Position children as primary knowers by having them dictate texts for a real purpose to a teacher acting as scribe¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

In the Modena project, five-year-olds work collaboratively to co-construct texts for social purposes by dictating to their teacher, who acts as scribe and "active recorder", reading back and posing questions that invite expansion. The teacher cedes the children the role of primary knower: they are the experts on the content and she is the novice. The children retain autonomy of composition and judgement, correcting each other and determining when the task is satisfactorily achieved.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• A genuine communicative purpose the children recognise, and a teacher willing to adopt the novice role and pose puzzled questions rather than supply wording

Constraints¶

• The teacher still assembles the children, sets the task and initiates exchanges, so autonomy operates within teacher-set boundaries; the activity did not tackle the orthographic code

Target Learners¶

• five-year-olds in pre-school classrooms

Target Learning Goals¶

• composing written texts for real audiences
• exercising judgement about correctness and completeness

Affordances¶

• Anatomy Of Autonomy In Early Literacy

Related Strategies¶

• Shared Writing

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Dombey, Henrietta; Formisano, Marina Pascucci. (1999). Examining the Notion of Autonomy in the Context of Early Literacy Learning in Four European Countries. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED434766