TAI2020 WFRC Inquiry task #3: Building an accurate student profile

Inquiry task #3: 

My task is to describe the tools/measures/approaches I plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge.  I will also try to justify why I chose these approaches and tools.

(Note: Although my hope is to inquire into how teachers collaborate as well as our students, my focus for answering the inquiry questions will focus on the students).

My challenge is to see if implementing the strategies involved in the ‘Talanoa’ will help my learners to collaborate better in their project based groups.  I feel that by doing this it will help my learners to make accelerated shifts across the board in reading and writing.

Raising the literacy levels for our junior school in reading and writing is a focus across all curriculum areas.  Is it key to preparing our students for the challenges of NCEA in the senior school. I would like to if the Talanoa could be used as a tool to enhance learning.  My efforts in the past have not been entirely successful in incorporating the Talanoa, as my focus has been raising the achievement in writing for my learners and Talanoa became lost in translation.  My idea is to equip students with the tools to talk their learning by using well-researched strategies, in a hope that it would support their literacy learning better and provide positive outcomes for the learners.

Planning changes:

• I am conscious of the fact that we have a non-teacher driving the course.  My plan is meet with Karl more regularly to plan ahead to ensure that we are on track with the projects vision as well as meeting the achievement objectives of the junior school Social Studies programme.
• I need to identify which skills students need in preparation for asttle and PAT tests but also to meet the curriculum standards.
• I need to check the Literacy learning progressions and figure out which ones will benefit students not just in Social Studies but across the curriculum.
• It describes the specific literacy knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students draw on in order to meet the reading and writing demands of the curriculum. Teachers need to ensure that their students develop the literacy expertise that will enable them to engage with the curriculum at increasing levels of complexity and with increasing independence. As students progress through schooling, they need to be able to read and write increasingly complex texts and to engage with increasingly complex tasks.
• I need to regularly meet with all the teachers and team involved with the class to ensure the groups targets are met and any concerns are raised before my teaching the class again.
• I need to develop a centralised ‘dropbox’ for strategies, tips and tools that each of the teachers have found worked/didn’t work. 

Instructional changes:

• I need to understand that my theory of the teacher at the front of the class is to be used only when needed.
• I need to ensure that I spend equal amounts of time with each group to ensure their projects are heard.  
• I need to provide opportunities for students to co-design the lesson and teach other students skills that are needing reinforcement.
• I need to provide differentiated activities and tasks to suit the varied learning needs in the class.

Data:  PAT/E-asttle

• I want to analyse the students’ results to help me profile their learning abilities and understand where the strengths and gaps are.  

Student voice

• I want to regularly have a number of students provide one on one feedback.  This could be done by creating a student council.
• I want to send out a student voice survey to identify what is going well and what we need to work on.

Colleague/Literacy expert observations

• I want to meet with Dr Jannie at least fortnightly to help me manage my inquiry better.  I tended to drift off at the end of 2019 and failed to complete my evaluation properly and I don’t want that to happen again this year.
• I would like an expert to observe the interactions between the teaching team and the students as well as the project groups themselves.

COL teachers expertise

• I hope to meet with the other COL teachers at our school to see how they are going and share highlights and lowlights.  This creates a sense of colleguiality around our inquiries.
• I plan to utilise the learnings that Nicola Wells found in her comprehensive Inquiry last year around raising the reading levels of her year 9 class.  It is a robust inquiry that has some key insights that I feel are valuable to understanding the complexities of reading for our learners. 

(I’d like to acknowledge Robyn Anderson’s blog posts on her TAI2020. They are written with such clarity and have helped me scaffold my own blog posts.  Thank you Robyn!)