Learning Support and Extension

GK offers intervention programs for students requiring extra support, as well as extension
opportunities for students who are able to perform above their expected grade level.

BOOST

‘Boost’ is an intervention program designed for children who are at risk in their literacy learning. These
small group sessions take place two to four times per week. Groups are commonly made up of around 5
students who have similar abilities, similar needs and have been identified through ongoing teacher
assessments.

The home-school partnership is vital to the success of Boost. Children with lots of support and
encouragement from home consistently achieve better results. There may be a small amount of follow
up work sent home from time to time with each child, designed to consolidate the understandings being
developed at school.

NUMERACY SUPPORT

Numeracy support groups are run to assist students who require extra help in the main topics of
number, including place value. In a small group format, students are provided with explicit additional
teaching and activities to help support their continued progress to the next level. These groups are run
by qualified teaching staff, including the Vice-Principal at GK.

EXTENSION OPPORTUNITIES IN THE CLASSROOM

Learning extension opportunities for students achieving above expected standards. Students who
consistently demonstrate that they have mastered the standards of their current grade level are
challenged through explicit teaching in the classroom to progress to the next level of work. This can
include a range of tasks designed to extend these students, including:
  Reading more extended and complex texts, and discussing these with peers in guided groups
and literature circles

 Developing knowledge of more advanced vocabulary and elements of grammar and punctuation

 Being challenged to solve multi-step mathematical problems

MATHEMATICS ZONING

In grade five and six, students are involved in learning mathematics in zoned groupings, involving
teaching at the level of need of students. This ensures that high-achieving students are continuously
extended into high school mathematics materials. Simultaneously, students who are struggling with
specific concepts are supported in developing these through the continued use of concrete
manipulatives in smaller groups. The Principal and Assistant Principal are regularly involved in both
leading and assisting with these needs-based mathematical workshops, ensuring we cater for every
students' next level of learning at GK.

PREMIER'S READING CHALLENGE

During a set timeframe from February to August, students are challenged to read a minimum of
30 books (Prep, Grade 1 and 2) and 15 books (Grade 3 – 6) from a nominated list of high quality titles.

Students may also select titles according to their own interests. Those students who successfully meet
the challenge have their names published in The Age and The Herald Sun as well as receive a certificate
of completion. All Glen Katherine students are entered into and encouraged to participate in this
challenge.

STEM Should Be a Natural Extension of

Literacy Education
01/29/2013 04:18 pm ET Updated Mar 31, 2013
Thinking child with a blackboard in the background

The nation seems enamored with the acronym STEM, which stands for
science, technology, engineering, and math.
However, according to the National Math and Science Initiative, the lack of
STEM proficiency is a crisis for U.S. educators, with students finishing 25th in
math and 17th in science in the ranking of 31 countries by the Organization for
Economic Coordination and Development (OECD). These findings are of
significant concern, of course, because essential elements of a STEM
education are absolutely necessary for youth to find future employment that is
enriching, rewarding, relevant and of importance in the world.

Microsoft reported in 2011 that it had engaged Harris Interactive to conduct

research to determine the STEM perceptions of parents and students, and
found that 49 percent of K-12 parents see STEM as a top priority, but only 24
percent would be willing to spend extra money for STEM education. The
divide between the survey group’s knowledge and its participants’ willingness
to act on that knowledge is disconcerting, especially in light of the accepted
value of STEM in providing competitive advantages in life.

STEM should not be treated as a separate domain in education, but rather

treated as a cross-domain strategy. In fact, the 21st century skills of
collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and communication must be infused
with STEM education to provide students with the thinking skills inherently
needed in STEM careers. In addition, art education should be integral, which
may change the acronym to STEAM. The Harris Interactive survey actually
found that parents were more willing to spend extra money on art education,
and that students favored art careers over STEM, which presents a strategy
for fostering STEM interest through art courses.

The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) has a

mandate to educate the whole child, and this mandate is shared by the
American Association of School Administrators. This compact emphasizes
that our students must not only learn knowledge, they should also learn
strategies that foster emotional intelligence, civic awareness, accountability,
and empathy for others. The Destination Imagination programming
accentuates these skills, and includes perseverance strategies that teach risk
taking, resilience, mindfulness, and self-determination.
As mentioned above, STEM education is not a single-domain strategy and
should be integrated across all curricula to enable children to construct
meaning across disciplines. STEM education can be taught through stories,
pictures, sound, videos, and hands-on activities. The opportunity for educators
is to use inquiry-guided learning (questioning) strategies to engage children to
use their imaginations for creativity, and then use the same teaching
methodology for critical thinking. This engagement could invoke emotion in
the form of excitement and passion, which is a brain-based teaching strategy.
A goal of STEM education should be to foster higher-order thinking skills,
such as goal setting, planning/budgeting, organizing, prioritizing, memorizing,
initiating/risk-taking, shifting, and self-monitoring.

Bottom line is that educators need to recognize that STEM is not a stand-
alone educational strategy. STEM knowledge should be integrated across the
curriculum, and schools should use after-school programs, such as the ones
offered by Destination Imagination, to develop practical skills — collaboration,
creativity, critical thinking, and communication — while fostering a sense of
wonderment, which is needed for passion, perseverance, and innovation.

Chuck Cadle, M.Ed., is a licensed teacher and educational leader. He is CEO

of Destination Imagination, Inc., a NJ-based educational non-profit, which has
been teaching STEM education through its after-school Challenge-based
distance learning program since its inception in 1999.

5
Extension
Cooperative Extension (extension) was designed to link land grant college
programs, grass-roots needs, and national priorities. Its implementation completed
the tripartite mission of the land grant college system and made the land grant
model a unique concept in higher education. The three-way partnership among the
federal government, the states, and the local communities was established to enable
the delivery of new technologies to the farm and to relay farmers' needs to the
university researcher as well as teach technical and self-enhancement skills to farm
and rural youth; and it has helped rural households and communities meet their
daily economic challenges and cope with changing times (Rasmussen, 1989).
Although the distinction is not always clear, university extension, conversely, is
more often focused on continuing education for graduates and members of the
community and it is often fee-based.

Today cooperative extension faces many challenges but also considerable

opportunity. Its critics argue it is spread too thin both spatially and substantively.
Satellite training, Internet access, CD ROM, and videos have supplanted bulletins,
brochures, and meeting presentations—the traditional media of cooperative
extension. Furthermore, it is often not on the cutting edge of research, and many if
not most of its programs do not have a broad base of support outside its traditional
circle of clientele. At the same time, new information technologies offer
opportunities to enhance the efficiency of extension delivery (Hildreth and
Armbruster, 1981). Growing incentives for private consulting in the farm sector
means that, where incentives for the private sector are lacking, extension can put
more emphasis on programs with broad public benefits and on clientele with
limited means to pay. The large number of public issues and informational needs
that relate to the food and agricultural system exemplifies the continuing need for a
system dedicated to linking science to the national interest.

Several issues important to extension, and accompanying recommendations, were

discussed in Chapter 2:

 the potential for designing extension programs to create a new geography

through regionalization, distance learning, and multistate collaborations;
 the diversity of producer and other clientele groups, and how extension along
with research must—drawing on broad stakeholder input—more carefully
assess the differing needs of these diverse groups;