ORID elements Focus Guiding Questions

Facts, Data  What were the key points you noted about the lessons?
 What did the students actually do during . . . ?
O What?  What did you observe during the . . . ?
Objective  What were the student behaviors you observed?
Reflective questions, Reactions  As you look at the students’ works, what concerns/pleases you?
 How did you feel as you were . . . ?
R  As you reflect on the lessons, what was exciting, surprising, or
What about the “What”? frustrating about . . . ?
Reflective  Which activities/actions do you think fostered high engagement?
Interpretive questions, critical thinking:  What could you have done/could you do to increase . . .?
 What could you have done/could you do to minimize the
I undesirable . . . .?
So What?  What other ways could you check for students understanding?
Interpretive  What did you learn about yourself through this experience?
Decision questions:  What things will you do differently?
 What things will you do the same in future . . . ?
D  Which of your skills will you further develop? And what will you
Now what? do to develop them?
Decisional  What are your next steps? What actions/ideas has this triggered
for you?
My Reflections

Teaching Up in 2020

Neat and most ideal in theory, teaching up can be tricky in its application and enactment in the
classroom. This reflection will focus on my T&L in 408. When the term ‘Graduating Class’ comes to
mind, many would envision lessons of drill and practice, or copious amounts of practice papers that
serve to get students exam-ready. I vehemently wanted to challenge this notion and strove to
incorporate insightful lesson materials coupled with the teaching and reinforcement of metacognitive
strategies in terms of processing reading comprehension.
408 comprises students of wildly differing linguistic proficiencies. I have avid readers and students with
robust vocabulary on one end of the spectrum, whilst others who experience difficulty in stringing
together grammatical sentences and spoken utterances on the other. The need for differentiation in
this class especially, is dire. Having worked with PMT Mr Cedric Leong and acquainting myself with
this concept of ‘Teaching Up’, I was convinced to try this out in my class in preparation for WA1
(Summary Skills) and in their ongoing essay submissions (Free Writing).

I found a lexically challenging text about social media and segmented a portion of it whilst crafting a
summary questions about ‘function’ of social media and what some of these ‘instantiations’ would look
like. I gave all my students to read through and guided them through the material in flexible groups that
collaborated to contend with content points (ie. whether they answered the question) and to what
extent they should paraphrase. This paved the way for rich classroom discussions which engaged
everyone, from my weakest students to the more confident and vocal ones too.

Moreover, I also came up with this new condition on essay submissions to scaffold their writing and
development - #20 AFIs. What this meant, was that as I marked their essay I would do 1 of 3 things :
(i) circle and error and write a suggested improvement (ii) circle the error and pose a question OR (iii)
circle the error without any accompanying comments. This was to raise students’ awareness with
respect to their own writing and guide them through how to improve in their writing. I would encourage
my students to then check through the rest of their essay for similar errors and submit the SAME piece
back to me again where I would do this entire process once again.

What these two instances, I find that students are led to their next step of improvement wherever they
are in their understanding. This process-focussed differentiation allows students to be more aware of
their knowledge baselines and pushes them to make that next step of improvement regardless of
where they are at. With sustained effort and with sharper monitoring on their part, my students can
become more independent and would be more compelled to improve. I hope to delve even deeper into
enacting Teaching Up in all my EL classes this year.