We all have unique stories about how we became teachers. In my case, I became a teacher, then left, and fifteen years later, I realised just how much I loved it. Now, three years later, I have stories of surviving COVID and starting from scratch… though the second time around, it has held many surprises on how memory impacts ‘how I once taught’ and ‘how I face up to the changes of what is before me’.
In the last fifteen years, acronyms have gained currency I don’t remember from my earlier life as a teacher. I work with CATs, SATs, SACs, SCITAPs, and TEALs. Moreover, I can prove that the Age of the Acronym exceeds the education circle by going to the Australian Government’s ‘style manual.’
Most worryingly, I tend to devalue the full impact of the content captured in the abbreviations. I experience the acronym a bit like T. S. Eliot mentions in his image of ‘squeezing the universe in a ball’ because experiencing the journey feels nothing like the abbreviated version of the route before me.
This is how I experience teaching and learning about the 10 High Impact Teaching Strategies, aka HITS. Their complexity defies any reductionist attempt to pretend they are anything but richly challenging and multi-pronged ways of improving my teaching practices.
Then a strange thing happened…
I’ve been teaching on the Core Literacy team for two years. If one word comes to mind about my participation, it is the careful way the scope and sequence of the programme reveal themselves. There is nothing imposed on me that I can’t relate to my students in terms of how the strategies work towards making them great readers via comprehension skills, oral language skills, mental models, and so much more.
Then it struck me. Every time I reflected in a lesson on how that lesson had impacted my students, I found myself moving towards the evidence I had been learning about in my professional reflections on the 10 HITS. In short, I realised I was participating in a VIRTUOUS CIRCLE.
The more I taught and learned about teaching Core Literacy, the more I found myself in a positive feedback loop on what I loved about teaching… giving my students ways to become successful learners.
So, I’m setting up this blog to share what I’m learning as a ‘Core Literacy Teacher’, primarily how focusing on the underpinning literacy skills helps me plan and teach lessons with a deeper understanding of the HITS in all my teaching.