TAI2020 WFRC Inquiry question and task #2: Collaborate

Inquiry question and task #2: 

Will my inquiry make a contribution to the wider school and cluster goals?

My task was to collaborate with my school's leadership team and colleagues to identify areas where my inquiry will make a powerful contribution to the wider school and cluster goals.

My Inquiry focus for 2020:

Does project based collaborative ways of learning in a Talanoa environment make the difference in the learning journey of our kids?  

At this stage, ‘Making a difference’ relates to:

• Raising achievement in PAT reading or asttle writing
• Wondering if kids can learn in an environment where Talanoa is prevalent and at the forefront of the teaching and learning?  Compared to other year 9 classes, will it help raise achievement in reading and writing?  How can I support the lower ability students whilst engaging and enriching the learning for others?

Specific Outcomes:

• A ‘framework’ for collaboration between teachers
• A ‘framework’ for success in collaboration between students
• A positive shift in achievement data related to PAT or asttle writing

Wider school goals: 

• School goal:  Focus on school goal #2, raising the literacy levels of our junior students (see specifics here).

Cluster wide goals: 

• Manaiakalani Achievement Challenges
• Challenges identified by Woolf Fisher at our cluster wide meeting specifically reading (please see blogpost #)

Through formal and informal discussions, I have talked to the following people:

My school’s leadership team: 

• The SLT (Senior Leadership team).  
• Vision is to see the collaboration as supporting our schools goals.  
• ‘What kind of support is needed to ensure this succeeds?’.  
• Connecting with the families from the beginning is key
• Heads of Department (related to curriculum).
• What does this look like in our subject area?
• How would we support our teachers who are part of the class
• Share your learnings - good and bad

Colleagues:  

• Teachers in my department
• How much more work is required?
• Can it work in my classroom? Strategies and tasks that you can see works.
• We would like support in how to scaffold collaborative groups because we don’t do it enough.
• Teachers from other curriculum areas
• I can see the value in working across curriculum areas.  How would assessments and reporting on the class look?
• Sharing ‘knowing the learner’ in a consistent centralised place important
• There seems to be a lot of time and planning going into this but we haven’t really heard much about the class, please share more about who they are and what they are doing.
• Literacy experts: Dr Jannie Van Hees
• This is an ‘Action Research’.  As the participant, you are essentially inquiring as you go (refer to blogposts # and #)
• Narrow your focus to think about it in two parts: A community of learning and a community of learners.  A group of teachers who are trying to cohese and a group of learners.  You would make a bigger impact.
• Manageability is important.
• MIT teacher from the cluster
• How are the year 9’s managing the changes in teaching and learning?
• From your findings, I’d like information on how we can work together better to support our year 8’s going to T.C
• Colleagues who are supporting the learning of the project based class.
• Community Activist 
• How will you sustain and maintain engagement within the groups without losing them?
• What limitations are there with regards to timetable for example, if we want kids to really utilise their time around projects?
• Kath Murdoch’s ‘The Power of Inquiry’ inquiry learning cycle may be good to scaffold students in their groups.
• Co-design is important to enable students and stakeholders to work together.
• MOE Principal Advisor Secondary 
• Keep making the main thing the main thing
• How do we make sure the learners do not miss out on key learnings required in the curriculum?
• MOE Lead Adviser - CoL
• How will you measure the success of the programme?
• Think about using the ‘Key Competencies’ and how different capabilities come across different areas of the curriculum.

I have found discussing my inquiry has helped me shape it better and think about the pros and cons of where I am going.  

Monitoring #1: Results of my pretest and posttest

As part of the lesson I did with 9PKr, I gave them a pre-test and a post-test on the 7 key concepts that we'd learnt in the double period.  I decided to make it a mix and match exercise.

Here are the comparative results:

The students either stayed were they were with results or made positive gains in the tests.  I found that the boys especially made the biggest gain in their results and it was pleasing to see this in the tests.  I think it may be a combination of slowing the pace of the lesson to focus primarily on the concepts but also the opportunity kids had to test themselves individually, in pairs and in groups to ensure they got the learning.  I hope also to examine whether it was my teaching approach that impacted on this shift in my next blogs.

