12 June 2020

Post date: Jun 12, 2020 12:52:19 AM

"Writing floats on a sea of talk"

And to get the talk we need to deliberately teach the art of conversation. Discourse.

Teachers have been investigating discourse and how we improve the conditions in the classrooms and naturally this links to the quality of discourse between the bigger/older people in the classroom as well!

I noticed this message shared in Māhutonga Matariki this week:

This week we will focus on:

Thumb/fingers. No hands up.

Show respect for other people’s ideas. Mistakes are a learning opportunity.

Have good listening behaviours, we look at the speaker.

Move head and body to look at the speaker.

Now a lot of this thinking has come more recently from the Maths world with Number Talks, Talk Moves and anything associated with communicating ideas in Maths and developing Maths language. But quality discourse is what we are after across all learning areas.

Learning to write is quite a mission. Especially when we have such a ph, wr, ei........ crazy spelling for so many words! Writing continues to be a major priority area for us. We want our children being confident, taking risks, writing more, not being caught up in perfection that will prevent a mark being made on a page.

In a former life, I spent 2 years working with Dr Murray Gadd, the maestro of developing children as writers. Over this time, I worked with about 50 schools to get writing moving and shaking. It was a priority area for the Ministry of Education, our weakest link in the 3 Rs nationally, so to speak. This was 20 years ago....... and it's still a puzzle. If writing does really float on a sea of talk then improving discourse must be a piece in the jigsaw.

We would love to work closer with you with this.

To get the conversation rolling Carl, Ximena and John will be hosting an inaugural webinar:

Learners as Writers at Worser Bay School - Webinar - Thursday 25 June, 6.30pm to 7.15pm

How do children develop their knowledge of writing at school? How can we make links between home and school to grow confidence in our writers? Join Carl, Ximena and John for a Webinar on How Writing Develops at School via Zoom on Thursday 25 June from 6.30pm - 7.15pm.

The Zoom meeting details will be sent via our school email system on Wednesday 24 June.

Now if this works......we could try it again!