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.

2020 Reading Progress

In our Year 7/8 block, we have the honour of working with our students over the course of two years. This means that the majority of my Year 7 literacy and maths students will be in my class again as a Year 8.

Last year, I worked with my Reading group to move them from reading at a Level 3 (Year 5/6) to reading at Level 4 (Year 7/8). This data was discussed in the blog post entitled, "End of the Year Reading Age Shift"It is important to note, that the graph on this post has different student identification letters than the graph on the 2019 blog post as my 2019 Year 8s have moved onto High School and I have included some students in my 2020 focus group who were not part of the 2019 focus group.

We have been extremely pleased with the progress our students have made before, during and after the lockdown. We have seen great shift in the majority of our students. As we look at moving out of our Covid-Level Classrooms and back into our regular Literacy/Maths rotations, the teachers of Team 5 have been spending some time looking at the shift of our literacy students and as a result we have decided that some students needed to have a change in teacher because of the progress they have made. This is because there may now be only 1-2 students in their literacy class reading around the same age level as they are.

This has happened with two of my students who were part of my initial CoL study last year. Students B and D have both made 3 years progress in the year and a half that they were in my class. They are now working above the curriculum level for their age and they will continue the school year working with a teacher who has a class of students working above Level 4. Students A, C, E, F, G have all made six months progress in the first six months of the 2020 school year. Student H, I,  J and K have all made a year's progress during the first six months of 2020. This means that in the past year and a half of school, each of these students have had 1.5-3 years progress in their reading age, except Student E who joined us midway through last school year and has made a year of progress.

As we break for the Term Holidays, this is such a great thing to celebrate. I am so excited to see what Term 3 will bring as our school begins a Professional Development focus on Reading. I would love to continue looking into what stretches the thinking and reading age of our Level 4/5 students, as well as learning new ways to engage those students in my class who are still reading well below their curriculum level for their age. 

Digital Student Teachers

This term, the students of Room 1 have been very blessed to have four student teachers working with us for the past three weeks. However, it is another new experience for 2020! Our student teachers (Chelsea, Gabrielle, Hyeonjeong, and Leonie) have never stepped foot onto our school grounds. These lovely ladies are part of a one year Graduate program at the University of Auckland and they were supposed to be partaking in their first practicum during the lockdown.

After having a session with our WFRC and Manaiakalani Facilitators, we began working together a few weeks ago over a Google Meet. During this time, I was able to provide a digital tour of our learning space, and present a brief for my maths class. The student teachers were tasked with taking this brief and creating a Google Site that would be used by my students before the end of the term.

The brief was: 

Year 7/8 students who are learning to:

•  Add and subtract decimals
• Know the relative size and place value structure of decimals to three places.

I would like for you to come up with ways to expand their thinking about decimals and their number knowledge using decimals. 

Some possible ideas are using: 

• number lines
• place value
• ordering
• fraction equivalents
• adding/subtracting
• link to money

After I received an email with proposed activities, we were able to have one more Google Meet together where I was able to give some feedback and offer suggestions to start thinking of ways to make their learning tasks more digitally manipulative. 

The site that was presented the next evening was so amazing! Such a great place for my students as we began to look at adding decimals and connecting our decimals to currency. We had a great time working our way through the site as a class, and the students were able to send feedback about their interaction with the site and learning taks.

I would like to extend a BIG thank you to Chelsea, Gabrielle, Hyeonjeong, and Leonie for the hard work you put into building your first learning site and for the lovely comments you have been leaving the student blogs. I wish you ladies all the best with the remainder of your studies!

Reflection on Teaching and Next Steps

Write a reflection in which you summarise your main learning about your teaching and next steps. This will prepare you to design an intervention next time. (WFRC #10)


The main learning about my teaching that I have made during this round of evaluation (as discussed in my blog post here) is that I am teaching my students how to have an academically based student-led discussion. It took some changing in my own teaching practise over the past few years to implement this change across the curriculum level, but I now know that I provide adequate think and respond time for my students instead of jumping in right away with the correct answer. My students know that they are allowed to have their voice and opinions heard. When it comes to maths, even my struggling students are not afraid to voice their opinions on how to properly solve a problem or identify what they believe the next step in a problem solving process should be.

My next step is to implement new vocabulary recognition strategies such as the Four Square and Feature Analysis approaches (as discussed here). I hope to provide my students with more opportunities to recognise the language of mathematical success. It is my intention to keep a record of mathematical terms students have used during a lesson (by providing opportunities for students to share their thinking in a Screencastify more often). 

Decimats: Rewindable Learning

 Now that we are back in school under Covid restrictions, I am remaining very aware of the students that I have in my class that have yet to return to school. The majority of these students are still working from home, but without the classroom connection and direct teaching that was available when we were offering Google Meets. As a result, I decided to make another rewindable teaching video showing students how to use a Decimat since it was the first time that many of the students have experienced this learning tool. 

This rewindable video was a great resource for my students who were in the classroom and those at home. It was also used by students in other learning areas of our. teaching block to help them to further their understanding of decimats. 

Student Voice Survey

Present findings from this inquiry about your teaching. Ensure qualitative data includes rich descriptions of your teaching and quantitative data is clearly presented. (WFRC #9)

Now that we are finally back into a regular swing of learning at school, I was able to present my maths class with a survey for them to consider some key things about their learning in maths this year. I tried to keep the questions I asked them clear and simple. I also wanted to be sure that the answers collected would provide quantitative data that could easily be recollected at the end of the school year.

The questions that I asked in the survey were:

• I like maths. (Rate on a Scale from Not at All to Favourite Subject)
• What I find most difficult about maths is...
• I am confident solving problems involving:
• The one concept I need to improve in most is:
• My maths teacher encourages me to use proper mathematical vocabulary (Rate on a Scale from Not at All to Favourite Subject)
• We have been presented with and asked to use new mathematical vocabulary this year.
• I am comfortable asking my teacher for help when I need it.
• How often has Mrs. Moala asked you to reflect on how well you understood something in your learning?

Based on the survey results I was able to gain a deeper understanding about my teaching as seen by my 22 of my students.

In the graph below, students clearly believe that the most difficult part of solving mathematical problems are multiple steps (36.4%) and vocabulary was a close second (31.8%). I was happy to see that the students in my class identify the same areas of difficulty as I would for them.

I was greatly pleased to see the results of this graph, as I have been making a conscious effort to model using correct mathematical vocabulary this school year. Nearly 64% of the students surveys indicate that I encourage them to use proper mathematical vocabulary the majority of the time and another 18% indicate this happens most of the time.

This last graph shows the number of students who feel that they are asked to provide reflections on their own learning in various ways. While approximately 41% indicate that it has happened at times, I would love to see more students be more confident that they were asked to reflect on their learning and that they were able to see the benefit of it by the end of the year.

In order to ensure that I keep an active understanding of my student's progress after putting my interventions in place, I will be sure to conduct another survey at the end of the school year to see if my student's impression of maths and their understanding of mathematical vocabulary has changed as a result of the change in my teaching.