Monday 4 November 2019

Digging Deeper to Reach the Mountain Top

Image result for climbing to the  mountain top

What a journey we have been on this school year!  I am so pleased with the progress that my literacy students have made to date and as a result, I have decided to post a progress update of my Teaching as Inquiry to date. 

My Inquiry question this year is: 

How will promoting vocabulary acquisition strengthen reading comprehension and stimulate student led dialogic conversations? 

This falls into our Kahui Ako Achievement Challenge #4 which is:

To increase the achievement in years 7-10, in reading, writing, and maths, as measured against agreed targets.

In order to help with this, I have been spending time this year "Deep Diving" with my students to develop their vocabulary acquisition. The concept of Deep Diving came out of our Kahui Ako sessions with Dr. Jannie van Hees from the University of Auckland and it was further discussed with our teaching team of year 7/8 teachers as we began a special Genomics program that we are doing this term with Dr. van Hees and Dr. Thierry Lints (Auckland University Medical School).

I have been contemplating the effectiveness of this change in my teaching, and after reviewing the Running Records and I was very pleased to see that many of my students were able to use the deep diving technique as we discussed in class to keep talking during those vocabulary questions and work their way to the correct answers on the PROBE tests.  I am very proud of my literacy students this year and the progress they have already made after three terms at school. 



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