Open the Door using SAC Pacs - Prepare, Plan, Build
There is a famous Chinese proverb that states "teachers open the door but you must enter by yourself". This is a lovely reminder that as teachers we endeavour to develop our students’ capabilities and inclinations to become independent learners. This can be quite a challenge and Phillipa Nock, Chinese teacher at Christ Church Grammar School, has risen to that challenge with the help of a NALSSP grant.
Christ Church Grammar School offers courses in Japanese, French and Chinese and received a NALSSP grant to support and expand the Chinese program in the school. Phillipa used the NALSSP grant to create Self Access Centre packages (SAC Pacs) for her Chinese language classes. Need more information on SAC Pacs? See SAC What?
No matter which language you teach, Phillipa's advice and explanation of the process of planning, structuring and organising a SAC Pac is helpfully detailed and informative. There are three videos in the series:
PREPARE
Phillipa explains why she needed to provide differentiated learning for her students with authentic, interesting, contemporary and engaging texts.
PLAN
With a clear purpose for creating self-access centre packages to cater for the diverse abilities and interests of their students, careful planning was the foundation of success. Phillipa was ably assisted by Tanya Jain who had been a prac student at Christ Church Grammar School. They both applied their knowledge of the topics included in text books and topics that appeal to students in planning their sacpacs.
BUILD
Phillipa and Tanya thought as much about how the SAC Pacs would be structured, organised and produced as they did about text selection and task design. In this video, Phillipa talks about the SAC Pac's structure, task design and skills development. She explains how she and Tanya met the challenges of making the materials attractive, interesting and durable and how they incorporated audio, video resources. Of special interest, Phillipa shows a work record and listening and viewing tasks and explains how scaffolding and support are built-in.
You can download all the documents for the Sports package below. This is a wonderful opportunity for teachers of any language to examine text types and tasks in detail. You'll be inspired by Phillipa's work and her generosity in providing these resources.
