PES PD: Maths With Fiona Fox

Today, the teachers at Pt England were once again able to spend some time working with Fiona Fox (Manaiakalani Maths Facilitator). We had a lovely time looking at the importance of subtising, promoting fluency and sequencing/developing mathematical strategies. Fiona brought along a wide variety of maths games that we explored in our year level teams. It was a great opportunity to look at resources that are available to us to implement into our weekly classroom plans. 

Subitising

-Using Number talks (show for 3-5 seconds)

Fluency

-Being able to provide mathematical answers instantaneously without having to think about it.

Sequencing and Developing Strategies

-Foundational Facts

-5 Frames

-Doubling

-SKip Counting

-10 Frames

-Arrays for mult/div

-Mulitpication Loopy

A New Normal

 Teaching the past two years have been anything but normal, and this year is proving to be much of the same. I was challenged recently when I saw a social media post that showed a table of comparing a student's current school year with the last "normal" school year they attended. This made me stop and reflect about our Year 3/4 students. The year 4 students have not attended a "normal" school year since year 1 and the year 3 students have not attended a "normal" school year since they were in an ECE programme. This led me to question myself about what is normal. 

School for our year 3/4 students in a Covid world IS normal. They have never really attended school any other way. One of the things that is not normal is the norms that we generally would have used to compare student acheivement and classroom success in the past. Thinking of the things that we need to change in our teaching practice to help focus on where are students are now our staff used the analogy of a face mask. 

We have been asked to wear a mask at school from nose to chin, which presents many problems in a classroom setting. So, as we move from a Mask On to a Mask Off society, we explored what challenges we are now face with the goals that we have for our "new normal" classroom. 

PES PD: Instructional Reading

 Today, the teacher's of Pt England spent some time in Professional Development discussing the reading research that has been compiled with our PAT data that shows that our students are still struggling to achieve at the national norm. We have been focusing on what we need to do as a school to help make accelerated progress in reading a natural occurrence for the students at our school.

Shanahan & Shanahan Model of Literacy Development (2018): moving students from Basic Literacy (foundational) to Intermediate to Disciplinary Literacy (High School/NCEA). We do a great job getting the students to a Year 4 reading level but we are struggling to get our kids to that level of disciplinary literacy at an earlier age in order to shape their literary understanding at an appropriate rate. 

Today, we spent some time looking at Instructional Reading, while remembering the importance of vocabulary acquisition. 

INSTRUCTIONAL READING

Orientation/Introduction of the Theme/Hook them in - ignite curiosity

Early Years: Talking mainly about the theme of the book. Keeping it nice and tight giving them enough to get going.

Planning: Depending on the level, you may do a quick high frequency word quiz and quick read of a familiar/seen text or revisit something from the previous lesson. 

    -Make sure you have the norms set up and reviewed as needed at the beginning of your lessons

    -Provide them with a purpose for their reading before the start the text. It is important that students have a clear purpose for what they are reading so that they make a connection to the text instead of just reading to read. 

    -Discuss what we already know about the theme of the text in pairs. Then, listen to each other share and then the next person rephrase and add on to what was already said. 

        **You are the Prime Minister, what are you going to say about this problem to others?

How do we hear kids?

    -Kids need to be comfortable and feel safe while being HEARD. Students need to be reading aloud to the teacher

   -Read to themselves and then tap in front of students to read aloud where they are so you are able to hear them and work with them individually

    -Older kids need remember their purpose for reading before starting and knowing what will be discussed after reading. Have them come into reading aloud when you tap them from where they are in the text and move on once you are ok with what they are reading.

Planning for instructional reading: Be sure to front load yourself with information about the topic/theme

    -Set the expectations up high. Encourage the kids through your launch about what the goals of the lesson are to promote student success. 

    -Don't focus on answering questions focus on the discussion about what they have read.  Thinking about why the author wrote the text

    -Be truthful about the concept that thinking is hard work. It is not an easy thing to do and we must work to be successful

PES Reading Inquiry

This term, the teacher's at Pt England are continuing to focus on collaborating to achieve a common language for teaching reading. We are primarily focusing on our students reading from Blue to Gold on the NZ Colour Wheel (students reading reading from 6-8 years). 

At this time, we are focusing on "fixing" words that the students read incorrectly. We were asked to read with a focus group of students one on one and see how we could apply the fixing prompts to our reading session. 

