COL Inquiry #4B: Collecting student voice and focus groups

Today I conducted a survey with my year 9's and asked them a few questions about reading.

The 1st question I asked was 'Do you like reading'.  Here are the results for the 18 students who completed the survey.

When asked why, the answers varied slightly so I categorised them into similar areas before graphing them

• A: Enjoyment: Students find reading relaxing or enjoyable.
• B: Learning/Improvement: Students talk about reading for learning, getting better at reading, or improving vocabulary.
• C:  Interest in Topics: Students only like reading specific topics or subjects.
• D:  Good for You/Important: Students think reading is beneficial or important.
• E:  Mixed Feelings: Students show a mixed response (e.g., liking reading sometimes but not always)
• F:  They Dislike reading: Students express a dislike for reading or mention negative aspects (e.g., reading is boring, gives them a headache).

The rest of the results are on this powerpoint.  It will help me design appropriate strategies to hopefully support my learners to be better readers.

Aside from collecting student voice data from the class, I also sat with a select group of students (2 boys and 2 girls) and to help elaborate further some of answers they provided.

The 3 main questions I asked were:

• Do you like to read? If yes why, if no why not?
• What are the positives and negatives of reading?
• What are some things you did at your old school to help you read?

There response were what I'd expected and I will use what they have said when planning my hypothesis.

Staff PLD Talanoa Ako: "When our languages thrive, our people thrive".

Today we had the honour of having Nafanuatele Lafitaga Mafaufau come speak to us as part of the Talanoa Ako PLD our staff has been learning about.  She shared some interesting and relevant information with regards to our Pasifika students and the risks of not teaching a Pacific language in the future. Below are some key points:

• U.E Approved languages:  Samoan, Tongan and Cook Island and offers literacy credits/standards.
• We Part of the Te Tiriti as Tagata Whenua 
• Pacific Languages are not currently thriving.

When it's Polyfest season, why is attendance 100% the opportunity to engage with their language, culture and identity and it's values.  The Ministry of Pacific people's work with communities is far-reaching.

Auckland Girls had the highest achieving NCEA results because students were thriving in their language and culture.

It's that mindset, that a language is easy, just as vigorous as valuable as.  Introduction of Pacific Studies, History, Geo and Sociology, is going to be university approved 

What kinds of career pathways - careers have not even been created for our people with languages, academies, eg. Director of Languages implementation.

When our languages thrive, our people thrive.

Have to encourage the Ministry, keep pushing.  Correspondance school.  School Priority. Survey the community. One class.

COL Inquiry #4A: Understanding PAT (T.M.A)

As part of our school and department goals, with a key focus on literacy and numeracy.  In our department we want to support a positive shift for students in their PAT and asttle tests linked to our school goal number 3.  

Earlier this year, our PAT expert Mele Suipi-Latu provided an in-depth all staff PLD around understanding PAT and how we can utilise the data to build effective programmes for our learners.

What was interesting to me were the text types Explanation and Persuasive and how in senior Social Studies, students had to understand different perspectives and points of view.  Students had to understand a persons/groups perspective through the words their spoke and the actions they took.

I will be looking at profiling my year 9 classes further to see what the learning needs are in the class.