Bursts and Bubbles 2020

This year's Burst and Bubbles was a lot of fun. It was great to hear what everyone was doing and how the classroom pedagogy had changed due to the Covid restrictions we faced during the year. Please read my Burst and Bubbles report below or click here to see the video of my presentation.  

The catalytic aspect of student learning my inquiry focused on this year was  providing opportunities for mathematical vocabulary acquisition to strengthen a student’s self-efficacy in maths.

I identified this as my focus when I noticed that many of my students were beginning to happily have dialogic conversations in literacy but were finding it difficult to carry that same level of conversation across to maths. Also, during my create based learning tasks students were asked to create videos of themselves discussing their thought process behind their problem solving strategies. Very quickly it became apparent that many students were unable to use the correct mathematical vocabulary when describing their solutions. 

To build a rich picture of my students’ learning I used PAT, strand based Easttle and GLOSS test results, personal observations/reflections, student voice surveys, and video recorded maths lessons and student interactions throughout the year.

The main patterns of student learning I identified in the profiling phase were that many of my students didn’t necessarily find maths difficult but they voiced that multiple step problems and the understanding of mathematical vocabulary were difficult. I soon realised that many of my low achieving students actually were able to complete the mathematical processes within an isolated step, but once the whole problem was put together or they were presented with an unknown mathematical term they shut off. 

My profiling of my own teaching showed that I had strengths in promoting a safe space for students to share their mathematical thinking even if that meant making a mistake.  My students indicated that I consistently provided ways for students to hear, understand and use new mathematical terms. But I felt my students would likely make more progress if I developed in my understanding of techniques used to teach mathematical terminology that would allow the opportunity for them to expand their abstract reasoning and move beyond basic operational problem solving.

The changes I made in my teaching were beginning each strand based unit with a “Diving Deeper” task that frontloaded students with definitions and examples of the mathematical terms that they would encounter during the course of the unit. I also began to insist that students used proper mathematical terminology when discussing their thought process. A basic (yet common) example would be saying, “I added 5 and 7” instead of “I plussed them.”  

The scholarly research (literature) that helped me decide what changes to make was a combination of scholarly articles, our own Pt England maths PD and discussions with other CoL teachers who shared their learnings from various professional development that they had attended. 

The easiest thing for me to change was the way that I was beginning each unit with a deep dive into the mathematical vocabulary for that particular strand.  However, the most difficult thing to change were the ideas I obtained from the scholarly literature that I had read. This was made difficult because of the changes in pedagogy we had to make in response to the various Covid levels and lockdowns. 

Overall I would rate the changes in student learning as decent for the type of year we have had.  The evidence for my rating is that 13/21 students who took the PAT test in both Terms 1 and 4 obtained the average yearly progress in their Scale Scores, not surprising is that the students who attended online distance learning and those who returned to school directly after each lockdown made the most progress. 

My 2020 CoL Inquiry Focus

My 2020 CoL Inquiry Focus:

“How can providing opportunities for mathematical vocabulary acquisition strengthen a student’s self-efficacy in maths?”

The Manaiakalani Community of Learning is working together on this task using the expertise existing in of our community of learning.

In 2020 for my inquiry I have selected the following CoL achievement challenge: 

Increase the achievement in Years 7-10, in Reading, Writing, and Maths, as measured against National Standards and agreed targets.

The teaching as inquiry framework I will continue to use in 2019 has been specifically co-constructed for Manaiakalani schools using our familiar Learn Create Share structure.

The elements in this framework share close similarities with other models New Zealand teachers use.

Throughout the year, I will be labelling my blog posts to reflect our Learn, Create, Share structure.

LEvidence	Learn - Gather Evidence	CPlan	Create - Make a plan	SPublish	Share - Publish
LScan	Learn - Scan	CTry	Create - Try new things	SCoteach	Share - Co-teach
LTrend	Learn - Identify Trends	CInnovate	Create - Innovate	SModel	Share - Model
LHypothesise	Learn - Hypothesise	CImplement	Create - Implement	SGuide	Share - Guide
LResearch	Learn - Research	CReflect	Create - Reflect	SFback	Share - Feedback
LReflect	Learn - Reflect			SReflect	Share - Reflect

Overall Evaluation of My Intervention

Write an overall evaluation of your intervention in terms of the causal chain you had theorised. i.e. To what extent was the intervention successful in changing factors such as teaching? To what extent were those changes in teaching effective in changing patterns of student learning? (WFRC?)