Dr Jannie suggested I show the results to the students because the more times we can showcase their cleverness the better.   I want to give them the test again at a later date to see if they can remember the terms more easier.  I also want to vary the way I monitor them by changing the tests for example I might try an emoji system asking how well they know words like the one in the image below.

My preliminary findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge

Findings #1:  According to asttle, there are varying levels of reading abilities in my classroom and all the students who are level 2 are boys!.  When compared to their writing posts conducted in class (which shows their understanding of their reading) their writing ability depends on their reading abilities.  Students can’t write a summary if they don’t understand what they are reading. They struggle with the vocab and do not have enough time to 'dig deep' into text. This is supported by further evidence in the next finding. Please click on the document linked to find out more.

Findings #2: That students who struggle on average do not like reading or spend less time reading in or out of school.  These are the same students who struggle to write and have said that they need extra help and support when it came to writing. They are not motivated to read and struggle to engage with text that they can not relate to or are not interested in.

Findings #3: Writing a summary requires clear structures and scaffolding for the lower ability learners. Students think they know what a good summary looks like but acknowledge that getting there is a struggle and that many of them need help to get there. They also want more practice in writing them within a framework and need support in using key words to show their learning.

Findings #4: Although my focus is writing and reading, students wanted to the chance to talk about the context first. Having the ability to talk about the context in pairs and groups may allow for the text to be more relatable for the students who like to engage with the texts in this way. The gap between reading and writing might be shortened by talking about the text.

Next steps: I want to look at approaches and models that I could use as interventions. This will be in my next blog.

Inquiry Blog #5: Collecting evidence and data

To collect evidence of how my kids write, I asked them to read a text about Tokelau and write a summary as to why Tokelauans migrated to New Zealand.  I then used a marking rubric to identify where students sat according to levels related to asttle.  From this, I reflected on the results and wrote observations of what I saw and heard when students were given the tasks.  Below are the results:

Analysis of the evidence:  My observations of students who had low levels of reading and writing was that they struggled to engage with the text initially and I wonder if it was partly due to my lack of explaining the task.  The text itself had a splattering of words that were difficult but is targeted at a level 5 student.  Taking all the different learning abilities to the same text is like leading a monkey and an elephant to the same tree and telling them to climb it.  

After reading, students were expected to write a summary.  The students who were at 4 and 5, wrote good summaries in their own words.  The students who struggled either copied from the text or used language that didn't summarise the text properly.  A strength that I observed though was that they were able to verbalise about the readings ie. they were talking about the content.

Here are some of my wonderings (as an aside):

• Schools who are entering results help to show good longitudinal data.
• Some schools such as Glen Innes school, showed accurate data and shift.
• Students whose language is not English, may benefit from learning vocab in their own language first.
• Can we teach them new words through their language first?
• How can student peer support help kids?

Profiles of my students and their learnings #1

The Challenge:  Kids struggle to write good summaries of readings they do in class.

Tools/ Measures/ Approaches to gather learning profiles:

1. Asttle data:  Readily available, one of the tests used at our school to collect reading/writing data.  Although not necessarily the best one to use, at this stage, it is the one that the majority of the students have results for on kamar.
2. Review of past year asttle results:  To see if the student has been progressing over the past few years with regards to their asttle results.  I wanted to see the pattern of learning from previous schools to help me see whether the student was progressing accordingly.  
3. Writing post:  Conducted a formative assessment type writing task that students had to take ‘seriously’ (suggested by Aaron Wilson).  I used a marking rubric developed by Marc to measure the students’ writing against. I did this to see what level of writing the students had against a marking rubric taken from asttle.
4. Student voice survey on reading:  I conducted a reading survey with the students which was developed with the support of Jannie and conducted over a period.  We carefully went over each question and had students carefully answer their questions.
5. Different context observation:  The classes English teacher wrote her observations after teaching the class for one term.  I wanted to see if she saw similiar or different writing/reading results as I did.
6. Quick survey and class discussion on writing:  I conducted a quick survey with 3 questions about writing and we discussed reasons for their answers.  I wanted to see what their thoughts around writing a summary was.
7. Teacher observation (from my student teacher):  My student teacher has been with observed me teaching them for a number of weeks in term1, has tracked them for a day in all their classes and is currently teaching them as part of her practicuum.  I wanted to see if her perspective was similiar or different to my own with regards to engagement in writing tasks (TBA). 