I choose to read a page out of the text the students were reading for their learning task about Te Horetā and Captain Cook's encounter.  I found it very interesting that I had multiple students replace the word "cloak" with "clock".  It was interesting when I used the "finding" prompt:

You said "They sat closely together on the deck, watching the men exchange flax CLOCKS for nails and other goods." Does that make sense to you? 

The students instantly knew that it didn't make sense so I moved on by saying, "Well, when you look at that word, you're right the beginning of clocks does have a "CL" blend just like the word on the page. If we take the CL off of the word in the text, do you know what it says?"

Both students were unable to read the word "OAK".  I then decided to move into other words that had the "OA" sound in it as it is used in cloaks. "Do you know any other words that have 'OA" in them=?"

The students were able to say "Boat"  

"Ok, if we take the sound that we hear in Boat and put that same sound in for oak
what do we have?"

We then went back and reread the sentence from the text and the students were able to properly read the word cloaks. They actually went back to their seats feeling very accomplished just from that small interaction.

PD: The Reading Book

This term, the teachers at Pt England School are taking part in ongoing Reading PD to try to create a common language when teaching our students how to read. We have noticed that we have a large number of students in our school who get stuck at that 8-9 year old reading level. We have also realised over the years that a number of these students often struggle during the first few years of school to reach that 8 year old reading level. By creating a common teaching language and technique across our school, we hope that student success will be seen year to year. 

As a way to develop our common language, the Reading Committee is taking a look at "The Reading Book" by Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey (2019). Prior to the Covid-19, Auckland Level 3 Lockdown Round 2 (Term 3, 2020), the Reading Committee was taking a closer look at a few pages from this book as we developed the next phase of the on-going professional development. 

Some of the key ideas when looking at students who are learning to read are:

• Getting Ready for Reading
• Build phonic awareness and develop visual skills
• Students need to hear, identify and make general letter sounds
• Share rhymes, alliterations, action songs, poems
• Break words into syllables with claps
• Learning to Read
• Hear and identify initial sounds
• Learn letter names and sounds
• Hear and identify initial letter sounds of a word
• Hear and identify final word sounds
• Hear and identify find sound in word
• Identify letters that are part of the sound
• Developing Independence
• Hear and identify medial vowel sounds in CVC words
• Break CVC words into 3-4 phonemes
• Begin to recognise and identify digraph sounds (if present)
• Hear and identify clusters of consonants
• Becoming Proficient
• Introduce common long vowel sounds
• Introduce other long vowel sounds (ie-car, fast)

It is also important to know how to teach students about chunking (morphology) to support spelling, decoding and vocabulary development. 

Students need to be taught explicit self-monitoring strategies so that they are able to monitor their understanding and build awareness of comprehension. As readers become more proficient, they are able to activate their prior knowledge and unconsciously access four cuing systems. The four cuing systems are:

1. Prior Knowledge: What do I already know?
2. Structure/syntax: Does that sound right?
3. Meaning/semantics: Does this make sense?
4. Visual/ Graphophonic information: Does that look right?   

In an effort to ensure that students at Pt England are unconsciously using those four self-monitoring cues, we will be diving deeper into the shared language provided through using teaching prompts from a previous Gwenneth Phillips professional development based on the research conducted in "Picking Up the Pace." Our hope is that by using a common language when reading aloud with our "learning to read" students, they will have more success as they move up through the school without having to learn a new teaching style every year. 

Making Reading Come Alive

This year, our staff is focusing on ways to teach reading strategies to our lower level readers. We will be participating in frequent staff professional development in order to implement a school wide approach to working with our learning to read students.

The students that I have chosen to focus on, during this time, all have a reading age of 9 years. One of the students has made 6 months progress in the last six months and the other three have not made any progress. However, all four students passed the decoding portion of their Running Record test. Therefore, I feel that we need to focus on reading for understanding.

It shall be an interesting few months, and I look forward to seeing the progress that I am able to help these students achieve.

PES PD: Equitable Outcomes in Maths

Did our shift in maths pedagogy create equitable outcomes?  What can we do to make it a more PES equitable experience?

Our students need tangible materials to help with their understanding of a problem (when needed). However, they also need to be TAUGHT how to use those materials.  We, as a school, need a little more structure and sequence with our teaching paths that will incorporate the concepts and teaching styles of DMIC. We will be unpacking this as a staff this week.

