The Casual Link...Accelerate: Conversation #3

During our beginning of Term 3 CoL meeting Dr. Rebecca Jesson challenged us once again by providing time for our team to engage in a number of conversations about the integrity of inquiry implementation. I felt that it was important to spend some more time reflecting on these guided questions in an effort to ensure that I am on the right path with my inquiry moving forward during this very important teaching term.

I believe the best place to refine my intervention is to provide more opportunities for students to see the vocabulary we are trying to build being recycled as often as possible. This happens by providing opportunities for discussions in literacy to build upon the vocabulary list when we read texts about the inquiry topic. This is done as best as I am able to with my students still on the Junior School end of the colour wheel.  However, with my students who are reading age 8 and above I am able to do this more in depth and with more consistency with the texts provided. I am also working to provide avenues for the vocabulary to be used by the students in the literacy create tasks and their writing tasks. By allowing students to hear, see and use the vocabulary we are focusing on in many ways will hopefully allow for the recycling of words to occur and become the new normal for my students. 

Integrity of Implementation Conversation #2

During our beginning of Term 3 CoL meeting Dr. Rebecca Jesson challenged us once again by providing time for our team to engage in a number of conversations about the integrity of inquiry implementation.  I felt that it was important to spend some more time reflecting on these guided questions in an effort to ensure that I am on the right path with my inquiry moving forward during this very important teaching term. 

The intended change in teaching was to integrate a more strategic approach to providing avenues for extended vocabulary development and usage. I have been trying to implement the new strategies that have been modelled at our COL PD sessions. My goal is to implement each strategy before we meet again and then find ways to recycle that strategy every 5 weeks or so.  However, timing is always a factor and change in scheduling as the school year becomes more and more busy. I have been trailing most of the activities with my own literacy groups and sometimes as a whole literacy class.  I have also used some strategies during our whole space (60 student) writing lessons.

I know I have been doing it differently because I try to capture digital evidence of my changes or student examples over time.  This information can be found in my various blog posts and whole inquiry reflections as the year draws to an end.

At times, there have been some intended changes that have worked out exactly as I had hoped, and other times I have had to modify things slightly to work with the students that I had in front on me for that timeframe.  However, for the most part, I have tried to do the language abundance activities as close to how they were modelled for us.

Integrity of Implementation Conversation #1

During our beginning of Term 3 CoL meeting Dr. Rebecca Jesson challenged us once again by providing time for our team to engage in a number of conversations about the integrity of inquiry implementation.  I felt that it was important to spend some more time reflecting on these guided questions in an effort to ensure that I am on the right path with my inquiry moving forward during this very important teaching term. 

We are very blessed the the majority of our research on Language Abundance is being provided for us during our Professional Development sessions with Dr. Jannie van Hees.  Jannie always models for us a number of proven activities to do with our students in an effort to introduce, recycle and maintain the rich level of vocabulary that we are hoping to move our students to using on a daily basis.

I have been trying my best to trail everything that Jannie has introduced to us and include my experience on my professional blog. However, I believe that I am finding it difficult to balance the time allotted for each activity as well as continuing with our general literacy program. I am hoping to spend some more time this term providing more opportunities for my students to experience Jannie's Language Abundance activities and becoming more confident with the delivery as well.

I have learnt that sometimes in order to make a difference you have to do things differently.  This can be a scary thing to do, especially after hearing our school (and CoL) beginning of term refocus talk, which discussed the importance of seeing all of our learning groups a minimum of two times per week in each subject area.  However, in order to deliver some of the language abundance activities some of those sessions would have to be combined group activities.

Language Abundance: Chain Linked Writing

Near the end of May, Dr. Janni van Hees came in and talked to the Manaiakalani COL teachers about Language Abundance within in our classrooms (see blog post here). One of the things that Janni spoke about was the idea of creating a dialogic chain (or paragraph) with our students to illustrate grouping details/ideas together in a physical chain.

