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. 

Key Changes in Teaching

Summarise evidence about key changes in teaching and other factors that influence student learning. (WFRC Ev1)

During this year, I have done a few strategic things to change my teaching practice that I believe have influenced student learning.  I discussed these methods at length in a previous blog post found here.  However, I have summarised the four strategies below.

1. Strategically planning my Deliberate Acts of Teaching and writing anecdotal notes during the lesson (or shortly after) that help with future planning. This enables me to remain on task while working with my reading groups, and focus in on the correct reading strategy, comprehension question, or connection to the wider world that I have decided to focus on before, during and after reading the text.

2. Digging Deeper Through Deep Diving.  We discussed this with Dr. Jannie van Hees from Auckland University and it is such a simple change in how I present and discuss new vocabulary words and phrases to my students. The influence this has had on student learning was the focus of this blog post. 

3. I have been strategically trying to talk less while encouraging the students to talk more. I do this generally by providing them with the topic (video, paragraph, question, etc) for discussion and then providing them with 30-60 seconds of "prepare" time to formulate what they are going to share. They then have 30-90 seconds to "share" their information with a partner before we come back together and "report" back to the whole group/class.  Students have learnt that they have to pay attention and have a take away from the lesson, video, etc to share with their partner and they also have to be prepared to report back to the whole class. 

 4. Providing opportunities for students to take notes and teaching them how to work collaboratively to do so has provided them with ways to help with summarising what they have read. It has also helped with retention of the information that we previously would have simply orally discussed and moved on. This was evident when we completed summary tasks later on in the week or had class discussions as the term progressed. 

I have also tried to provide various new ways for students to complete their CREATE tasks this year. As year 7/8 students, they sometimes feel like they know all there is to know about the GAFE (Google Apps for Education) tools that they use on a daily basis. However, while attending the Digital Fluency Intensive this year, I realised that there were some fun creative things that the students could be using to share their learning. The new elements that I was able to teach the students how to use sparked new interest in some of my students to complete their assignments, especially my year 8 students. They were excited about discussing their learning and showing off their tasks while working on them and especially once they were completed. They often needed many prompts to stop working and move on to their next class. An example of this is found on a previous blog post here.

Key Shifts in Literacy

Summarise evidence about key shifts in the problem of student learning.

(WFRC Ev #2)

At this point in the school year, we are in the process of collected our end of the year data.  The main ways we do this is through standardised testing (ie PAT Reading Comp, PAT STAR, and Running Records). In addition to the standardised testing, I decided to once again survey my students to see if their opinions about reading have altered during the year.   

One of the easiest ways to collect student voice for evaluation is to conduct a survey. I decided to slightly modify the survey I gave my class at the beginning of the year to see if their opinions of reading have changed during the year.  When looking over the survey I was pleasantly surprised to learn that of the 25 students students overwhelmingly stated that they prefer to read in silence and away from "distractions."

Perhaps the most exciting part of the survey for me was reading the student's written responses. In the beginning of the year, many students stated that they wanted to learn how to understand bigger words better, which made me very happy to have their buy in for our vocabulary acquisition focus.

Hearing student voice once again was exceptionally helpful in determining the growth that many students see in themselves. A few very interesting student responses were:

"I am more confident talking with my group."

"I am able to state the emotions of the characters in the story. For me, the biggest impact (this year) is being able to understand the vocabulary better."

"The biggest impact for me this year is that reading has become my favourite subject."

One student stated, "Reading this year was better because I got more help from my teacher. I can now read between the lines and understand stories much better. One thing that has made the biggest impact in reading this year is that I am more confident to read in front of my friends and my teacher."

When creating the survey, I was curious how the students saw themselves as readers. So I asked the question:

TERM 1

TERM 4

When comparing the two graphs I was so pleased to see that only one student considers him/herself to be a slow reader compared to the 10% from term 1. However, at first glance it appears that the number of students who consider themselves to be fast readers has gone from 21% to 12%. When digging a bit deeper into the survey results, I was able to determine the students who believe themselves to be fast readers in Term 4 are not typically careful readers. It was good to see that the students who believed they were fast during Term 1 were able to reassess their own reading style at a high reading level. 

