Evolving My Site Presentations as the Year Progresses

Now that we are half way through the school year, I was spending some time looking at the learning pathway that I have provided for my students during this school year.  I was personally challenged (once again) after creating the Multi-Text Database to be even more focused and purposeful with the range of texts I was selecting for my students to read.  I realised that I was not always providing challenging or scaffolded texts for my groups on a weekly basis.

In an effort to do this more effectively, I spent some time thinking about how I had my weekly assignments posted for my learners.  While I was providing them with multiple texts each week, most were complementary and I was not sharing them in a way that allowed easy differentiation for me when I looked at them.

Nearly halfway through Term 2, I decided to be more diligent with how I displayed texts to my students.  This was also made easier by thinking about and then filling out our cluster wide Multi-Text Database each week after I completed my lesson plan.

By using 4 coloured boxes to display the reading texts instead of only two, I am now able to clearly see what I am lacking in my planning.  The students work on reading the assignments from left to right and while their follow up tasks might be directly in response to the main text, often the follow up task created by using aspects of information found across all the texts. 

Graeme Aitken: Collaborative Inquiry

Graeme Aitken, the Dean of Social Work at Auckland University, presented to the Manaiakalani leaders a few weeks ago, and a video of his presentation on Collaborative Inquiry was shared with our Community of Learning cohort to further our understanding of Inquiry, espeically when it comes to the fundamental portion of our Inquiry under Learn: Scan.

Here are a few snapshots that I found interesting while listening to Dr. Aitken's presentation.

-You will only be an effective teacher if you know what you are trying to achieve.  It is important to figure out what you are going to do to teach your students in a way that enbles them to acheive the goals you have for them.  Also, an effective teacher needs to spend time reflecting on the process and doing what they need to do to make it better and more effective for future lessons, while remembering that it is often the teacher that needs readjusting, not necessarily what the students are doing.

-Inquiry is an ongoing, continuing process.  It is not an individual activity around one big idea.  This makes me so happy to be part of the Manaiakalani CoL team, and to be part of the discussions that we are able to take part in during our CoL meetings.

-Teachers are only trying to acheive three things: more interest/enjoyment, more confidence, more achievement scores.

-Part of your SCAN should be all about your data, and what it is telling us about who is doing well and who is not doing well (this also has to be about what the teacher is achieving or not achieving).  Part of the 'Data Story' is also about how well the teacher is doing.

-Engagement SCAN involves questions similar to the following: 

• Can our learners answer the question, “where are you going with your learning?”
• Can they describe what they are learning and why? 
• How can they demonstrate what they are learning? 

-A SCAN survey should not take more than 3 minutes to complete or you will loose student interest.

-Collaborative Inquiry does not mean finding a problem and immediately offering a solution.  It means sitting down with a group from staff (or the staff as a whole) and try to come up with various ways to fix the problem that can be tested out to find correlations.   

-When finding a 'solution' it really is just a hunch that reveals a different way to achieve the goal, which may actually end up being something that the teaching staff needs to learn to do in order to raise student understanding.  

-Medicine works because doctors and researchers share what they have learnt and discovered.  Educators have not always worked this way.  We need to stop critiquing and create a culture where we learn from each other, through our successes and our failures. 

 

Taking a Look at My Literacy Learners in Term 2

Taking a look into my literacy students have revealed so many interesting things about my students that I would never have known otherwise.

First of all, I was surprised to see how many of my students enjoy reading "Chapter" books (novels) more than other forms of literature as demonstrated in the response graph below.  After completing this survey, I have also decided to locate some comics/graphic novels for my students to read at different points during the year.

When the students were asked if they enjoyed reading the selected texts for their literacy class, I was happily surprised to learn that the majority of the class enjoys reading the texts I have selected for them.

One of the things that I have come to realise that I do not openly do enough is provide my students with opportunities to select their own texts (with the exception of our silent reading novels).   However, I understand that there are times that they may be Googling a topic to find out more information while reading or completing a learning task.  Therefore, I am going to looking at  implementing a way for students to log any additional articles/websites they may look at on their own while completing a learning task.

The Multi-Text Database is Underway!

The main page of the database with detailed instructions showing what each submission should include.

I had an opportunity to share the work that has been done on the Manaiakalani Multi-Text Database with the Pt. England staff during our weekly staff meeting.  Although it was a quick presentation, it was well received and I am so excited to see the database being populated by Pt. England teachers in the weeks and months to come!

