The Learning Area

Literacy
After completing a self-reflection on the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, and
analysing the data, I decided to focus on my literacy instruction and align with standard 3.3 –
use teaching strategies.
This was also beneficial since the school in which I was placed had a focus on literacy
outcomes, and this is where I felt I could make the biggest impact.
Blair, Rupley & Nichols (2007, p. 43) explained that student success in reading and writing is
heavily dependent on quality teacher instruction. They went on to suggest that to provide
quality instruction, teachers should use a combination of explicit instruction, modelling and
guided practice. This is supported by Derewianka & Jones’ (2012, p. 45) teaching and
learning cycle, which follows exploration, explicit instruction, modelling, joint construction and
independent construction. I used this research to scaffold my literacy lessons and support the
development of my students.
 Focus Students
I began collecting evidence on 4 students, however I only got a complete sample on 2 students due to absences.
The other skew in the data is that of the 2 students that I did collect a full set of evidence on, both were out for sections
of each lesson due to their intervention time with SSOs.

Student 1
5-year old male. Currently being taken out on intervention for fine motor skills (writes letters and numbers transverse)
and replaces ‘r’ with ‘w’ and ‘th’ with ‘f’ in both his speech and writing. The reason I chose him is because he is easily
disengaged in learning. He regularly rolls his eyes and says ‘I’m sick of this’. My planning aimed to increase his
engagement in literacy.

Student 2
6-year old female. Currently in the process of being assessed by the special education teacher for major gaps in
comprehension both academically and socially. She will often put her hand up during instruction, and say something
that has nothing to do with the current topic. My aim for her is to boost comprehension throughout the nursery rhyme
unit.