The results of the profiles are linked here.

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.

Meeting #5 with Dr Jannie Van Hees: Thinking about our reading

My year 9 social studies class often struggle to understand what they have read because they struggle with the language and making meaning from text.  Dr Jannie and I have been working on ways to dive deep into text so they have the ability to increase their language capabilities.

Today we had a planning meeting for a lesson that we will be team teaching this week.  We talked about how to gather evidence from the students around their thoughts on reading and language.  The survey will support my inquiry as well as help me gage what the students thinking was behind their attitudes to reading.  We talked about a student voice survey that had both multi-choice questions and open-ended ones.  We then looked at an example of a text that we could dive deep into.  The thinking is to give the kids multiple opportunities to dive deep, so that they could apply it, transfer it, teach it to others and be the expects of their own understanding of text and language.   My challenge is to ensure that I constantly remind students the 'why' behind everything eg. why I am doing a survey, why I want to find out about their reading etc.

Jannie will then dive deep into a current event article, focusing on the first paragraph only.  Here is our draft powerpoint below.

I always get excited when listening to Dr Jannie, because there are little pearls of wisdom that pop up randomly in our conversations that I have to record.  Here are a few from today's meeting:

• We want the kids to practice 'mindful reading'.
• We can live a thousand worlds through reading...we could be sailing on the Pacific Ocean, we could be on a camel in Egypt, we could be at the top of Mt Everest...we can understand others and the world around us better.

CoL teachers meeting #2: Understanding the inquiring teacher

At our CoL meeting today, Dr Aaron Wilson shared his insights around how to build a 'detailed and robust profile of our students in relation to that student learning focus'.

Just a thought...
Before this meeting, we had to find out what was going on for the learners in my classroom.  I needed to figure out how to find this out so of course I started by googling it.

I wondered about student engagement to try and build a picture of how we can look more closely at engagement.
Observations
Reflections on the effect of my practice on engagement.

Types of engagement include:

(a) Cognitive:  kids are engaged with the process and are willing to learn
(b) Behavioural:  kids show they're ready and willing to learn
(c) Emotional:  kids feel secure in the relationships with teachers, classmates and school.

I have been thinking of the me and my survey that Dr Graeme Aitken had alluded to at a PLD last year and I am reading through the background of the survey to understand it more.

Here are my notes my from our CoL meeting:

Come up with a plan to build a rich picture in relation to the valued learning outcomes that we have identified.

What is a common focus? Is this a common focus across our CoL team?

Do we have similar approaches to profiling the students?  I need to think of a plan.

The next stage for our inquiry is to look at describing tools/measures/approaches that I plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students' learning in relation to my challenge.  We then need to justify why we chose these approaches.   I want to break down what this means further.

Tools:  

• Profile
• Standardised tests
• Student voice
• Connecting with whanau

Measures:

• Data (PAT asttle)
• Progression over the years
• Formative/diagonistic/summative tests

Approaches:

• Research types
• Learning styles is an example of gathering information

Idea #1:  Is there a lack of resilience in reading or behaviours when it comes to text?  What are their attitudes to learning?  Do they like reading/writing?

Inquiry Blog #1: The challenge of student learning.

1. Summarise the challenge of student learning you plan to focus on in this inquiry. Be as clear and specific as you can about the evidence you have about this to date.

My inquiry question take #1:  Could an effective change in teaching practice and pedagogy, by putting the lense on language and diving deep into text, develop critical thinkers, readers and writers? (TBC)

Summary of the challenge:
My year 9's often struggle to tell me (either verbally or in written form) what it is they have learnt at the end of a lesson and I am trying to figure out whether the way I am teaching them and what I am teaching them is too hard (or too easy) and whether this is leading to them not achieving personal or classroom success.  My hunch is that part of this lack of achievement is because I have become too complacent in my teaching and am not setting high enough expectations for each learner in my care.  Another hunch is that students need more scaffolding and work that is suitable for their level in the curriculum and that they find the work difficult.  

I need the students to be critical thinkers which is an important social science skill to have but also important for the big wide world awaiting our kids when they leave school.  Unfortunately, the reality for the majority of my year 9 kids right now is that they struggle to get one task completed during our class time.  This is leading to a lack of engagement by the less able students and a lack of motivation by the more able.  By 're-configuring' my pedagogy and forcing the lense on language, I could support my learners to become critical thinkers.