This term, our school theme is "Move 'Ya Body" and as a focus the students in our learning space are exploring the Maori idea of hauora through their literacy tasks.  After introducing the concept of hauora to the students last week through their reading, we decided to have them write about how they have all four elements in their own lives.

This morning, I launched this concept with the students by providing time for them to Think-Pair-Share what they remembered about hauora.  We then discussed the elements of a paragraph (topic sentences, details, closing).  Students were randomly selected to read aloud sentence strips that were prepared ahead of time.

The class had to decide which statements linked together to form our introduction paragraph and which statements were random details that might fall into the body paragraph links later on in our writing. We also prepared a digital dictation of the paragraph for students to listen to and type into their assignment before writing their own body paragraphs. 

The girls enjoyed being our human paragraph chain. 

The chain was added to our wall as a visual reminder to apply to future learning. 

I look forward to later in the week, when we discuss student writing as a class to have students chain link the sentences they have written for their body paragraphs. Hopefully, this will provide a deeper understanding of paragraph development (and conversation skills) for the students in our class.

CoL PD: Rebecca Jessen

Dr. Rebecca Jessen

Planning and Predicting: THEORY is everything

Studying cognition is like studying dolphins but only being able to see them when they pop out of the water.  How do I adjust what I do for when the dolphins pop out?

Image Source

We should have a strong theory for what language abundance should look like for student acceleration to take place.  Providing opportunities for students to have meaningful conversations using rich vocabulary. Remembering to recycle vocabulary throughout the school day. 

Now is the time to take what we found 'worked' last term and make it happen more often this term. We need to start taking our results (looking at the kids 'it' worked for) and think about what worked for them and how it worked differently.  Also, reflecting on what I did differently.  Bearing in mind, how different students engaged, and how I engaged with different students.

Revisiting our Theory...what causes the shift? How was I able to obtain shift in the students so far this term? Theory is not quite everything. The only way to know if it works for a certain student is to try it out. 

Analysing implementation data

Moving from:

-What I wanted to happen (planned)?

To:

-What actually happened (delivered)?

To: THIS TERM

-How can I make sure this happens even better every time?

Opportunities for Teacher Learning

1. Figure out the students' strengths and needs

2. Use the existing research base to plan something different that is likely to use strengths to meet the need

3. DO the different thing

4. Which engages the students in a different way of learning?

5. Which results in learning...for all? for some? WHY??? What explains anomalies?

CoL Meeting: Russell's Message for Term 3

It is important to remember not to over scaffold and not promote independent thinking will not allow the opportunity for students to have metacognitive growth.

Success of our students needs to be evaluated by the teachers to ensure that change is occurring to make those success continue to happen for those children. Our success must be evaluated by looking at the value added to the student's understanding.  It is important to remember that teaching is an intervention...and it is important to remember that 'great teachers make children learn.'

What do we need most in Term 3? It is the 'bomb' term.  Go hard!  There are no tests, reports or major interruptions (productions, Fiafia).  Therefore, the 'guts' of our Inquiry need to be completed by around week 4 Term 4. This is the term to push for your Inquiry and student acceleration. We must be able to deliver the curriculum really well,  and make sure its visible. If the learning is not visible, then we as educators have failed. Student work must be in the right place on their Drive and shared on their blogs.

Extending Language

The language of success v GI cheechee

• motivation
• expectations
• What language do we speak when it matter most?
• Remember the cultural origins
• How do we grow/revisit/maintain language & concepts 
• How are going to do this during Term 3?
• Link the language of success to the known environment
• Make children speak to the known environment
• Provide them with a formula or template
• Sing my song
• Write really interesting stuff with a real world purpose

We need to be sure to plan effectively to promote listening, speaking, reading and writing into our planning on a weekly basis. We need to have things that actually deliver the WALT's we have planned. If they don't, it means that our students are not improving unless they are directly working in front of the teacher. 

• Number of iterations of high value activities
• Real world context
• Check in points/conferencing/direct instruction
• 2x week meeting minimum
• completed work
• visible
• published

Our students need to be posting to their blogs a minimum of 2 times a week.  This will directly impact our accelerated progress.