Reflecting on my Kahui Ako Inquiry

My inquiry this year was based on research more than ever before. I think that the students and I have  a good understanding of 'talking about text' now and I have tried different things with my teaching and learning this year. The original idea came from Aaron's research. As I attend different PD sessions over the year I included more ideas into the sessions with the students. One of the most memorable was including the image of a 'conversation chain' from Jannie van Hees. Most recently the PD session with Cynthia Greenleaf in looking at a text and using it as the basis of a critical thinking conversation.

I think I now need to consolidate all the learning over this year and really spend time working with groups across the whole class to implement 'taking about text'. I believe that all students can benefit from doing this activity. In doing so they are building their oral language skills, as well as being able to give opinions justified by information in the text.

The focus on reading comprehension through oral language was a new area for me to explore and I have leant some good skills in being able to let the students lead the discussion. I found myself needing to ask less questions and being more of a prompter when students got stuck.

One of the interesting side benefits for me has been more regular collection of student voice. This is son easy to do both via google forms and informally with discussing progress using running records. I was pleased to note that the students were proud of the gains that had made over the year.

Where to next - I would like to continue using these sessions across the whole class to build students skills not only in oral language but also in comprehension and critical thinking.

Testing results and some conclusions made

We have just completed the end of year testing this week and have our results in. While the standardised testing results were a mixed bag, I was very happy with the on-going improvement in the Probe data of my target group.

The students made excellent progress with shifts of between 1 and 4 years.

I think that one of the reasons that the students did consistently better with the Probe testing rather than the PAT of STAR testing is the focus on oral language. The students started the year very reluctant to talk about what they were reading but by the end of the year they were able to answer questions much more readily.

I made quite a few tweaks and changes to what I was doing with the students over the year. I modified the group, the recording sheet twice and finally changed the mode of the text.

Looking back I think I would start at the end, and begin the year with discussions around an image. I don't know if it was all the practise through the year but the discussions around an image seemed to flow the best. I think there are a number of factors that made this easier for the students: they had the image in front of them, there were no wrong answers just what they could see, they didn't need to flip pages to find information to justify what they could see. When we expanded on the discussion to what might have happened before the photo and after the photo, they were all able to come up with ideas that were plausible from the image in front of them.

Unplugged: The show. Part 7: Sorting networks

I really enjoyed the session with OMGTech. We started with this activity from CS Unplugged that talks about computer science without needing a computer. A very cool way to demonstrate coding and binary decision making.

Using images as our 'text'

One of the main ideas I took from the PLD with Cynthia Greenleaf last term was the idea of using images as the text to be read.

I sourced images on-line to use as the conversation starter with my students. The images are from the NY times section - What happening in this picture. Here is the link. The pictures are drawn from the newspaper and have the captions removed, there is a moderated forum for students to comment and have an on-line discussion about the images. The pictures are selected to provoke conversation.

My students enjoyed the difference in having a picture to look at instead of discussing a written text but they thought it was harder to do. I think this may change as they have more opportunities to discuss visual texts. I was pleased with the depth of the conversation, especially when talking about what might have happened before and after the image was taken. They were able to come up with complex themes and build on each other's statements. I'm looking forward to seeing how this progresses over the next few weeks.

Term 3 check in with students

I have sent a google form to my target students to reflect on the progress they have made in reading this term. Here are the responses, when they were asked how having the conversation chains helped their reading.

Because it helps me be confident with my reading.

Yes because l can link my ideas together/

yes because my make the group to collaborate to make us what they learn and the other person commented what the person

Yes because it helps me use different part of a text to make an new text

They are positive about the changes in their reading abilities. This is encouraging because they can see for themselves the progress they have made. I like that they have identified learning with and from each other as this is a focus of our learning space.

DFI - Session 5 - Sharing Bingo

DFI - Session 4 - Google sheets tips and tricks

Learning little tips and tricks that will make my life so much easier! My two new favourites are both in sheets.
Being able to split names. This is huge! I have spent so much time typing out names that import from my SMS into one cell. This is a fantastic add-on that is included in the power tools that I have downloaded and will now have open at all times. Even if it's just for the one click add column or add row.
The second tip I discovered is the function - sparklines. This allows you to put a small visual of the data in a cell at the end. Saves having to make a graph if all you are wanting to track are trends over the data.
Two very cool tips I will be incorporating into the EoY data analysis that will be coming my way shortly.