The light bulb moments of figuring out my challenge: My evidence to date!

1. Action vs Inaction
Recently, I taught a double period lesson for our year 9's to help them start their inquiry assessments. Basically it was 15 minutes of me emphasising the importance of the assessment, then explaining each aspect in a hope that they understood what was required of them. I then set them the challenge to complete two of the tasks which was to find at least 3 parts of background information and complete a map task.

Of the 21 students present, this is what I noticed:

• About 4-5 students went ahead to start. They were a mix of abilities. They worked individually and sat away from the majority of the class.
• A group of less able boys choose to work together although I needed to constantly remind them to focus.
• Another group of highly able boys, mucked around and had to be separated.
• A group of girls (who were my top students) refused to do the work stating they were being distracted and wanted to complete the work at home.

At the end of the lesson, less then half of the class had completed the two tasks. When I asked them what the issue was, most of them said they had been distracted. I found this really frustrating. Was it because they didn't understand the requirements? Was it too much or too little? I need to understand this more and figure out what was happening between my teaching and the students learning to cause this?

My wonderings:

• Is it the culture of my classroom? Are groups too distracting?
• Do I have low expectations of my kids (ie. you can do what you can, all good)?
• Is it the work? Have I set them up to fail?
• Is it the way I taught the lesson?
• Am I spending equal amounts of support time with all students or only with the ones I think need it?

2. Time vs no time
I co-taught a lesson with Dr Jannie Van Hees recently and I learnt alot about myself and what I thought was important for the kids to know (here is a blogpost about the lesson).

I had always thought that if kids could tell you at least 2 things they'd learnt in the lesson and showed it in a summary, then it has been a success. I realised after co-teaching with Jannie, that it was not about what they'd learnt there and then, it was more about what they could transfer to the next lesson and whether they understood the purpose of their learnings and where it fit in the big scheme of things. On reflection, this was one of the most engaging lessons that I have seen the kids take part in so far this year.

My key takeout from the lesson with Jannie is that if we rush the learning, we set kids up to fail. If we can slow the process of learning and put the lense on language, we can build the students' capacities to make meaning from their learning and apply these learnings across texts and contexts. I also found that not enough time is being spent on the learning language to understand text deeply and we very rarely share this learning through oral dialogue and verbal conversations, something that I am passionate about.

My wonderings:

• If I slow down the learning, will the kids miss out on other things they need to know?
• Can I teach myself to be patient? Am I really open to the change?
• What about my higher ability students, what are they supposed to do when we slow down the learning?

3. The damn data

In a blogpost recently, I introduced my students and shared data about their learning needs. The class is mixed from ESOL students to high level 6 of the curriculum readers and writers. This data supports my thinking that low ability readers are also very low ability writers. Is what I am doing in my teaching practice now helping or hindering student achievement? I need to find this out!

4. A taste of writing and reading

To understand how much they could read and write in these early days, I set the students a challenge. I called the activity a 'learning post'. They had to write a summary about Tokelau in 25 words or less and use 6 key words that they'd identified as important (this is a writing strategy they I had borrowed from the awesome Robyn Anderson a few years ago). I then asked them to record themselves reading their passage to me. The reason for the writing was to see if they could follow the instructions and to get a sense of how well they wrote and the reason for reading was to see if they could read with fluency and if this could possibly be an extra barrier to learning (blogpost to come).

What I found was that with the writing, a few (2 -3) students could write well and these same students articulated their writing in a good clear voice when reading their summaries. The majority of my class found it a struggle to understand the writing task which therefore made them feel pressure to spend less time on the reading of the summary. Most of them refused to have their faces shown, instead choosing to point the camera at a blank wall or at their computer screens and only have their voices recorded. One student though, choose to learn the reading off by heart and insisted I filmed him in my office away from his friends. This really surprised me and I have to give him credit for his efforts (short clip below).

My expectations were totally thrown off and the reality has reshaped my approach to my 'normalised' versions of teaching and learning. I will continue to collect evidence to support my inquiry because it is important to develop a holistic picture of what is happening for my learners and the impact of my teaching on their progress. In my next blog, I will describe how and why I have selected this challenge and I will attempt to locate my inquiry in the context of patterns of student learning in Manaiakalani overall. 