While we still we be structuring culturally relevant problems, our groups will be extremely fluid. Socially, academically, and structurally allowing for ability stretching are great ways to structure learning groups for different opportunities.

This was such a valuable PD session as a staff as we reflected on what worked well and what was successful for our students during our two years of DMIC roll out and mentoring. Although we gained a tremendous insight into culturally relevant problem solving and how that could look with our students while providing formative data, we also had to step back and realise the gaps that we were now missing in the content knowledge that could be measured formatively.

I am excited to explore this more this year as I begin my 2020 Inquiry into teaching.

PES PD: Welcome to 2020!

What do we need most in 2020?  What a question to start the year off with as we discuss the direction of the new school year. As a staff we spend the first two days of the school year in Professional Development meetings and this is a great way to start the year on the same page. 

An exciting part of today, is that this year we will be focusing on the Pt England/Manaiakalani Way of implementing the amazing parts of the information that we acquired over the past few years. We will be focusing on Maths PD during the first semester and Reading during the second. 

Our school theme for this year is "Never Lose Hope".which comes from one of our school values. We will be focusing on hope as: Dreams, Vision, Imagination, Goal Setting, A Vision for Tomorrow, A Sense of Future Possibility 

As always our first part of the day was a great reminder of why we do what we do. Excited to see what the rest of the day looks like as we unpack our curriculum a little more and plan for a great Term 1!

PES PD: Dr. Jannie van Hees

As a team, we have presented Jannie with three areas of concern

FOCUS: Reading age: 8-10 years old. This is where a lot of our kids are stuck..
Reading strategies/ approach to do with kids when they are with us.
How do we lead group discussion/facilitate our reading groups to get more vocab and thinking/argumentation from our students?
Also what types of follow up activities can they do after this session with the teacher?

Deep Diving into Text

Narratives are often less demanding in terms of what is going on in the text. We need to make sure we are doing a disproportionate amount of non-fiction.
Read silently-take in information (what can we get a hold of from this text? Then, read to build fluency)
Re-read aloud 1-2 paragraphs (or short section) and try to get a wider deeper meaning of the reading (holistically look at the text).
Teacher becomes the mediator for student discussion to pull together the deeper meaning on the story and pick up the “gems” that need to be melded together.

Significant Word Groups: Be intentional about noticing. Do not singularly look at vocabulary but look at the phrase or group of words for combined meaning (veil of mist)

Quantities of quality text (cutting edge texts for kids). Less about doing activities and more about focusing in on logging word groups.  We need to create a hungriness in our students for a deeper want to learn.

Learning conditions need:
Word Consciousness Cultivation
Rich Language and Word Availability
Explicit Word Attention
Word Learning Strategies

Developing a culture of word-consciousness, while creating a community of Word gathers.
Word hunters
Hungry for words
 Word crazy
Word power/powerful
Word wizards
Collect-grab-share
‘Human’ dictionaries

To be relevant vocabulary must be:
in text-in context
Available-notice
multiple encounters
engaged with

WORDPLOSION: Digging deep for the underlying meaning of a word and then you are able to understand the word family.
Example: Employ
-explain it: to enhance something/to put to use
-family members: employee, employment, employed,
employing, reemploy
As texts become more complex, language and structure, vocabulary, concept knowledge and thinking and meaning bring upon deeper student understanding.

Deep Diving
We want kids to be mindful readers. Deep diving comes from talking about it. Students are viewing, reading, noticing, and talking with each other and the teacher.

Newspaper article
Headline: what clues does it offer about the main points? What is amazing about that? What do you want to know now?
Paragraphs 1 and 2: Dig the details of the article to help answer the questions further
Use images and movie clips when appropriate

Slow down to take small chunks to pick up ideas. Looking at groups of words. What are the surface meanings of those words?

Manaiakalani Create PD

This term for our Manaiakalani staff PD, the whole cluster was invited to Tamaki College for the afternoon to spend some time engaging in a fun create task or two.  I signed up to make Vietnamese spring rolls.

We were split into groups of 4 and put into kitchens around the room to work. Each kitchen was responsible for prepping the ingredients needed to make various types of spring rolls. We were in the shrimp kitchen. My job was to cook the vermicelli noodles, dice the lettuce and then I split the prepped veges into two different serving dishes.