I have created some graphs to display the Scale Score shifts of my focus group from the STAR Reading and PAT Reading Comprehension tests.  

The STAR graph shows that while my students are still below the Mean Scale Score for a Year 7 student a few have made the average progress as indicated from Table 6 on P. 33 of the STAR Manual.  Students A, B and F have made this average shift and it is important to note that Student A has nearly doubled the indicated average shift.  Students E and G were about 2 points below the average and Students C and D have each shown minimal (0.9 and 1 points) increase. 

The PAT Comprehension graph shows the comparison of Terms 1 and 4 of my focus group.  This graph shows that every student in my focus group has improved their scale score since Term 1. The average year 7 should have an average progress of about 7 points. While Students B and F are still below the Scale Score they have both made progress since Term 1, Student B has increased their scale score by 7 points and Student F has increased by 6 points. While students A and D have both increased their scores by a little more than one point, they are both tracking right around the mean Year 7 scale score. Students C, E and G have made considerable progress on this assessment placing them above the mean year 7 score. 

Another piece of evidential data that I have collected are reading ages based on the results of the PMBenchmark and PROBE Running Records, which at this point in the year will be administered by an outside teacher.  She has done a wonderful job and has provided me with clear successes and next steps for each student as a result of their test. 

This information, along with my anecdotal teaching notes (made during in class small group lessons), will help me formulate the curriculum levels for my students and as a result I will be able to see progress my students have made throughout the school year and determine if the results are due to the interventions put in place through my Inquiry.

Small Steps to Vocabulary Success!

One of the things that I have been considering recently is how successful has the deep diving been when developing vocabulary acquisition with my students this year.  I discussed my initial process with Deep Diving in an earlier blog post found here.

Recently, I spent some time deep diving a few words/phrases that I felt were important to discuss with my reading group prior to beginning the text.  However, I asked students to circle any words or phrases that they were unsure of while reading the article with a partner.  It was my intention to spend some time discussing these words as a group later in the week.  However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that some students took it upon themselves to deep dive/word web the identified words/phrases and share their understanding on their blogs.  This is seen in Lillyana's blog post below.

Click here to see this post and interact with the slides.

I was really impressed with Lillyana's post because also took the time to indicate using a question mark (?) the possible definitions for the words she was exploring. 

What Evidence?

Describe how you will collect information about the implementation of your changed practices/intervention (so it is clear what you doing differently). (WFRC 10)

Describe how you will keep a record of each of the above in a manageable way. (WFRC 11)

We were challenged by the Wolfe Fisher team during our last CoL meeting, to spend some time thinking about how we have been recording how WE as the TEACHER have changed our own practice.

When we began the journey earlier this year, my initial focus for my inquiry was, "Using dialogic discussions to expand vocabulary usage, while strengthening reading comprehension." In order to make this happen, I have been working very hard to change my teaching practice in a few specific, yet meaningful ways:

1. Very specific purpose to our oral reading sessions. In my lesson plans (DATs), I try to specifically think about what I want to do with/focus on with each reading group prior to reading, while reading and after reading. In doing this, I am able to clearly know (and remain on task) with the literary elements/vocabulary that I am trying to work on with that group of students.

2. I have been providing student led methods of discovery for vocabulary acquisition (Deep Diving). I have been strategically spending time working through what a new word means instead of simply having students take one random guess while reading and then telling the group the true definition or modelling how to conduct a "define:" smart search.  

I now grab a piece of paper (or on the whiteboard) and write the word in a bubble before turning the pen/marker over to the group to add what they think they know about the word.  Students then asked to continue adding to the word cloud to build their understanding of the word as they continue their reading or watch the assigned video.  Students then create a digital model of the deep dive to post on their blog and link to my spreadsheet. There are also been times, when we have simply stapled the paper copy on the classroom wall. 

