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.