Cynthia Greenleaf

Last Thursday we were lucky enough to be invited to Pt England school to hear Cynthia talk about using oral language and discussion to build reading comprehension.
She talked about building students knowledge through reasoned discussion, that is having an evidence based argument. Student should be able to weigh up all the different perspectives of an issue making this different to persuasion, which is what our students (and myself as a teacher) usually default to. For this to be successful the topic or event or picture needs to be of interest and able to be investigated and researched.

In the classroom students need to have abundant opportunities to discuss. Students can look at a topic, find evidence and add their perspective. This is building important life skills as conversations rehearse having multiple perspectives.

A strategy shared was one I have used before but was reminded of how powerful it can be, when student report back to the group not their own idea but one from someone else in the group. This can be a great strategy to ensure that they listen to whet each other has to say. It also helps students won are unsure of putting their own ideas forward as they are reporting back what someone else has said.

One of the other ideas we talked about really made strong connections with what we have been talking about in reading; making text sets. Cynthia talked about resourcing the discussion in layers. Using visuals and text. This way we can scaffold learners' entry into the discussion

I am looking at these great ideas as I move with my students into the final term of the year. I really like the idea of choosing a visual along with a current event so that students can research multiple points of view before the discussion. I can see this working well as a lead in to the discussion chains we have been doing.

DFI - Session 3

Another fantastic day of learning this week. Some very good reminders about making digital presentations. Keeping it simpler and looking to add SISOMO - Sound, Sight and Motion.
This is a concept that comes from Saatchi & Saatchi. It is a simple but effective strategy to share with our students about making their blogs more creative and interesting. 

Some of the top tips are listed here - Link

We also recorded our digital pepeha. Still working on the younger brother part. On the plus side I have finally got my internal mic to record sound using a quick time screen recording.

Panmure Bridge School Promo

DFI 2 - Using Quicktime to screen record

Our job this week was to record the Google Meet, we looked at some of the Summer Learning Journey blogging and what comments were left for the students. The Google Meet kept getting easier to use each time we used it. I like the idea of using this to do reading buddies with another class. Unfortunately my use of quicktime to record is a work in progress as the sound didn't work as I hadn't chosen the internal mic in the opening screen.
Here is our silent movie lol

Has anyone else used quicktime to make a screen recording?

Aaron Wilson via Education Hub

Great to hear Aaron talking about data and what schools should be focusing on. An interesting listen.

VR in the classroom

Robyn and I have been lucky enough to have been invited to work with Yvonne from Auckland University's bio engineering department on some Virtual Reality research.


Robyn and Yvonne have developed the content around our current study and have created amazing VR tasks for the students. We used 2 different formats - Google Cardboard and iPads to deliver the content. Yvonne and her team collected all sorts of data from the sessions including heart rates, balance and before and after content knowledge. It has been fantastic to be involved and I look forward to seeing the results!
A really excellent opportunity lies ahead for our students 'creating to learn' using.

DFI - Session 1

I had my first digital fluency intensive today. We learnt a lot of different, nifty tricks to make our digital lives easier. One of the reminders I got was how easy it is to use voice typing to convert speech to text in goggle docs. This is something I need to use more with my students in the classroom.

I also want to run a session with staff at school on google keep. This was invaluable on conference to take all my notes. I like the way you can label things and use it both for personal and professional reminders and notes.

2018 Hui - Reflecting on where to next

At our Manaiakalani hui for 2018 we received some recommendations from Aaron Wilson and Rebecca Jesson from Woolf Fisher. They challenged us that we need to be planning for deeper learning. We have been very focused on lifting our students to be achieving at National Standard, now that the pressure to do this is no longer on us, we are looking to extend and aim for more ambitious outcomes. Here are the 5 nudges they suggested:

1. Identify ambitious outcomes (e.g. analyse, synthesise, critique, argue, disciplinary literacy etc).
2. Frame these outcomes as open questions or provocations.
3. Identify entry level knowledge or key details in the texts and other learning opportunities that will help students achieve the ambitious learning outcomes.
4. Design activities that help students develop entry level knowledge or notice details relevant to the ambitious learning outcomes.
5. Check regularly to see how students get on without significant teacher input – always aim to provide the least scaffolding students need to achieve outcomes (the deep-end principle)
   
   
   
   

Celebrating success as we go!

