TAI 2020 WFRC #5: Nature and Extent of the Student Challenge.

Share your findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge. Make sure it is clear what evidence from your inquiry supports each finding.

My inquiry is looking at whether project based collaborative ways of learning in a Talanoa environment will make the difference in the learning journey of my year 9 class.  I know I need to be more specific with regards to shifting achievement in literacy, so the challenge will be how to shift the capabilities and achievement of our lower achieving students above their entry level to high school.  This will be with regards to both reading and writing.

My initial focus was to develop a plan to observe and construct strategies to support students in teams during their groups collaboration process but because of the lockdown, part of my focus has changed to include how groups can do this in both the physical sense (in the classroom) and online.

I have taught level 2 and level 3 Social Studies for a number of years, and when it comes to students presenting their learning to their class (or even verbalising their learning to me their teacher) students find this really difficult.  Students refuse or why they know they have to present, they provide an ill-prepared speech or spending the time reading a powerpoint from the board.  This led me in 2018, to inquire into why my seniors struggled and to what extent was this lack of speaking to their learning, an impact on their achievement.  

A big part of my inquiry focussed on the ‘Talanoa’ and how I thought, that this strategy of having students speak their learning could encourage students inevitably lead my kids to write better.

• 22nd August: Encouraging the Talanoa - giving our kids the confidence to speak
• 31st August: Encouraging the 'Talanoa' - Home group/Expert groups in Level 2 Social Studies
• 4th Sept: Encouraging the 'Talanoa' in Tongan Language Week - Inspirational speeches by our students!
• 27th Sept 2018:  Encouraging the Talanoa blog : Using Cue Cards for reflections

I found that the actions around the Talanoa did support those students who were already confident speakers and those who weren’t, were able to slowly come out of their shells, with support from scaffolding templates and encouragement from  their fellow classmates.  Students’ were able to articulate their learning better than before, although I found there was still a disconnect from students who could speak their learning to having to write it.

One of my goals with my inquiry this year, is not to wait until year 12 and year 13 to find out that students could not talk their learning, but to create a culture of ‘Talanoa’ through the collaborative efforts in my year 9 classes project based learning, so that it would be the norm for them.

From my observations of my year 9’s at the start of the year, I could see that there had been some success with regards to students who were less confident before becoming more confident through a lesson we had on conversation skills (blogpost here).  However there were many students, particularly those of lower ability struggling with collaboration and speaking their learning.  During the lockdown, it was a challenge to run a physical collaboration and so my attention turned to whether students were able to collaborate in a google hangout (blogpost here).  What I noticed was that regardless of the platform (physically in class vs. google hangout), students still needed a lot of prompting and scaffolding to support their ‘Talanoa’.  Some students needed less whilst others would needed more.

The challenge for my learners this year is understand that the ‘Talanoa’ can work to support their literacy journey towards achievement and success.  I want my learners to engage in learning conversations that can be presented in a public forum and understand that the Talanoa is another way to show progress and learning. I want them to support each other in their groups and to use their strengths to build on their participation in the group.  This would mean that I need to make sure that I provide enough opportunities to engage in the Talanoa with well-developed resources and strategies that will cater to the varied learning needs of my class.