After learning how to prep the rice shell, we were given time to explore the various ingredients and make our own spring rolls to sample.  We had a lot of fun and I look forward to making these again in the future.

Words Have Power...PES Edition

Today, the teachers of Pt England had a Teacher Only Day and the last portion of our day was spent hearing from Dr. Janni van Hees. Below are my notes from our session.

Janni van Hees

April 2019

Quantities of quality text

• The more books in a child’s life means the more talk accompany there is in their world. What type of talk accompany mileage engagement are our student’s encountering?
• A quick explain (in the gifting zone) helps using ‘real life language’ when working with students
• We can’t afford for too long to be at texts that are too low. Students need to be reading challenging texts routinely.
• It isn’t just written but oral as well.
• We need short, sharp dives into quality challenging texts.

We want our students to be capable in Language: expressing and understanding.

Children’s language and learning acquisition potential is astounding. Don’t be scared to work in the “Goldilocks” zone with kids. The ultimate achievement is uptake! They will get it because they can!
There are two ways to learn language: engagement and usage. It is important to remember quantity along with quality.

• Other’s language available to me
• Me trying out the language and using it

We should disproportionally provide language for the kids. We spend too much time with reading groups and not enough time with expanded opportunities for oral language

We need to be sure that we are optimising learning conditions by allowing a flourishing learner potential for learning and language.

We need to Deep Dive in Action.

Say more and talk with detail. (My COL blog post using this)
-Use words and ideas that gift your learners knowledge and words. (YOU-Teacher)
-Use words and ideas so your audience knows what you mean (STUDENTS)
-Use words and ideas that gift your child knowledge and words (Families)
**When talking about the detail focus on talking the detail not necessarily focusing on how, what, when, why, etc. Focus on the details the students present.

Adding detail doesn’t make something more interesting. It allows your reader to see exactly what you mean.

PES DMIC PD

Today the teacher's of Pt England had a teacher's only day and we spent the morning hearing from DMIC Don. It was a great session refocusing our mindset on various elements of DMIC Instruction. Below are my notes from that session. 

DMIC-Don

April 2019

All the things we already know about maths (including follow up tasks and content knowledge) does not change with DMIC. Strengths with behaviour management and key competencies does not change. All that changes is the delivery of the mathematical content.

Complex Instruction

• Promotes a different way of understanding of how people learn
• A different image of what it means to understand a mathematical idea
• Norms
• Accountability
• Grouping

Builds on the idea that learning is complex, and that the learners all bring different ideas and understandings to a problem, which make sense of the learning challenge it presents in multiple ways.

• Standing back and observing from a distance
• Provides opportunity for students to show what they know
• Teacher is able to pull from student interactions for sharing back

Social and Academic Status

In GI, the community values, family, inclusion, reciprocal relationships, leadership (church, chief, school), family/culturally centered events, sports)

-confidence (DMIC; NO hands up….keep the control on the teacher not on the confident child who continually volunteers)

Assigned Value?

- English has more assigned value than other languages.
-non-fluent English speakers do not have the same competencies as those of native English speakers
-Asians are always good at maths
-Status at PES is often determined by those who are/are not able to self-regulate and use language to accurately express themselves.

Status GeneralisationHelps us understand how the characteristics between people differ and how they are pooled so that status is allotted

• Status is local and changes within settings
• Status differences in classrooms reflect those of wider society
• Many local status characteristics derive from the school and class culture
• Children watch and interpret teacher’s actions to see what is valued?

The effect of status
When students work in small groups the differences in status (not strengths or motivation) shapes who talks, who others listen to, and who’s ideas direct what decisions are made.

It is better to consider students as having low status instead of low kids, low achievers, struggling students because this means teachers will look for more effective ways to open up the maths for all students.

What does being “smart in maths” means?
-How can we build this into our classroom culture?
-Why do we listen? Focus on listening to understand

Presenting back: Roles need to be defined as things that need to be done. However, student involvement in presenting back needs to be fluid. Every student should be presenting at some point during the talk back.

PES PD: Manaiakalani LEARN

LEARN

Term 1: Dorothy Burt

This week was the Pt England Manaiakalani staff meeting.  During Term 1, the schools throughout Manaiakalani focus on the Learn part of our Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.   Below is are my notes and personal reflection from that session.

