STANDARD 3: PLAN FOR AND IMPLEMENT EFFECTIVE TEACHING AND LEARNING
3.3 Use teaching strategies
3.3 Use teaching strategies
Include a range of teaching strategies
Evidence
Figure 1: Classful. (n.d.). The gradual release of responsibility model. Classful. https://classful.com/gradual-release-of-responsibility-grr/
Annotation
During my placement, I used the Gradual Release of Responsibility model to structure my numeracy lessons.
Reflective statement
When planning and delivering my maths lessons, I used the Gradual Release of Responsibility model (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983) - often referred to as the ‘I do, we do, you do’ model - in which responsibility for task completion is gradually transferred from the teacher to students.
Fisher and Frey (2021, pp. 22) state that “[a] learner who sees a new skill executed, a new strategy deployed, or a new concept applied has a better sense of its value and more impetus to master it”. Thus, according to the model, the teacher takes responsibility for learning at the beginning of the lesson by demonstrating a desired strategy or approach (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983). During this stage, I modelled completing questions that used the same process as the ones students would be working on later in the lesson. I made sure to talk through the steps as I was completing them and verbalising my thinking. For example, saying ‘I know that rows run across left to right and columns climb up and down’ while modelling a question that involved identifying the number of rows and columns in an array. This approach is also aligned with the High Impact Teaching Strategy of worked examples (Department of Education and Training, 2020).
In the shared instruction phase, students became actively involved in this process. I used closed-ended questions such as ‘how many rows can you see in this array?’ and ‘how would we write this as a number sentence?’, and open-ended questions such as ‘what do you notice about these arrays?’ to guide students through the process and promote engagement.
Finally, in the guided and independent practice phases students completed a task using the process modelled at the beginning of the lesson. During this time, I frequently checked in on how students were progressing and offered verbal feedback on what they did well and/or how they could improve (DET, 2020).
References
Department of Education and Training [DET] (2020). High Impact Teaching Strategies. DET. https://www.education.vic.gov.au/Documents/school/teachers/support/high-impact-teaching-strategies.pdf
Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2021). Better learning through structured teaching : A framework for the gradual release of responsibility. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.
Pearson, D., & Gallagher, M. (1983). The instruction of reading comprehension. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 8(3), 317-344. https://doi.org/10.1016/0361-476X(83)90019-X