This year, I spent some time thinking about the causal chain for my inquiry and I choose two key factors to hypothesise about in an earlier blog post seen here.

Scaffolding: This was a very successful part of my teaching to consider this year with my priority learners. By conducting regular Running Records, and monitoring student work regularly, I was able to indicate the exact areas that students were finding challenging and modify my teaching approach to address those issues, either independently or as a group. 

Collaborative Sharing Time: This has been so much fun!  Since the shift in my class was ongoing, I enjoyed having the students work between groups at random times during the year. This also meant that I was able to stretch my readers more by providing them with a more challenging text, but a group of students to work with that are working at the reading level of the challenging text. Students were able to hold deeper conversations and complete their learning tasks with a wider variety of students. 

Bursts and Bubbles 2019

This week, the Manaiakalani COL Teachers presented 3 minute "Bursts" or summaries of our Inquiries at the annual "Manaiakalani Bursts and Bubbles." Below is the report that I shared during my three minutes.

The catalytic aspect of student learning my inquiry focused on this year was promoting vocabulary acquisition in an effort to increase dialogic conversations and reading comprehension with my Year ⅞ students. 

I identified this as my focus when I noticed that we, as a school and a cluster, were still struggling to increase our reading results. This was evidently clear from the Wolfe Fisher Research Centre’s presentation earlier this year.  Although many of our students demonstrated shift in their achievement from Term 1 to Term 4 in 2018, they were still landing below the National norm for their age group.

The sources of evidence and data I used to build a rich picture of my students’ learning were PAT Reading and STAR assessments, Running Record data, student voice surveys, and observational anecdotal notes of student oral reading and group interactions.

The main patterns of student learning I identified in the profiling phase were that many of my more able readers actually did not consider themselves to be a good reader, and this made me think further about the actual self-efficacy of our students as readers. I soon realised that the students  overwhelmingly wanted to learn how to read “bigger words” and this often stopped them from participating in group discussions because they didn’t feel they knew how to pronounce the word or even more, what the word actually meant in that context. 

My profiling of my own teaching showed that I had strengths in promoting comprehension discussions, recognising an individual’s oral reading skills and modelling decoding strategies and vocabulary strategies using the surrounding text. But that my students would likely make more progress if I developed in providing ways for student led discussions to occur more freely without feeling the need to give “the right answer”. 

The changes I made in my teaching were taking more time to strategically plan what I wanted the outcomes of our reading sessions to be before, during and after a text was read. Part of this meant that I no longer focused on reading a whole text with a group but we often focused on reading a shorter more difficult passage for decoding and understanding.  Part of this led me to find new ways for students to determine the words and phrases that they found difficult to understand and provide ways for the students to confidently share their conjectures while on the hunt for the correct definition, without simply “Googling” it. 

The literature/expertise that mostly helped me decide what changes to make was the ongoing CoL PD offered by Dr. Jannie van Hees the past few years and the time we spent with her in our team preparing for our Genomics project. I also attended two Agility with Sound sessions led by Betsy Sewell who stated, “Good readers are constantly encountering and absorbing new vocabulary.”

The easiest thing for me to change for that vocabulary absorption to take place was taking the time to dive deep into meatier, more meaningful shorter texts during our microgroup teaching and hardest things for me to change was student perception that they could rely on their prior knowledge and surrounding text to help define an unknown word or phrase. 

Overall I would rate the changes in student learning as amazingly! The evidence for my rating is based on the Running Record assessments that were just conducted on my class of 30 students, who were reading just below to well-below grade level at the beginning of the year, 9 are now reading at or above, and 6 less than a year below grade level.  It is also evident that with 27 of my literacy students have made between 1 and 2.5 years progress in their reading age.

My 2019 CoL Inquiry Focus:

“Promoting vocabulary acquisition to strengthen reading comprehension and stimulate student led dialogic conversations.”

The Manaiakalani Community of Learning is working together on this task using the expertise existing in of our community of learning.