This week during syndicate meeting we all took the time to share some part of our Teacher Inquiry that has been going well.

ISTE - Feeding back

This week I ran a session at staff meeting on FAKE NEWS. I was able to repurpose the slides used in the session attended at ISTE to facilitate this, (many thanks to the presenters who allowed this)
One of the main activities we did was play a game created by Maggie Farley a veteran journalist. The game is called Factitious and staff were challenged to identify between fake and real news reports.

Give it a go for yourself here

Starting the term with a new scaffold

I have started the term using the new scaffold sheet that I put together last term. This uses the links that Jannie talks about as a way to represent the connections made in a conversation. The students seemed to find this template easier to use and the conversation flowed better than it has in the past. The removal of the 'prompts' meant students were using their own words and weren't as 'stilted' in their responses to the text and each other. My next session I want to focus on using words from the previous speaker to help link the conversation further. I also think using a non-fiction text was helpful as there were facts for the students to reference.

Monitoring our Interventions

At syndicate meeting this afternoon, we took time to look at the questions posed by Woolf Fisher about how we know our intervention is making a difference. Both in terms of the changes in the teaching and the changes in what the students are doing.


It is interesting to hear the evidence other teachers have collected to gather student voice, as well as track and monitor progress in informal ways.

Starting to see traction

Really happy with the session today. A lot of progress with the responses and comments idea. We discussed the idea of 'chains of conversation' before we started and I think this made a difference as we had a much better conversation and a lot of comments were being made about what other group members had said. This idea of conversation chains comes from the work we have been doing with Jannie van Hees. 

This slide of Jannie's talks about the scaffolders that will help students develop an abundance of language. It is interesting that the peer section matches what I am hoping to achieve with my students. Also as part of these sessions Jannie has emphasised the role of the teacher in introducing new vocabulary to the students. I am thinking of a way that I can be involved in the students discussions with out undermining the improvements I have seen in the students when the teacher doesn't take an active role. I feel that I do have the ability to introduce the extended vocabulary needed.

This is the template that I am working on and want to introduce next term. The idea being to build on having a conversation by adding links to the chain. Thanks to Ashley Schellingerhout for letting me re-purpose her template. 

Introducing new learners to the group

As I talked about in my previous post, I decided that I would add 2 new learners to the group as a way to spark some more conversation. This has the added benefit of making the group a mixed ability group. An unintended consequence, but a happy one, is that the original 4 students took the lead as they 'taught' the newcomers what we were trying to do. This has been an amazing change as we have had the most interactions that we have had so far. This ties in well with what Dr Hunter talks about in maths.

'Our achievement results for Pasifika children are “dismal, heartbreaking”, says Associate Professor Bobbie Hunter, but they do not accurately reflect their capabilities. Because Pasifika children tend not to talk, their teachers assume they don’t understand and put them in a bottom group. Once there, they become trapped in a self-reinforcing cycle of low expectations.'

It is interesting that we have grouped our students for instructional reading for so long that perhaps we have locked our lower students into a cycle where they are only exposed to talking about text in a way that is lowered by the abilities of the people in the group. If we are aiming for acceleration in makes sense that we try new things to break the cycle of what we have always done.

I am excited by the possibilities that this session has brought up. I am looking forward to seeing what happens next with this group of learners.

Where to from here?

• I want to include 2 other students in the group to see if they can spark more conversation. This will also be an opportunity to include more than one boy in the group. 
• I will continue to use the short text book format as this is how we can get as much mileage done in the time available, and what the students enjoyed.
• I want to step away and see if they can fill in the sheet by themselves, this will also stop them from looking to me when they respond to the text.
• After a few more sessions I wan to record the conversation and write up a transcript to see if I can identify trends in the responses and comments.
• I also need to make sure I go over what the language of questioning with the group so that they know what sort of response is needed.

I am hoping to give this another 2 weeks and then do the recording and check in again with the students about how they think it's going.