3. After working with the DMIC mentors, one of the things that I have been trying to pull into my teaching this year is strategically talking less while encouraging the students to talk more. I do this generally by providing them with the topic (video, paragraph, question, etc) for discussion and then providing them with 30-60 seconds of "prepare" time to formulate what they are going to share. They then have 30-90 seconds to "share" their information with a partner before we come back together and "report" back to the whole group/class.  Keeping an accurate record of this is something that I have not actually considered until this past week.

So far, as the reporting back has occurred I have created a mind map/brainstorm/note taking model for the students to use when completing future learning tasks. The notes that I put on the board are often added to or modified as more students share.  The whole class notes are photographed and put in a folder in our class Google drive.

After our PD session with Aaron and Hanna, I am now thinking that perhaps I should set up a video camera more often during my class discussions simply to capture student interactions, voice, and sharing.

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Testing Hypotheses

Explain the hypotheses about teaching that you decided were MOST worth testing, and why. (WFRC #8)

For each of your hypotheses, explain how you will test it and what evidence would support (or refute) that hypothesis. (WFRC #9)

Scaffolding:
Am I scaffolding too much and at the same time, am I removing the scaffold too soon? It is such a delicate back and forth that we must do, especially in a class setting with students working across three curriculum levels?

WHY: Many students in my class, are so used to being able to do things in a step by step process as described and monitored by teachers in the past. Students are not used to self-monitoring their own progress.

TESTING/EVIDENCE: The most immediate way to test this is by observation of independent student work. By providing students with assignments that have the scaffolding in place as a pre-observation and then removing it for a later assignment will provide the easiest way to visualise and assess student achievement. Once it is observed that a task of that nature can be completed without the scaffolding, then move on to the next task type.  I also believe that the effectiveness of this will be seen when analysing student running record results. Many of our learning tasks are created in a way that will allow students to think about a text in a way that is required for the higher level running record tests.  If students are able to make that connection from their assignment to the test question then growth is evident.

Collaborative Sharing Time:
Do I provide my students with time to learn from each other? We spend so much time in class reading about similar topics, but what can I do to provide opportunities for groups to grow wider with their understanding of a learning topic by learning from their peers in other reading groups.

TESTING/EVIDENCE:
Evidence of .this would occur by careful planning on my part and the development of tasks for students to work in across their reading groups. This could provide students with a common language about a subject but depending on which text they have been exposed to they would have different levels of understanding. Students working together collaboratively like this has the potential to create cross-group creative tasks for students to shine with those from higher/lower reading levels.

Addressing Student Learning Focus

Develop a set of hypotheses about patterns in your teaching that could be changed to more effectively address the student learning focus. (WFRC #7)

1. Time Management: Am I expecting too much or too little of my students when it comes to their follow up tasks?
2. Collaborative Sharing Time: Do I provide my students with time to learn from each other? We spend so much time in class reading about similar topics, but what can I do to provide opportunities for groups to grow wider with their understanding of a learning topic by learning from their peers in other reading groups.
3. Scaffolding: Am I scaffolding too much and at the same time, am I removing the scaffold too soon? It is such a delicate back and forth that we must do, especially in a class setting with students working across three curriculum levels?
4. Reading Strategies: Am I offering the right follow up tasks (in a creative way) that allow to students to develop their specific reading struggles?

Process of Hypothesis Development

Describe your process for developing hypotheses (what you read, who you talked with). (WFRC #6)

Conversations with:

Woolf Fisher Research Centre
-Students across our cluster are making some achievement, however, they still remain below the national norm for their age group.
-Wider and Deeper Reading Models
-Increased Reading Mileage 

Russell Burt-Principal 
-Ongoing Staff meeting discussions about our school reading data and next steps

PES Staff Inquiry Meetings
-Twice a term, we have staff meetings designated to discussing with and gaining feedback from our staff in regards to our 
Team 5 Colleagues
-As a team, our team wide focus in on reading and as a result we have ongoing conversations during our team meetings (Both formal and informal)

2017-2018 COL Bursts and Bubbles
-Listening to the presentations from the CoL Teachers from across Manaiakalani

Professional Development/Reading:

Betsy Sewell (blog post here)

By the time students reach years 6,7, and 8 they have so many gaps that have been created by the inability to know HOW to apply specific reading skills like letter combinations, sounds and words.  What can we do to change the way they are learning? Betsy offers many new strategies that we are implementing at lower levels around the school.