Should we teach kids about the neurons in their brain so they can learn?

In discussions with Dr Jannie Van Hees around ways to use language learning effectively, a key idea she has discussed is the need to put the 'lense on language' so that our learners can achieve success.  An example of how we did this was the lesson we recently had with our year 9's who were learning about concepts in migration.  When Jannie drew a brain on the board and explained that making yourself learn these concepts helps the neurons in your brain move and become active, I felt that the kids felt more connected to their learning.  She reminded them that unless you use your brain, it will be inactive.  In the lesson, students were 'forced' to use their brains and re-energise them to ensure that the learning wasn't just 'surface' level but ingrained in the brains to allow for access when needed.  Following on from the lesson with Jannie, I decided I wanted to find out more about how the neurons worked in the brain and whether teaching something like this to our kids could help them be more engaged in their learning and improve outcomes.

The search for answers
I began like all good researchers do, I googled 're energise brain neurons education NZ'.  The first link was to the TKI ESOL site which gave specific examples of metacognitive (thinking about thinking) strategies and how teachers could scaffold learning using different templates and strategies. The title of the page was 'Thinking and metacognition' and although it didn't help me explain if teaching kids about their brains would be a good thing, I am locking this link away for later for when I need a few teaching strategies.

The second link was better.  It was a blog by a writer and educationalist called Dr Donna Wilson.  She has written a lot of books and publications.  She is an expert in the field. Her blurb read like this:
For more than two decades, Dr. Donna Wilson has been a pioneer in bridging brain science and psychology to educational practice. She co-developed the world’s first MS /EdS degrees in Brain-Based Teaching and Instructional Leadership (BrainSMART), as well as the first Doctoral Minor in Brain-Based Leadership. Dr. Wilson has co-authored 20 books and over 100 articles, book chapters, and blog postings.

The particular link that I'd clicked on was a blog post by Dr Wilson called 'Building a Metacognitive Classroom' Featured in New Zealand magazine' which shared a piece that she had co-written for our very own New Zealand 'Teaching matters' magazine.  I went to article itself and as I read it, I was excited to find out that teaching kids about their brain has a positive impact on engagement and achievement in school.  A Secondary school example of how a teacher in Georgia taught 'neuroplasticity' showed that 'emphasing that our brains can change and that we're always getting smarter as long as we are learning' was a proven strategy that worked.

Another article by Dr Donna Wilson and Marcus Conyers called 'The boss of my brain' explains how 'explicit instruction in metacognition put students in charge of their learning'.  It goes on to talk about how lessons about neuroplasticity (how learning new information and skills changes the structure and functioning of the brain) are especially inspiring for struggling students, who may have internalised the idea that they cannot become academically successful'.  How cool would it be for our kids to know that if they used their brains 'more', they could redirect their learning and essentially achieve their best in their learning?

When looking for New Zealand specific examples of this type of learning, I came across a publication by an ex-principal in Rotorua, Eden Chapman, who was awarded a scholarship in 2016 to examine how our education system was applying Neuroplasticity in our schools and if this was effective.  He found that the few schools who did use strategies to address this, had to essentially buy expensive programmes to run them with specific learners.  It seems that my search had come to a bit of a dead-end.  Why weren't we teaching this more in our schools?

Reflections:
In synthesising what I have learnt in my search for answers so far, I found that kids need to know and understand how their brains work and this needs to be explicitly taught and continually reinforced for our kids, especially our struggling learners.  In my own teaching practice, I know I have become too complacent and don't push my kids enough to make them really use their brains to work.  When I think back to the lesson that Jannie and I taught recently, when we made the kids really learn the concepts using multiple opportunities to learn, this forced them to energise those 'neurons' and what grew out of this learning were kids who 'got it'.  My hunch is, that if kids are reminded that learning re-energises their brain, not their friends brains, but their own brains, they will feel empowered and motivated to learn and this will lead to positive outcomes.

Next steps:
I will continue to discuss with Dr Jannie ways to explicit teach how the brain works for the year 9's perhaps in our next unit, which will be a collaboration with the English department.  I also want to survey the students to see if learning about the brain is important to them and to see if they can make   a connection between knowing how their brains work and improved outcomes in social studies.

