PLT Reflection

“If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton once said, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. Here he acknowledged that the ideas of other scientists contributed to his own discoveries, thereby illustrating that Literacy in Science, the conduit for these ideas, underpins advancement in all areas of this discipline. Indeed, every year I assess students on their reading and writing ability, yet too often fail to provide specific and explicit learning opportunities for them to develop their skills. The 2022 PLT program on Literacy changed all that.

I have been teaching for five years, currently within the Year 8 Investigate team, and this year during PLT sessions discovered more about the process of writing than ever before. The program covered fundamental sentence-level writing skills, such as conjunctions, appositives and expository terms, gradually progressing to note-taking and sentence expansion, where creativity and higher-order thinking are promoted. How to structure paragraphs, a skill I am still developing, followed naturally with the course culminating in revising and editing written pieces to produce a finished product. The sequencing of our PLT sessions was affable and logical, encouraging us to build on prior learning as we developed new skills.

Most beneficial for me was the specific examples of teaching techniques provided in the program. I utilised several of these within my classes, such as identifying and incorporating conjunctions and appositives in sentences through specific modelling and colour-coded examples. In addition, students developed note-taking skills using short-hand and the Cornell system, afterward expanding sentences to create summaries. I was surprised how engaged the students were in these scaffolded activities, and subsequently observed not only improved sentence writing across the class, but also enhanced retention of the scientific content. These outcomes clearly demonstrate the importance of modelling and explicit practise of literacy skills.

Writing is fundamental to the way we communicate knowledge and learning in Science, and the Literacy PLT program supplied exactly the support I needed to embed writing into my Investigate lessons. My hope for 2023 is that I can add more to my toolbox of writing tricks in order to develop literate young Scientists - or in the very least, students who feel confident they can write a decent prac report!

Mrs Jenni Gadd

Middle School Investigate Teacher.