Asking the students

We did our third session today. The students are starting to take more initiative and our responses and comments continue to improve. They knew that I wouldn't be talking so they were quicker to respond with their ideas, and respond to each other. However they still mainly spoke making eye contact with  me rather than talk directly to each other. Even when commenting on someones response.

I decided that I would ask them to fill in a google form about how they had found it so far.
They reported that the easiest part was sharing their ideas as a response to the text and the hardest part is commenting on other peoples responses.

Interestingly they all preferred to read a book, but liked the most challenging text we have done that was presented as a digital text.
They were a bit confused by the question asking them what I could do as the teacher to make it easier and replied with what they could do: "Go back and read the text again", "Give more responses", "I need to go back to the text to get my own ideas from it"

Creativity Empowers Learning

During our Manaiakalani staff meeting this term we were reminded of all the wonderful creative things we do to engage our students with their learning, and the way our digital tools can help us.

Here are some of the gifs I made...

First session

This week I started the intervention with my target group. They found the activity and text very challenging (more so than I expected). They understood the goal was to have a discussion, but they defaulted to putting up their hand and talking to the teacher.
The scaffold I had created worked well as I was able to record how many things were said and the students used the sentence stems really well to respond to the text. They were even able to use it says in the text... which was great. They were less able to comment on what each other had said, so this will be a focus for our next session.
I think that I will need to find a simpler text for the next session. So that the focus is on the discussion  points I'm introducing.

Intervention

Robyn and I were lucky enough to meet up with Aaron Wilson on Friday and check-in with him about our planned interventions. It was beneficial to have the conversation about my thinking and what I planned to do as it helped me consolidate my aims and what I was going to talk to the students about to introduce the intervention.
I have a mystery text that I have broken up into 3 parts, all at crucial points in the story to help the discussion to be about the clues we have so far and what we think will happen next. This is what the slide for the week looks like on our class site.
Aaron suggested we also talk about the meta-language of a mystery text as there is a 'red-herring' used in the story.

Discussion Starters

Starting week two I am going to introduce the following scaffold to my target students. At the moment their responses to text are short and at a surface level. By using this scaffold I am hoping to hear more in-depth discussion and dialogic responses where students are replying to each other, rather than just to the teacher. At the moment the scaffold has been created by the teacher but, as we get familiar with the responses and comments using I am hoping to include more student created prompts.

The Chain of Events

Our expert partners at Woolf Fisher shared this diagram with us to help put into perspective where our intervention sits.

My inquiry fits under our Kahui Ako Achievement Challenge 4 -

A rewording of this would be:
Increase the achievement of years 7-8 in reading, as measured by agreed targets.

The outcome I hope to achieve is improved comprehension through evaluation. Allowing students the opportunity to make evaluative judgements by having dialogic discussions about decisions faced by characters and then relating them to their own ideas and experiences.

The specific language outcome includes being able to re-organise text as well as make inferences. Being able to justify their evaluation using information from the text. This dialogic discussion with an elaborated response, with explicit reference to the text, is a focus of Talk about Text.

Talking about Text

Interesting to read the article in Tukutuku Korero from Aaron Wilson and Jacinta Oldehaver. I am looking at elements of this that I can transpose from the secondary context to the year 7 and 8 students in my class.

Raising Reading Achievement

One of the readings I have looked at last term was from Jo Fletcher et al. about Raising Reading Achievement. My three main take aways that I want to implement in my reading programme are:

• Students collaborating with their peers to develop their understandings.
• Repeated interactions between reader an text, between teacher and reader, and between readers themselves.
• The meaning of the text is debated and interpreted, to enhance comprehension.

Data from Running Records

I have completed Running Records on my target students and have observed the following areas to target: Vocabulary (this is a continuing area of weakness), and Evaluation. I am currently reading 'What every Primary School Teacher should know about Vocabulary' by Jannie van Hees and Paul Nation, so I am hoping to come up with some good vocabulary strategies. I plan to address the area of evaluation during Talk about Text discussions in teaching sessions next term, where students can talk about decisions faced by characters and relate them to their own ideas and experiences.