Recognise Effective Practice

Amplify Effective Practice

Turbocharge Effective Practice

In the digital world of our learners.

Looking at effective practice through the RAT lens in the digital world.

Effective practice is the key, but effective planning and individualised student goals are the gold and the digital learning simply amplifies our practice.

The ability to see what others are doing allow us the affordance to amplify our own teaching practice. We do this is many different ways, Blogs, PENN, Learning Environments.

Turbocharging comes into play when we use digital affordances to provide ways for rewindable learning, ubiquitous learning to take learning into the next level.

As a staff, we split into groups of 4 and looked at various progressions for the Level 2 reading curriculum and presented mini-lessons that focused on a particular progression. The rest of the staff had to guess which progression our deliberate acts of teaching (DATs) was being used with that particular group. This provided an excellent way for our staff to amplify our effective practice through modeling.

Now that we have reaffirmed our understanding of how to link the progressions to our micro-teaching through our DATs, we can continue to reaffirm the understanding of that progression through our turbocharged learning tasks that will ultimately provide an avenue for an increased level of student understanding.

PES: DMIC PD

PES PD: DMIC 11 March 2019

The hardest part of learning something new is not embracing new ideas, but letting go of old ones.

Justifying and Arguing Mathematically:

-Require that students indicate agreement or disagreement with part

of an explanation or a whole explanation.

-”Do we agree? Does anyone not agree?”

-Ask the students to provide mathematically reasons for agreeing or

disagreeing with an explanation. Vary when this is required so that

the students consider situations when the answer is either right or

wrong.

-”Why did you do that?”

-Ask the students to be prepared to justify sections of their solutions

in response to questions.

-”Can you explain why you (or your group) did that?”

-Everyone in the group presenting is held accountable for the solution.

               -Require that the students analyse their explanations and prepare collaborative responses to

                 sections they are going to need to justify

-Model ways to justify an explanation

-”I know 3+4=7 because 3+3=6 and one more makes 7”

-Structure activity which strengthens student ability to respond to challenge

-Expect that group members will support each other when explaining and justifying to a larger group

-Explicitly use wait time before requiring students to respond to questions or challenges

-Require that the students prepare to explain their thinking in different ways to justify it

Questions to support student justification/extension?

-Why did you….

-How did you know…

-What do you mean by…

-Why did you do this...and not this…

**Encourage “so” “if” “then” “because” to make justifications**

Questions to extend an explanation into a generalisation? (CONNECT to GENERALISE)

-Does that work for every number?

-Would this work for “X”?

-Can you make connections between…?

-Can you see any patterns?

-How is this the same/different to what we did before?

Developing Generalisations

-Representing a mathematical relationship in more general terms

-Looking for rules and relationships

-Connecting, extending, reconciling

-Ask students to consider what steps they are doing over and over

again and begin to make predictions about what is changing and

what is staying the same.

-Ask the students to consider if the rule or solution they have used

will work for other numbers

-Consider if they can use the same process for a more general case

-”What happens if you multiply the number by 2?”

Revisiting how we Develop Proficient Mathematical Learners

-Attend to classroom culture

-Choose high-level, problematic tasks

-Launch tasks in contextual ways

-Anticipate strategies and monitor group work

-Select and sequence the sharing

-Allow student thinking to shape the direction of discussions

-Plan for anticipations and how the connect could look

Revisiting the Launch

-First focus on the context. The problem should be in front of each

group of students. Let Y3 up read it themselves.

-Use Talk Moves to help students with lower literacy levels to

access the information of the problem

-”What is happening in this story?” Ask for others to add on or

repeat and revoice until you know they all understand the

story.

-20% Teacher Talk 80% Student Talk

-”What do we need to find out?” Do not let them say an

operation, focus their attention on concepts not how to do it

-5 minutes work time (Jr School) 15 minutes (MAX!! Seniors)

-Think through grouping carefully, think social grouping or

what individuals can bring to the group work

-Never ‘High Half’/”Low Half’

-Regrouping Regularly

-Keep groups close together to work on the mat

-Teacher role: roving, monitoring, etc

Connecting and Summarising

-Plan explicitly!

-Draw connections between solutions

-End with a summary of key maths ideas so students leave with

a “residue” from the lesson. This provides a way of talking about

the understanding that remains