Should W.A.L.T's retire?

The joys of looking in your drafts. I started this post last year and I have simply tidied it up a bit. Clearly, I had other thoughts I wanted to express but alas the day to day pressures meant this slipt out of my priorities. And am I still using WALTs? Yes, but this post are refuelled my thoughts in this area.

Just as I was finishing teachers college, two new sets of 'it' words became all the rage, W.A.L.Ts and success criteria. But in this time of student-directed learning is there still a place for telling children what they are learning or would it be better to change tact?

I had an example in maths today where I was teaching children a strategy to use addition and subtraction to work out fractions of sets. A couple of questions in, a child who I least expected said to me when working out 1/3 of a set, "oh that's just using your 3 times tables, can I just do that instead?"
Part of this argument relates back to the importance of assessment but are using W.A.L.Ts setting restrictions for our learners? Would a focus for the lesson or a question be better suited, for example, 'our focus is working out fractions of sets', or 'what is the fastest strategy I can use to work out fractions of sets?'

A couple of years ago I attended a workshop run by an Australian lady Kath Murdoch who first implanted this idea about moving away from W.A.L.Ts and using questions instead. I remember telling a colleague about it but he couldn't quite get his head around it. I think now might be the time to investigate this idea further and getting away from telling my children what they are learning and opening up possibilities instead.

PLG group 2018 introduction

Today many of the primary teachers around the Uru Manuka cluster gathered for our first professional learning group (PLG) of the year. We had a choice of four groups which focused on some of the important findings from Woolf Fisher Research that have been shown to make a difference for student outcomes. Of the four groups, extending conversations, activating prior knowledge, effective feedback and critical literacy I chose the later.

This will fit in with my inquiry question, which I am still working on the wording but at this stage is

Can improving critical literacy skills accelerate reading progress of my target readers?

Today's main focus was to select a reading and focus on some of the key items of particular relevance or interest to us personally.

Below are some of the key ideas for me from the reading Questions that matter, conversations that count Implementing critical literacy with young children By Raella Kahuroa

Critical Literacy - A working definition from the work of Vasquez, Egawa, Harste, and Thompson
(2004) describes the approach as:
The body of practices that involve the critical analysis and transformation of texts, based on the
understanding that texts are ideologically charged and as such represent particular points of view where some perspectives are silenced while other perspectives are privileged. These practices also operate on the belief that texts are socially constructed and therefore can be reconstructed. (p. xiv)

• Critically literacy (CL) give learners opportunities to 
• become text analysts, not just text consumers
• look at text through different critical frames
• ask questions
• have (extended) conversations 
• look at things from different perspectives
• build empathy
• make their thinking visible
• Sandretto (2011) suggests 13 different frames, or themes, that are often used in critical literacy:
• age
• race/ethnicity
• consumerism
• class
• culture
• gender 
• stereotypes 
• environmental issues
• historical context
• ability
• choice
• sexuality
• difference
• Confirming that critical literacy links well with multimodal text
• No text is neutral
• Naming is a good starting point for beginning CL with a young group of students or a group 
• CL is not necessarily aiming to change children's thinking but more planting seeds and helping students to realise that ideas can be investigated.

I am really looking forward to exploring this topic further as it is definitely an area of personal interest. So much so that I was hoping to do a Master's paper on the subject but unfortunately it is no longer being offered.