In 2019 for my inquiry I have selected the following CoL achievement challenge: 

Increase the achievement in Years 7-10, in Reading, Writing, and Maths, as measured against National Standards and agreed targets.

The teaching as inquiry framework I will continue to use in 2019 has been specifically co-constructed for Manaiakalani schools using our familiar Learn Create Share structure.

The elements in this framework share close similarities with other models New Zealand teachers use.

Throughout the year, I will be labelling my blog posts to reflect our Learn, Create, Share structure.

LEvidence	Learn - Gather Evidence	CPlan	Create - Make a plan	SPublish	Share - Publish
LScan	Learn - Scan	CTry	Create - Try new things	SCoteach	Share - Co-teach
LTrend	Learn - Identify Trends	CInnovate	Create - Innovate	SModel	Share - Model
LHypothesise	Learn - Hypothesise	CImplement	Create - Implement	SGuide	Share - Guide
LResearch	Learn - Research	CReflect	Create - Reflect	SFback	Share - Feedback
LReflect	Learn - Reflect			SReflect	Share - Reflect

Looking ahead to 2019

As I think ahead to 2019, I am excited for what 2019 will bring as I prepare to move back into a year ⅞ classroom. I am looking forward to working with a new group of students after rolling up with mostly the same group this past year. I am excited to possibly revisit a combination of my prior two inquiries into my own teaching to see the impact that they can make on a year 7/8 classroom in comparison to the year ⅘ classes I was with in 2017-2018. I am excited to look deeper into the ways that we, as year ⅞ teachers, can support students by using NCEA vocabulary in our learning tasks and small group discussions to help promote student efficacy as they prepare for their College level exams. This will also help with bridging the gap from intermediate to high school. I am also interested in looking closer at the current gap from intermediate to high school. I would love to come up with ways to make that transition a smoother one for our students and their learning.

In 2019, I am wanting to further my confidence in DMIC style maths teaching and in doing so gain a deeper understanding of relating back to the big idea and providing opportunities for student engagement. I am looking forward to having students who have a previous understanding of the DMIC process which will hopefully allow up to focus on working together and learning from one another.

Focus Group Data Term 4

Now that our Term 4 testing has been completed, I spent some time taking a look at the data and comparing it to their scores from Term 4 last year and Term 1 this year.  I was easily able to do this for all of my focus group students except in a few instances due to excessive absences during the testing period.

This year, I focused my research on a group of 7 Māori students in my literacy class (as discussed in a previous blog post).  Below is a graph showing the Reading Ages as provided by our 2017 and 2018 Term 4 Running Record Data.  At the beginning of 2018, all of the students in my focus group were reading below grade level between 7.5 and 8.5 years of age and as the graph below shows, they have all made some progress and are now reading between 8.5-9 years.

One of the tests that our students take twice a year is the  PAT-Reading Comprehension test.  Here is a comparison of their test scores from Term 4 last year (2017), Term 1 2018 and Term 4 2018.  The majority of the students did somewhat better on the 2018 Term 1 test, which indicates that there was not much summer drop off with my focus group of students and nearly all of the students made some shift from Term 1 to Term 4. 

Our students also sat the STAR (Supplementary test of achievement in reading) Test, which is another way for us to assess a range of our student's reading skills.  Although, the PAT shows not much drop off in the results, our STAR data clearly shows the opposite. However, I find that students who struggle with reading often decide that it is simply "too hard" and give up on the STAR test particularly in the beginning of the year.  It was my hope earlier this year that we would see greater improvement during Term 4 and in nearly all cases the students did somewhat better.

Lastly, as I stated in a previous post (linked here), I decided to administer an additional word recognition assessment to my focus group called the Burt Word Reading Test.

At the beginning of the year, I found the results of this test very interesting, especially when compared to the 2017 Running Record Reading ages and looking at it now, I feel the same way. The majority of the students who were able to complete both testing cycles made some improvement during the year and in nearly every instance the growth of their reading age this year nearly matched the estimated growth span (the age for the Burt test on the graph shows the lowest age in the scale score band).

I am very proud of the progress my students have made this year in their vocabulary usage and confidence when speaking orally and sharing their thoughts and opinions with their peers.