Understanding the inquiring teacher: CoL teachers meeting #1

I was fortunate enough to meet with Fiona, our Manaiakalani facilitor who talked me through our first CoL meeting for 2019 that I had missed. Here are some of my notes:

We talked about the inquiring teacher and how there were 3 styles of teaching approaches.

In Dr Graeme Aitken's background paper "The inquiring teacher: Clarifying the concept ofteaching effectiveness" (2007) he discusses the 3 views of effective teaching:

• The 'style' view
• The 'outcomes' approach 
• The 'inquiry' approach

(My thoughts are that I can see both the 'style' view (ie that we think teachers effectiveness should be the focus) and the 'outcomes' approach (ie the data reflects the effectiveness of the teacher) currently working within our school system. The focus is on what the teacher does and whether kids get results).

The Inquiry model: “Since any teaching strategy works differently in different contexts for different students, effective pedagogy requires that teachers inquire into the impact of their teaching on their students.” (NZC, p.35).

There are two phases to the inquiry model: Inquiry 1 looks at knowing what is happening for the students in my classroom and inquiry 2 asks questions that explore teacher actions and that lead to student learning.

The cycle of inquiry establishes the process of inquiry one and two. It enhances the opportunity to learn for the teacher (learning about the impact of my own practice) and for the students (changed teacher practices aimed at increasing students engagement and success).

The approach to teaching effectiveness requires particular knowledge and skills and attitudes:

Knowledge and skills

• Pose questions that capture the main dimensions between teaching and learning
• Collect valid and reliable information
• Analyse data to identify patterns and issues (Aitken, 2007)

Attitudes

a. Advancing knowledge implies "a genuine willingness to re-search one's own teaching - to open it to ordered and intentional analysis and critique".

b. Ideas from all sources. Testing my beliefs, not just to reaffirm them.

c. Fallibility: No absolute truths, our hypothesis may fail but keep searching.

I need to have an understanding that our ideas and beliefs might be wrong but that's o.k. We are inquirying into the impact of our teaching on our students.

My Wonderings: What does IMPACT mean? What does it mean to different people?

All inquiry cycles are intended to:

• Be centred on a particular group of learners in your care in your context
• Seeing the words 'in your care' has triggered interesting thoughts.
• What does 'in your care' mean?

There are 8 attributes of an inquiring teacher: Efficacy, high expectations, curiosity, clarity, noticing, collegiality, criticality and resilience.

My thinkings out loud:
When I think about the challenges of student learning that I've come across, I have a few. One is when I ask the kids to argue why an issue is an issue, they research why other people think it's an issue. Dialogic conversation could lead to conceptual critical thinking leading to 'The Talanoa'. (The spoken word 'Brown Brother'). "We Pasifika people, are an oral people. We tell our stories through our voice, our music, our dance and yet you try and define us through reading and writing?" This is a persistent idea that gnaws away at me and I need to figure out how to word it better.

Back to understanding inquiry, when collecting data we need to look at:

1. Achievement (reading, writing, maths relative to national norms)
2. Rates of progress: Term 1 2018 to Term 4 2019.
3. Achievement and knowledge of achievement
4. Beliefs
5. Community and family voice
6. Systematic teacher observations of student engagement

Key takeouts:

• Don't try and think of solutions yet
• Think Globally
• Make the main thing, the MAIN THING.

Meeting #3 with Dr Jannie Van Hees: Putting the lens on language

At the beginning of each week, my year 9 social studies class usually look at current events that are local, national and global.  We start with a socrative activity, where students have to answer 20 questions about events from the past week and then I get the kids to find an article on one of the events that they found interesting and summarise what happened, when and where etc.  Unfortunately I have found this exercise a bit of a waste of time, because many of the students still leave the classroom not knowing what they had read and some do not complete their summaries.

When I reflect on why this is, I find that they may not understand the language that has been written in the text and this becomes a barrier to their learning.  This then leads to a lack of engagement and a lack of motivation to complete the tasks set.

After discussing this with Dr Jannie, we focussed on designing reading tasks for the students in my year 9 social studies class that could focus on unpacking the language of current event article.  I have recorded our discussion and have written the key points below.  To understand the context, click on the link to the article below, then listen to our discussion video.

