Visible Thinking Strategies to Promote Writing and Literacy Development for Literacy Learners

Indigenous students in primary classrooms are generally willing to engage in classroom conversations and participate in group discussions. Their communicative contributions can be viewed as natural extensions of the oral tradition Indigenous students are familiar with. For the classroom teacher, these communicative contributions can be used as a wonderful opportunity to gauge student thinking and form a framework for extending oracy and literacy learning. However, a difficulty experienced by many Indigenous learners is the articulation of oral communication into written communication. Creating narrative texts may be the easiest for Indigenous learners because they can rely on the textual features of storytelling that they are culturally accustomed to. However, creating texts such as persuasive, argumentative and expository texts can be a real struggle and result in disengaged writers. This workshop has a practical focus and aims to provide teachers with strategies they can implement in their classrooms to support Indigenous learners with their writing skills and promote literacy development