Digging Deeper into the Data

Testing has been completed on the students and now it is time to dig deeper into the data. First of all here is a look at the reading comprehension PAT scores with an expectation band identified. This is a year 7 / 8 composite so each year group is sorted separately. From this, classroom observations and STAR testing, I have identified my target group of students.

Once identified I have looked at the individual reports for all of the target group in STAR and PAT reading comprehension and identified their needs.

What I need to do next is to look into my planned teaching and learning. What is going to best support these (and other) students make the next steps in their learning, based on their identified need.

Tairawhiti Writing Moderation

Yesterday I was hosted by the lovely team at Tairawhiti Cluster in Gisborne. Leading some writing moderation. A fantastic experience getting to meet some of our new outreach people, and sharing the Manaiakalani knowledge and experience. Thanks to the lovely Maria and Cheryl for their help and support.

What is a Futurist?

A group of Manaiakalani educators met Roger Dennis for a discussion about trends for the future.
Roger was really interesting to listen to as he has done work all over the world looking at patterns and trends for the future.
While not an exact science it was fascinating to hear what could be coming in the next 10 years.
As educators Roger believes that the skills our students need most for the future are 'soft skills' - collaboration, empathy and communication.
A huge thank you to Pat for organising and hosting this event.

Link to Roger's site

Manaiakalani Staff Meeting - Term 1

Robyn, Chantal and I led our first Manaiakalani Staff Meeting for 2018. The focus for the first term is always 'Share'. One of the questions posed was to reflect back on our own professional learning last year. What did we discover during our spiral of inquiry that was effective in making a difference?

For me I did a lot of work getting my students using Reciprocal Teaching strategies, I probably could have gone further using our digital skills to record and reflect on sessions. However I was really pleased with the students confidence in talking about text and their results in our end of year assessments.

My suggestion for teachers starting out this year, and choosing an achievement challenge to focus on, based on their data, is to look at what was done last year across the CoL. 2017 CoL Inquiries. What worked and what didn't? What could you build on, adopt, or adapt to meet the needs of your 2018 learners?

Manaiakalani School Leaders - Term 1

Chantal and I at the Manaiakalani School Leaders Day.
A fantastic opportunity for rich discussions about data, achievement, and barriers and successes over the past year.
Looking at:
Language Acquisition.
Robust discussion about how we set up our 'Spiral of Inquiry' for the year.
Data Narratives

Data discussions

Great to catch up with Dot today to talk about our new Kahui Ako roles and how our Manaiakalani data is looking. Lots of questions! Watch this space for some possible answers over the course of the year!

WFRC feedback

It was great to hear Dr Rebecca Jesson sharing the Manaiakalani data this afternoon. This was a great opportunity to reflect on how we are going as a cluster, a school, and as a teacher. My main take away was that the acceleration we are achieving in writing needs to be replicated in reading and maths. Another point of interest is how we can continue to grow our success into year 9 and 10. Congrats to Tamaki College, Dot shared their NCEA results. Well done everyone, our results speak for themselves in terms of acceleration and our goals for our students.

Abundance of Language

Dr Jannie van Hees spoke to the Kahui Ako teachers last night at our meeting about the use of language in our classrooms. We were challenged to think about activities we set for our students and what it might be like for them if they don't have the vocabulary to go with a certain task or learning opportunity.
We talked about “Language in Abundance” and what this might look like in our classrooms and for our students.

My notes from the session

Teacher Only Day PLD

One of the take away messages from this morning discussion with RTLB on Understanding Behaviour and Responding Safely.


Our students come to school with a wealth of knowledge but sometimes also with a lot of stress in their home lives. We see only a small part of their experience.

Curation of on-line feeds

I found this a very interesting watch after a discussion with friends when camping about receiving targeted advertising over the holiday break. Might be of interest, certainly raises questions about the quality and bias of the media our students are seeing.

Writing PD

Robyn and I were lucky enough to go to the Writing PD session with Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey. A fantastic opportunity to step back and look at our writing programme overall, and make sure we are using a shared language of instruction. (and the lunch was yummy too...)

Manaiakalani Orientation

As usual a wonderful way to start the year, meeting all our new teachers joining us, and a reminder about the who, what and why of it all and how we fit into the bigger picture. Thanks Fiona, Dorothy and all those involved in the day.