A
last resort? Teaching Resources Homepage
Teaching Notes and Activities:
- B-D-A: Reading A last resort?
- the Summary Guide to the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention - Getting to know the Convention on the Rights of the Child
- Useful Links and Resources
- Download the Resources
Before-During-After Reading:
A last resort? - the Summary Guide to the National Inquiry into Children
in Immigration Detention
The Before-During-After (B-D-A) Reading Activity is based on the K-W-L (what I know, what I want to know, and what I learned) strategy. It will assist teachers to ascertain what students already know about Australia’s Immigration Detention Policy and the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. It also creates a framework for further investigation of these issues.
The B-D-A Activity is designed to assist students to access the information in A last resort? A Summary Guide to the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention.
For further information on implementing and assessing this strategy in the classroom visit: http://www.myread.org/guide_frontloading.htm#kwl
Resources:
- A last resort? B-D-A worksheet - available for download in
Word and 
PDF formats. - A last resort? A Summary Guide to the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention
Teaching Strategy:
1. Provide students with the A last resort? B-D-A worksheet. They begin by brainstorming and listing in the 'before’ column everything they know about Australia’s Immigration Detention Policy and the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. This step can be done individually, with partners, in small groups or the whole class can participate together. However, it is important to always have students share and debate this information as a group before moving to the next step.
Before |
During |
After |
List
everything you know about Australia’s Immigration Detention
Policy and HREOC’s National Inquiry into Children in Immigration
Detention. |
While you
are reading, briefly note the new information you have learned about
the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention and
Australia’s Immigration Detention Policy. |
Write a
summary of the things you have learned about the National Inquiry
into Children in Immigration Detention and Australia’s Immigration
Detention Policy. |
2. Provide students with the A
last resort? A Summary Guide to the National Inquiry into Children
in Immigration Detention. While they are reading, ask students to
write brief notes on the new information they find in the 'during’
column. This can also be done individually, with partners, or in small
groups, depending on classroom dynamics and objectives. When students
locate information in the text that agrees with statements they wrote
in their ‘before’ column, they place a tick next to those
statements to indicate that their background knowledge was correct.
3. In the next step (after reading), students briefly summarise the new
information they have learned in the 'after’ column.
4. Using their summaries, students are then asked to write three
questions to quiz other readers (or to use for later study.)
The teacher should stress to students that the question should be phrased
so that only readers of the text could answer them. Teachers could expand
the lesson by requiring students to include different levels of questioning
(eg literal, interpretive and applied).
5. Next, group or whole-class discussion should take place to revisit
the ‘before reading’ statements that were listed on the worksheet
and to share and answer questions that students wrote.
6. Finally, students practise writing a main idea statement as a class. This seems to work better for practice than having students
write individual statements because main idea is often a difficult concept
for some students. At this stage, the teacher should discuss the difference
between a summary and a main idea.
The completed B-D-A worksheet can be submitted as an assignment in itself
or kept in student notebooks as a study aid.
The aim of this discussion is to establish what students already know
about the Australia’s Immigration Detention Policies and the treatment
of children held in Australian Immigration Detention Centres.
The B-D-A Activity is sourced from:
Laverick, C. (2002). B-D-A Strategy: Reinventing the wheel can be a good
thing. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 46, 144 -147.
Additional Resources
For further information on the K-W-L strategy visit:
- MyRead Website - developed by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) and the Australian Literacy Educators Association (ALEA) and published by the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), 2003. http://www.myread.org/guide_frontloading.htm#kwl
- Teaching English Website - developed by Office for Curriculum, Leadership and Learning, Department of Education, Tasmania. http://www.discover.tased.edu.au/english/choosing.htm#kwl
- Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs website: http://www.dimia.gov.au
- Minister for Immigration and Multicultural
and Indigenous Affairs website:
http://www.minister.immi.gov.au