A Letter to Lead Team

A Letter to Lead Team

Hi everyone,

I have been reflecting on the learners in my class and have struggled with the whole concept of having my learners leave to go somewhere else for their learning.

I thought I would share my journey with them so far this year,

In Term 1, seven At Risk learners left my room 4 days a week for about 45 minutes,This happened at 3 different times of the day, which meant these children would miss out on 2 writing sessions, and a reading session.Unfortunately these AT Risk Maths learners are also At Risk Writers and Readers.

On top of this in Term 1 Jess had these same learners for reading support on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays during my writing sessions, These At Risk Writers would get no writing, but have my maths lesson, Cindy's maths lesson, my reading lesson and Jess's reading  lesson.

I appreciated their help with these learners, but because the kids were timetabled at different times on different days it was impossible for me to create a balanced timetable without going insane. Often  I would have just finished motivating the whole class, when Cindy's group would start coming back. I would have to do the same motivation...again! There are huge gaps in their writing book where writing didn't happen.

As a classroom teacher, I value the extra help these learners get, but it ends up not really extra, because they end up missing out on another curriculum area where they are also At Risk. What would have worked better for me and my class of learners was for Cindy to come into my class at the same time every day, to work with these learners at Maths time. Cindy is such a good Maths teacher I could have learned from her as well.

If someone has another solution to this dilemma, please share, because  I need to do better for my learners.

As a result of this Term 3 looks to be an exciting change with Cindy coming in to my room which means we can experiment with co teaching.I have set up a Google Doc for our planning. we are setting it up initially as a 2 week cycle. We will review it after 2 weeks. The idea is that we will have 2 groups, but we will both work with 1 of those groups.