Meeting with Dr Aaron Wilson to sound out my inquiry #1

At our last CoL teacher meeting, we were given the challenge to find tools and measures that would support our inquiries in a more robust way.  Because I am a bit slow at processing important information some times (meaning I need some one to one translating of words and concepts lol) another colleague and I, Hinerau Anderson, asked to meet with Dr Aaron Wilson to sound out whether we were on the right track with our inquiries.

I shared my thoughts around the difficulties kids had with completing tasks and when it came to writing summaries, students especially boys, were struggling.

The first task I need to do was to find out who was not completing them and how long they were.  Aaron shared that he had worked with a teacher at another secondary school (similar to ours) who was struggling with their year 10 class to write summaries.  When collecting data, he suggested that the best source of data would be copies of summaries they've written themselves.  Once I had evidence of kids work, I could put them into three categories: incomplete, complete, missing.  Using a marking rubric will help me gain a good picture of where the kids were at with their summary writing.

From this, there are a number of hypothesis that could be the reasons for the challenge:

1. Was them understanding instructions
2.  Related to not reading the text (can't/don't know how)
3.  Flow diagram - can read but don't know much about summarising
4.  Not good at knowing the structure of the text.
5.  Some can write a summary but don't see the purpose - analyse and find out what's going wrong

We touched on a number of approaches that could support different students at different stages which I will talk about in later blogs.