Teaching Context

Teaching Context

Question 1

The literacy hour is designated to establish a common pattern and routine that pupils can follow to enable teachers to be more pro-active in the classroom and maximise the time spent teaching as opposed to managing. The basic structure of the hour will be for all classrooms so that pupils meet similar predictable framework from class to class (Harris, 2008 8-10). It also means that teachers will have a common structure to share the planning and develop their ideas. "The framework provides schools with a means of shifting the emphasis in planning for the revised National Curriculum (NC) for English" (Schmied 2000 157-176). The literacy hour clock was designed ot be the main focus or 'heartbeat' of the lesson, providing clear direction, pace and interactivity.

Reading and writing are justifiably referred to as central parts of the basics as these tools are for further learning (Francis 2003 137). Very low levels of literacy are associated with unemployment and crime, it is therefore crucial that literacy skills should be aimed to be taught and learnt effectively, preventing such happenings.

A teacher does not want a high proportion of the class `switching off'; surely his aim is to keep all pupils on task for as long as possible. Therefore I feel that this style needs careful planning and supervision both before and during the lesson. The style does though allow the teacher to be more of an observer or supervisor and therefore pay attention to those that might be losing interest and direct the attention of the class onto those pupils, either by asking those questions or having them help a pupil who may be struggling to understand. Whole-class teaching still actively involves children, Far from reducing the role of the teacher; it restores their pedagogic skills to the centre of classroom work. However it has many benefits in that it brings the pupils together focuses their attention as a whole and provides real opportunity for structured and focused learning.

There is much emphasis with younger readers on collaborative re-reading of the text. As children become more fluent readers, and confident in the independent strategies they need for unfamiliar text, less emphasis is placed on reading aloud in unison, and more on exploring the text together.

In the first section of the literacy hour (15 minute) is whole class teaching whereby the objectives of the lesson are made clear. This allows children to focus and have a clear understanding of what is expected of them and what has to be done. Within this 15 minute period shared reading or writing is taken place. Here the teacher is able to model effective reading or writing.

It is suggested that more interactive forms of whole class teaching will play a vital role in rasining literacy standars by promoting high quality dialogue and discussion and raising inclusion, understanding and learning performance. In the NLS framework successful teaching is described by 'discurive, charachterised by high quality oral work and interactive, encouraging, expectingand extending pupil's contributions' (Johansson and Hofland, 2004 ...