Bron's story

Bron is a young teacher who has a great knowledge of her students, their needs and their learning. She is very enthusiastic about the Essential Learnings and its relevance for her students. She had a very clear goal for the learning sequence she developed and worked purposefully with her students to reach a meaningful outcome.

Bron is a teacher at a special school. The school staff began exploring the Essential Learnings in 2004 and Bron recalls with pleasure the satisfaction she felt, within minutes of first opening her ELs folder, at seeing the natural connection between the planning she already did for her students with severe disabilities and what an ELs-based curriculum would provide for learners.

Her students are all between 17 and 18 years of age. There are seven students in the class with one teacher and two teacher aides at any one time. The students have multiple disabilities and are preintentional communicators. As such, they have no language, but have very specific, idiosyncratic ways of indicating ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and indicating choice and preference.

The purpose of the learning sequence

Transition to post-school life is a very big focus for this senior class. With four of the students moving on into post-school placements in 2006 and the rest the year after, Bron wanted to ensure that the potential each student had in communicating personal information, needs and wants would be maximised for their entry into the new setting. She also considered the IEP goals for each learner. From these two considerations she decided to design a learning sequence (I am, I can, I prefer, I want) to gather together such personal information especially around the preferences of each student. The culminating performance would be the demonstrated ability of the students in their new setting to convey to others some information about their identity.

Bron carefully planned her learning sequence with these whole class and individual goals in mind. She devised a number of active learning experiences as well as utilising some of the natural learning opportunities from daily routines such as meal times to assess her students’ learning. During the weeks of implementation, Bron revisited many of the activities (performances) especially with different adults supporting the students to assess whether the responses and behaviours would remain the same irrespective of the presence of different people. It was also important, given the level of interpretation of behaviour involved, to see whether different adults would interpret behaviours differently.

Key features of Bron’s work are represented in the diagram below with links to the teacher notes that Bron provided. These explain in detail the kinds of planning, support and accommodations she was making in her work to maximise student engagement and achievement.

Phoebe’s case study provides examples and evidence of student performance in relation to the learning sequence

References

Bloomberg, K and West, D. (1999) The Triple C – Checklist of Communication Competencies Communication Resource Centre, Victoria.

SCOPE, 2004 InterAACtion: Strategies for Intentional and Unintentional Communicators Communication Resource Centre, Victoria.

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