Dr. Janni van Hees (Blog thread here)

During the past few years, I have been able to have multiple sessions with Dr van Hees across the grade levels due to the different classes I have taught. Her messages are always the same (students need to talk more and be talked to using high level vocabulary), but she continually brings new strategies to consider and trial in class. 

What Every Primary School Teacher Should Know about Vocabulary?-Jannie van Hees and Paul Nation

Preliminary Findings

Begin to collect evidence and data  and come to the next session ready to share your preliminary findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge i.e. using your baseline student data and evidence. (WFRC #5)

Earlier this year, I conducted a student voice survey in an effort to understand my literacy students a little bit better and to gain a deeper understanding of their reading likes/dislikes.  When looking over the survey I was pleasantly surprised to learn that of the 28 students who took the survey only 2-3 said they didn't enjoy reading and just over half of the students also put something in their answers about how they enjoy reading even more when they are able to relax and not be distracted by others.  Students indicated that they enjoy reading most in silence.

When creating the survey, I was curious how the students saw themselves as readers. So I asked the question:

 

I was happy to see that only 21.4% of the students in my literacy class considered themselves to be slow readers and when digging deeper I was exceptionally surprised to learn that some of those students were actually some of the more able readers in my literacy class.

Students were also asked (in short answer form) what they wanted to improve on the most in reading this year and the most common response was that they wanted to be able to read and understand "big words" the first time.  I found it very interesting that this is something that our students indicate as something they would like to work on and it is also something that we have flagged as an important area of focus for the students in our cluster. 

I have also collected and created a spreadsheet for my students that shows their test scores from Running Records, PAT, and STAR as well as their Curriculum level from the end of 2018.  I have included the data for the students in my focus group below as compared to the national scale score average.

Another piece of evidential data that I am collecting are student reading ages based on the results of the PMBenchmark Running Record kit which I will be administering during the next few weeks.  This will be compared to the data from the end of the 2018 school year to see what the student's shift in reading age is over the past 6 months.

The last piece of data I have is found in my anecdotal teacher notes where I indicate observations that I have when reading aloud with students from my literacy class.

Building an Accurate Student Learning Profile

Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge. Justify why you chose these approaches and tools. (WFRC #4)

When thinking about my inquiry this year, the tools/measures/approaches that I plan to use to help portray and accurate profile of student learning in relation to vocabulary acquisition strengthening reading comprehension and promoting student led dialogic conversations are:

1.  Student survey: My hope is that by asking my students to help paint a reading profile of themselves, (likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses, etc) I will be able to hopefully plan the best reading tasks/genres/topics and have an idea of where to focus my lessons to help build student interest in a topic

2. PAT Scores: This paints a very quick picture for me as the teacher (and for my students when we go over the results together, which I hope to do early in Term 2) of a student's strengths and weaknesses. It also allows for a clear picture of student achievement at the end of of the year when combined with other data collection.

3. STAR Test Scores: This test allows for a picture of current vocabulary usage to be made for each student. Combined with the PAT test at the end of the year, it contributes to the clear picture of student achievement as well. 

4. BURT Word Recognition Test: After administering this test last year, I realised what an easy tool it is to administer and how it also contributes to that picture of student achievement.  Going through this with the students and allowing them to see what they were able to achieve now and at the end of the year is a quick indicator for them of the daily words they are able to recognise while reading.

5. Running Records: By administering Running Record tests, I am able to see firsthand what an individual's issues are when decoding/comprehending a text.

6. Teacher Observation/Group Interactions: I try to keep adequate anecdotal notes when working with my reading groups. I have begun to keep an "oral reading" log where I quickly note things I notice during our reading sessions in addition to my normal teacher plan reflections. 

