One of our school goals is to raise student reading and writing literacy levels in our junior school by the time they get to the end of year 10. As a department, we have developed some good strategies to engage students in their learning but on reflection, we identified the need to find more effective ways to support our junior students better.
One of the aspects that we use to know our learners is data. Students are tested at the start of the year and again at the end and between both tests, we try our best to shift student achievement. But just knowing the results of their tests is not enough as it limits the depth of the support that we could offer to each student who have different learning needs. To understand how to interpret the data better and use if more effectively, I asked Mele Suipi-Latu if she could take my department through some PLD to share her learnings and research with us in order to better understand what data is important to know, what it means and how to create some actionable steps.
Below is the recording of our PLD and the powerpoint used for the presentation.
As a department we will sit down with the data and brainstorm ways we can utilise it better in our planning for teaching.Our goal is to ensure we design differentiated tasks to suit the learners but also challenge them to shift in their achievement.Watch this space!
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.
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 fromtheir 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.
A tweak in my practice: Phonetically sounding out words/terms.
From my first intervention lesson #1, I read my reflections about sounding out the words and phonetically sighting and sounding the words to deliberately use all throughout the last two lessons I'd taught my year 9's.
I noticed that I never used to think about doing this in the past because when I have taught, I would assume that kids knew the words and knew how to sound the words out and sound them out fluently. I was also conscious of the lack of time that we have in a lesson and have felt the pressure of getting everything done. Now, I am trying to think carefully about the words themselves, about the varied learning needs of my kids and how they would need to know how to pronounce the words carefully.
I find myself staying on words/phrases for a lot longer instead of rushing it to the definition. I give them the time to 'sit' on the word, look at the word, and just process it in their brains. We clap it out for the syllables, they say it aloud to the class and also to each other. I've noticed the first time I did this, kids were not receptive but the more times we did this, the more they got used to it, the more it seemed to become normal.
When I discussed this with Jannie and Mele, our ESOL specialist, they said there was important research that supported the number of times a student needs to hear and practice a word 5-16 times before they can properly understand a word.
For further monitoring, I am thinking that I would like to voice record students sounding out a word and watching me practicing and verbalising the words so that the sound could resonate with them. I am also think of putting those voice recordings plus movie recordings online to build a rewindable learning library.
Evidence for a need to 'shift' my teaching.
Last term, I taught a unit on our community with a focus on significant places in our community. At the end of the unit, students had to complete an assessment essay to show their learning from the unit and the many of the students answers were basic or did not reach an achieved.
When reflecting on why the kids essays were below standard, I wondered whether my teaching was part of the reason for these failures. I don't think my teaching style had changed much as I have taught the unit many times in the past. Although I used a number of strategies to support my learners, they were more for the scaffolding of reading and writing for the learners rather then looking at ways I could support my learners in my teaching approach.
This term, I want to implement strategies that I'd used at the beginning of the year whereby I purposefully and deliberately took away time spent on the context of a topic and used it to slow down the focus in a lesson to learn key concepts properly. I also want to look at talking more about the learning too rather then trying to focus on having the kids write something down to show their learning. Recently, I taught a lesson with these aspects in mind.
The Context
My year 9 Social Studies class are starting a new unit on understanding the Government and how decisions can impact on people and places. There are a lot of different concepts that are complicated and challenging to understand and I wanted to use a technique that Jannie had taught me earlier this year to slow down the learning on new concepts and to discuss knowledge around the concepts.
Planning and preparing for the lesson.
The lesson time was a double period, 2x 50 minutes and it was after morning tea and before lunch. To prepare for the lesson, I created a slide that had the concepts and their definitions on it. I also wanted to test whether there was a shift in their learning, so I created a pre test and a post test that was mix and match exercise to measure if there was a shift in learning for the students (I will talk about the results in my next blog).
Collecting evidence
I want to collect evidence to support how my change in teaching practice helped my learners to learn and understand key concepts in a more verbal and oral way. Formal:
Pre and post tests - I created a snap 'quiz' where students were provided with the 7 key concepts and had mix and match the correct definitions with the words.
Videoing myself - I want to watch the video to see how I teach in this style. I have video evidence of me teaching in my default style of teaching (the old me) and I want to see
Informal
My observations of students - I want to observe the engagement of the students through the lesson and make mental notes of who is making a genuine effort as compared to previous lessons.
Student verbal feedback - I will catch up with students at the end of the lesson to talk about how they felt about the lesson.
The Lesson
As the students entered the classroom, I handed them the pre-test and a pen and said we will be discussing our learning today through 'talanoa' (discussions) and to leave their devices in their bags. The students were given 5 minutes to complete the pre-test at the start. I collected the papers in, then I asked them to draw their attention to the presentation.
I started by reminding them about the brain being like a muscle and that when they energise their brain through learning new things, they are making them 'smarter'. I also reminded them that we will be verbalising our lesson through 'talanoa' learning and that I hoped they will become confident speakers by the end of the year.
I asked them to read the instructions and we went through each one carefully for understanding. I then put the slide with the 7 key concepts up for 2 minutes, where they individually had to say the words, then 2 - 3 minutes to a partner, then a group. I then called for volunteers to stand up in front of the class and say the concepts fluently without stopping. I modelled to them how I wanted them to say the words, with good posture and in a confident manner.
At the end of the lesson, I did a quiz exercise which involved asking students to tell me answers to the concepts, to further learn the concepts and to get them to say out loud the answers. I then handed the post-test questions to students who completed them before the bell went. I have recorded parts of the lesson below.
Reflection
My initials observations of the students as I taught them, was that they were engaged and motivated to give the learning a go. I felt I had minimal behavioural issues and students were willing to try the concepts and learning out, and for the most part seemed happy. I think this was because I was confident in my approach, I took time to allow students to try things out and gave them different ways for them to try out the learning.
Feedback from a student is that she felt it was a fun lesson and enjoyed the interaction with her classmates.
Next steps:
I will collate the data from the pre and post test.
I will watch the video of my teaching and analyse what I see
I will try and collect feedback from students about the lesson.
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.
One of our department goals is to utilise literacy strategies across our junior school to support achievement in reading and writing. At our department meeting today, our team shared some of the literacy strategies that we have learnt from our PLD with Marc Milford, our literacy guru, who was present to provide feedback and feed forward.
There were lots of good activities that our team shared which was really great to see. One particular strategy that Sonya Robertson had taught in her classroom, utilised resources from a site called Newsela (anyone can join the newsela site with their google account). On the site, it has current events articles that allow you to choose the reading level applicable for your kids. Below is an example.
The title and article are for the less able readers as shown by the drop down box.
The same article but at more advanced level for the more able students
Students were then asked to use a scaffolded template of predicting, questioning and selecting 20 key words from the article, then select the 6 most important words. Using this list, students were asked to summarise what the article was about in their own. They then used this summary in a blog post. Here are a few examples of blog posts:
It was awesome to hear how students such as Kaleb, who has had time off school, show his learning in his blog. Sonya pushed him to get it done and she shared how she felt she had made progress in helping him with his work. Marc was really impressed in the modal verbs that some of the students were using and suggested that a point be made to the students what the modal verbs were and how these helped develop their summary. I was really proud of the strategies that Sonya and the team have used so far to address the learning needs of our kids. I look forward to hearing more in the future.
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.
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.