The article we discussed was "Man petitions to make 'Aotearoa' official, alongside 'NZ'".

My key takeouts:

• Get the kids to answer 'What's the point ' which is also important to hold conversation.  
• Support students to recognise complex word groups helps to build language capacity.
• In the end we want to lift up language.  If we don't put the lens on complex language, they'll never produce it.
• Although it might seem tiresome at first to slowing down the language, we can work together to inform each other. 
• Don't get too fancy with doing a whole lot with it, but what we do know is that they need re-encounters.   It may just be having students' in groups and at the end, they complete a table with labels such as 'the main was' and 'my opinion was'. 

My next steps:

• Design the lesson and do the lesson with the class.
• Put language on my walls
• Adjust my pedagogy in expecting the kids to have to write a proper summary of what they have learnt in class.

Reflecting on my Classroom inquiry into raising the achievement of boys' writing in my level 2 Social Studies class

In February this year, I shared a blog post about my classroom inquiry and the fact that 8 of the 9 students who'd joined my class had not taken social studies in year 11.

"When asked why they took my class, 2 replied because it was the only option in the line they liked, 3 said because they wanted to try it out, and rest weren't sure why they'd taken my subject.  Only 1 student had said it was part of his career pathway" (February, 2019)

Over the year, I have used engaging contexts and activities to motivate my students with their learning and to think critically about the social issues that they were learning about - the Tamaki Regeneration Company, the 40 Hour famine, Marriage amendment laws and Israel and Palestine (for the external). Having limited knowledge about what social studies is all about, I was hoping that their interest will grow if I exposed them to different learning environments.  

I also used a variety of effective writing strategies to get them used to academic writing and to improve their confidence in writing.  A workshop by Joseph Driesson on Improving boys' literacy skills helped kick off a drive to research effective practices.  This was followed by a PLD opportunity with 'Write that Essay' taken by members of staff, who have shared effective strategies that we had trialled throughout the year.  A focus on 'Language in Abundance' has allowed my students to use the 'Talanoa' to encourage my kids to make meaning of their learning through verbal and oral discussions.  This has probably been the most effective strategy because my kids love to talk.

To measure whether my inquiry has made an impact in their achievement, I have looked at:

• Credits gained in their assessments
• Credits gained at merit/excellence level
• Literacy credits gained at the of the year
• Student voice surveys

(Note:  These results are based on 8 remaining boys in the class)

Credits gained in their assessments, at merit/excellence level and in literacy.

My Reflection:  I am pleased about the results overall as there has been a shift from 6 boys achieving credits in the first assessment to all 8 in the term 3 one.  As shown by the table, there have been successes in the number of merits and excellences gained by the boys, but not a significant shift.   This shows me that more work is needed to shift the achieved students to a merit or excellence grade.  

Student voice surveys

I conducted a comprehensive student voice survey at the end of the term for my kids to sum up their experiences in the class for the year.  

• Engaging Contexts

I asked the kids to rate the topics on a scale from 1 - 5, 1 being the least interesting, 5 being the most interesting.  I then asked them to write why they put this grade on the scale. 

• Effective writing strategies

I asked the kids to tell me whether they thought their writing had improved and 100% of them said that it had and they then identified which strategies may have helped the most. 

My reflection:  I can see the link between engagement and achievement in that the students that did not rate the first unit we did on the marriage laws highly - they then did not achieve as well as they could have.  As we got to the next two units, there were lots of different activities and engaging tasks that I feel impacted positively on their learning and therefore led to good achievement in their assessment results.  The more engaging a context is and the more a student can identify what helps them to write, the more they will invest in their learning and achieve better results.  When asked whether they will take social studies again next year, 100% of them answered and told me they were bringing their other friends!  I look forward to taking up the challenge again next year!

Next Steps:  I want to continue to focus on raising the achievement of boys' writing because I feel is the biggest issue that needs to be addressed for our learners.  I have enjoyed learning about the different ways that writing could be improved and find it rewarding to see the success of our boys when they write a great power sentence for example or they overcome the challenge of starting a paragraph.  For my next inquiry, I want to explore the power of the 'Talanoa' further and sit down with Dr Jannie Van Hees to plan to develop our kids as informed conversationists, which I am excited about.