 I have also enjoyed seeing the database being shared in our Google+ Communities and populated by teachers across the country from our Manaiakalani Outreach Clusters.  I am spending time every day looking over what has been submitted, and it is really fun to see all the amazing work we are all doing in response to the findings of the Wolfe Fisher Research from the past few years.

If you are a Manaiakalani or Outreach teacher and you would like to have access to this database, we would love your input! Please send me an email or comment below.

Anne's A-Team!

Today, we had our second CoL Meeting of the term, and we were split into groups to share what we would do differently in our own practice as a teacher, based on the evidence that we have gathered.  I was put into an amazing group of women, facilitated by Anne Sinclair.

As we shared, we were asked to discuss the following points using our Inquiry blogs a reference to highlight how our evidence was organised to be visible and accessible to our colleagues.

• What information, strategies, tools did you use to determine what your students have already learned and what they need to learn next?
• Based on this evidence what are you planning to do differently as a teacher? What might you need help with?

It was amazing to realise that as we discussed, we all had different Inquiry focuses and topics, but we were all able to relate in some way to each other when thinking of what we are going to do differently.  Amazingly enough, as a team we were able to come up with "A" words to describe our teaching role in our next step, such as Auditory, Analyse, Actor and Amalgamate.

My next step was described by Anne as "Allowing" for student voice.  Anne shared that she once wrote telling students that they are "allowed to be aloud."  Hopefully, I will be able to borrow a copy of Anne's paper and share some key ideas from it that I will be able to apply to my classroom.

Source

Create: Making a Plan for Inquiry

Who are my learners and what are their goals?
I have been having an amazing year working with a group of year 4 students who began the year reading from Levels 23-28 to raise their roof on their personal reading achievement.

What have I been doing?
I have been working with a selected group of students from my literacy class (those with a reading age of 8 and above) to provide opportunities to read multimodal texts that support a learning topic (generally the school wide student Inquiry/Topic focus).  Students have really enjoyed reading on their Chromebooks different text types provided at various learning levels to further their understanding of the designated topic.  I have been trying to provide texts for my students as described to us by the Woolf Fisher Research Centre (in the diagram below) in order to increase reading knowledge and foster dialogic conversations in our learning groups.

What I need help with?

I am continuing to find opportunities to engage students in dialogic conversations before, during and after reading, especially those who tend to shy away from sharing in a group setting.  I need to remember to record my group lessons more often in an effort to share (and learn from) my successes, and failures.

How do I document if a strategy is working?

The easiest way to do this is simply by teacher observations.  Listening to my students while they are interacting in their teaching group discussions, and when they are off working independently will give immediate feedback.  However, utilising student blogs and Hapara Dashboard to monitor their learning tasks during the week will also provide evidence of understanding.  The main thing for me to remember is to provide my students with learning tasks that require them to think outside the box and utilise what they have learnt from all modes of the text.  

Spark-MIT Innovation

As one of the MIT-Spark Innovative Teachers, I decided to have a go at creating a multimodal text database for the Manaiakalani and the Outreach clusters.  I have spent the past few months trying to formulate a plan for what this would/could look like, and what type(s) of information it would need to include.

This morning, I  was very fortunate to work with the Manaiakalani Outreach Facilitators to synthesize our collective understanding of the research provided by the Woolf Fisher Research Team, including Dr. Rebecca Jesson and Dr. Stuart McNaughton, from the University of Auckland.  We have been assured that if we provide our students with reading material that is both wide and deep, they will make accelerated progress.  To take it a step further, the modes of texts (journal, internet article, picture, graphic, video, song, etc) that we should be allowing our students to experience should vary as shown in the graphic provided by Dr. Jesson in a Professional Development session she did with the Pt England staff during the past year.

Time was then spent constructing a Google Spreadsheet system to be used as a collective database for teachers across our own cluster, and the outreach clusters to input information about their reading choices based on an original text/theme and supported by texts from each of the other text types in various modes.  

My Next Steps: During the upcoming weeks, I will be working to compile various examples multimodal texts to build the database.  I will also engage the participation of colleagues within my own school to help populate, use and offer feedback, while overseeing the database as it is populated by teachers across Manaiakalani and our Outreach clusters.