The Catalytic Issue and my Hunches

Explain why you judge this to be the most important and catalytic issue of learning for this group of learners this year. (WFRC #3)

This year I will be inquiring into promoting vocabulary acquisition to strengthen reading comprehension and stimulate student led dialogic conversations.  This is the most important issue for my group of learners as indicated by our school wide reading data and the 2018 Manaiakalani Reading data because as the years go on for Manaiakalani students the gap between our students and the NZ norm increases tremendously as they reach years 7-10.

I believe that based on the Professional Development we have received over the past few years from Dr. Janni van Hees focusing on Language Acquisition and the discoveries made by previous CoL teachers are key to building the link from primary to intermediate and then again from intermediate to high school.  I am very interested in seeing if the students from my focus group are able to grow in their understanding of unpacking topic rich vocabulary to ultimately lead to a growth in self-efficacy to promote dialogic conversations that will in return create a "want" in my students to independently go "Wider and Deeper" in their reading, as previously unpacked by Dr Jesson and Dr McNaughton.

Some possible wonderings that I am considering as I discover the catalytic issue of learning this year are:

-Have students at this age have lost the confidence to share with their peers? What can I do to promote student self efficacy in my classroom?

-Is it true that my students are not actively reading for pleasure?

-Do my students know where to begin to read for pleasure?

-How can I effectively model and recreate useful strategies for students to use to gain vocabulary knowledge while reading?

-What are the level of texts used in the high school reading program?

-What does the high school do to promote reading comprehension? What do their follow up tasks look like?

-Could introducing NCEA level vocabulary purposely in years 7-8 help to bridge the gap between intermediate and high school?

Selecting the Challenge of Student Learning

Describe how and why you have selected this challenge of student learning. (WFRC #2)

Manaiakalani Kahui Ako Achievement Challenge #4:

Increase the achievement in Years 7-10, in READING, writing and maths, as measured against agreed targets.

After teaching in Year 7/8 for a year in 2015, I have been bouncing from year 6 (2016) to 4 (2017) to 5 (2018), which has enabled me to have a first hand look at what tools and understanding students are coming to years 7/8 with. Knowing that I was heading back into a year 7/8 classroom this year, I kept thinking of the presentations we have heard from Dr. Rebecca Jesson over the years beginning with the year I spent in our Intermediate block.

For the past two years, I have focused on Language Acquisition and Dialogic Conversations when Reading, and it has become something that I am passionate about. I am very eager to see which successes I had teaching younger groups of children will work in the same manner with the older children. I am also very eager to learn more about what is expected at Years 9 and 10 literacy and how we can begin to make that an easier transition for our students by either raising our expectations or realigning content and class expectations between years 7/8 and Years 9/10 at Tamaki High School. I would also like to spend some more in depth time looking into the expectations and language used on the NCEA exams and in our Year 9/10 classwork with the hope of introducing and unpacking that language at the intermediate level.

When considering the Manaiakalani data, it was clearly apparent during our cluster presentation earlier this term that while we are making adequate shift in writing and maths we are not seeing that same trend with reading as indicated in the graph below.

Summarising the Challenge

Source: Wikipedia

Summarise the challenge of student learning you plan to focus on in this inquiry.

(WFRC: Post 1)

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

After listening to the Wolfe Fisher Research Centre present their Clusterwide findings from the 2018 school year, we spent some time looking at the data from our school and comparing it to the National Norm.

It was clear that we are still struggling to increase our reading results across the school (and cluster).  Looking at the Term 1 to Term 4 (Teacher Judgement) results from 2018, it is clear that while there is some shift in achievement many students remain below the National norm for their age group.

The graphs below show the Year 6 data (our students before they come into the Intermediate block) and the Year 8 data (the students leaving the Intermediate block heading off to High School).




This year, my reading class is comprised of 32 year 7 and 8 students and all are reading below grade level.  It is my hope to focus my Inquiry on the seven students just below the National norm who currently have a reading level of 10.5-11 years.