Best Practice

Spelling proves a successful new focus

Lucy Hine

February 02 2012

Using data to improve teaching practices is a foundation of the United in our pursuit of excellence improvement agenda and a core focus employed by one of Education Queensland's youngest and brightest schools.

'Spelling and differentiated learning are a strong part of the curriculum at our school,' says Meridan State College principal Julie Kornmann.

'Following the school's inception, we analysed our student data which identified spelling as one of three areas for our 'Lifting Learning' project and decided to unpack and extend the school's current spelling policies and teaching practices.'

Ms Kornmann says they set a clear schoolwide agenda for improvement based on the results of the data and developed a strategy that has been led by Meridan's head of curriculum, Julie Elder.

'We began the Lifting Spelling Project by in-servicing all teachers in how to use the spelling inventories in the 'Words Their Way' program to identify what individual students know about words and what they needed to learn,' says Ms Kornmann.

'Teachers were shown how to group students according to their spelling ability using a 'school snapshot' tool. Individual spelling goals were set with all students which involved them in the process of improving their spelling.

'There was a noticeable improvement across the school after the implementation of the 'Lifting Spelling Project', including improved consistency and NAPLAN spelling results, particularly in Year 5.'

Ms Kornmann says the addition of the school-developed 'Meridan Spelling Resource' to the spelling policy provided detailed information about what students were required to learn in the different phases of spelling.

'This school resource helped teachers to plan for differentiated instruction and enabled us to match strategies to each of the spelling phases.

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'We use diagnostic assessments to identify student learning needs, group students for instruction according to the data, and develop targeted programs and goals designed to improve student learning.

'After identifying key focus areas for students and student learning goals, teachers monitor student progress over short blocks of time (four or five weeks) rather than wait for the next summative assessment.

'These measures ensure that our detailed unit plans are not delivered as a one-size-fits-all curriculum.'

Ms Kornmann says teachers are allocated cooperative planning time towards the end of each term to prepare units and curriculum for the following term.

For this exercise whole year teams are released to work with the head of curriculum in whole and half-day planning sessions.

'These planning sessions are successfully used to examine data and set our class program goals as well as provide an opportunity to identify teacher professional development needs.

'The head of curriculum also models key strategies in these planning sessions and ensures consistent practices across the college.

'This ensures our documents, such as our spelling policy, are not just a piece of paper, but a practice that comes alive in every classroom.'