Getting Students to Learn: Academic Leaders Tell Us How

“I just want to see them learn and I would do everything to get them to learn. [I have] sleepless nights, just to ensure that they are provided with the [right] learning experiences. [I try to] motivate them and stimulate them, and if one thing is not working [I] try something else. This is my area of specialization and I just love it.”                                                                 Eualee Willis Roberts, Camp Summer Plus Academic LeaderThe entire focus of Camp Summer Plus (CSP) 2011 was moving the children along the literacy continuum. Academic Leaders and Advisors met weekly with one clear goal: to help the students learn. As Dr. Jean Beaumont, Chief of Party of the Jamaica Basic Education Project said, “The camp allowed us to get down to the classroom level with our strategies… efforts to improve literacy must focus on lowest performing students.”Monique Reynolds and Eualee Willis Roberts, two of the Academic Leaders at the camp, shared their approach to literacy instruction, known as The Four Block Approach. This was the main methodology used to engage the students.  Camp Literacy Advisor Novelette McLean noted that some teachers were not familiar with this method, as it is a bit different from strategies often used in Jamaican classrooms. Monique described how she implements this approach in her classroom:1. “We start out using Read Aloud. Today, we went outside, but sometimes we do it here in the classroom; yesterday, we did it on the floor. Read aloud is every day, so we try to do it in different ways so it does not get so monotonous.”2. “Then there are sight words  and decoding. Every day, we focus on five sight words and target words that [students] have to decode, and the words they have to decode [are derived] from whatever guided reading text we are going to use after that. For example the word ‘bridge’ and other ‘br’ words came from the poem, Susan Loves Bridges.” 3. “In the guided reading yesterday, we read aloud together, reading by group – I read, they read. They saw a slide of different bridges and we spoke about that.”4. “After that there is guided writing. We help [students] to pre-write, draft, revise, and edit their work. So Monday they pre-write, Tuesday they draft, Wednesday they revise and edit, and Thursday we have the author’s chair. [Students] sit on the author’s chair and read from what they have done, even if it is just a sentence. So overall, they get to organize their ideas. Guided writing is helping them to pre-write, draft their writing, edit their writing, and publish."A big plus of the CSP operational approach, the teachers found, was that the objectives of each lesson were clearly defined and they could concentrate on what works best in achieving each objective. The rigorous and consistent use of planning time was also useful to the teachers and Eualee noted that the weekly meetings are something she can utilize in her school. “I can take this back to put in my school”, Eualee explained. “Yes, we have been doing common planning, but not as regularly as we do it here – getting the feedback from each teacher, learning strategies, and sharing our own feedback and concerns about the children and how we deal with it”.Definition of key terms:

• Sight words are words that are automatically recognized without having to decode them.
• Decoding is defined as “the ability to make sense of printed words. This involves recalling and recognizing the spoken word that is represented by the printed word” (Improve Reading – Skills).
• Target words are key content words that have been pre–identified to be learnt by the student.