Beyond a Blackboard

 This evening we had the opportunity to share our 2020 inquiries in 3 minute 'bursts'. It was a fantastic experience and I left feeling motivated to use many of the amazing interventions that my colleagues developed. This was my presentation: My inquiry has been focussed on reading, specifically supporting students to self-monitor their own understanding of a text. I noticed my students would often ‘zone out’ and lose focus when reading, particularly if they had read a few different texts in a lesson.  To build a picture of my students needs I used running records, PAT data, student voice, observations and interviewed the students while they completed a short independent reading task.  This profiling confirmed that the students were not monitoring their understanding of a text; they might make sense of the text to begin with, but ignore information that contradicted their understanding later on. My students needed to learn to recognise when they were struggling to compreh...

After administering the final PAT Comprehension tests, I can finally determine whether my self monitoring intervention has been successful. However, I need to be realistic as I only had eight weeks in class to use my intervention with my target group, as I had a totally different literacy class in term 2! Despite all of the obstacles of the year, some of my students have made fantastic progress. Here are the results for the students who I saw in the lockdown and who returned to school for the full 8 weeks of intervention. The average progress at this year level is 7 points. With an average score of 55 for year 7s and 60 for year 8. While four of these students made less than 7 points of progress (three of these students are high performing),  seven of them achieved above this, with three making over 14 points. It is really tricky to compare the PAT results from 2020 with previous years or with other students - as we keep hearing, these are unprecedented times. However, when I looke...