we revisited our timetable and began to throw around some ideas of how we could better spend our time teaching implicitly. We decided that we needed to work towards  a model of Investigations that would best suit the needs of our children rather than one that fit perfectly with Kathy’s model. We discussed how their developmental stages can affect engagement in investigations and whether this can impact on the students use of provocations. After talking to Christine also about some of our concerns she helped us to see that we need to monitor how many of our students we can see engaging with the provocations and decide if we believe the learning is worthwhile for the majority.

After lots of talking it through we decided that we would trial only doing investigations three times each week so that we can work towards a better literacy block that has clearer focuses and explicit teaching. Through the coming week we will monitor how the kids respond to the new timetable and groups. In my class also I want to discuss with the children how they can work towards being more focussed in Investigations.