Reflecting on my 2020 Inquiry

 I have now 'completed' my 2020 inquiry. My focus question was: how can I support my students to monitor their own understanding of a text and their use of comprehension strategies?

I have previously reflected on the impact that this inquiry had on my teaching and on student learning outcomes. In this post, I will be reflecting on the inquiry process itself - how well did I follow the teaching as inquiry framework?

1. Identify valued learning outcomes 

I started the inquiry process well. I knew I wanted to focus on reading as our 2019 data illustrated a need to increase student outcomes in this subject. I had also been inquiring into the subject in 2019, so I was aware of research and other inquiries that could support my own.

2. Profiling student learning

I was able to profile my students needs well. After using multiple methods of data collection, I developed a firm understanding of my students strengths and needs. This caused me to alter my initial inquiry focus.

3. Generating hypotheses 

At this stage I discussed my student profiles with other colleagues and explored literature related to them. It was great getting insight from others, although I think I could have asked a wider group of individuals and reached out to more experts.

4. Testing hypotheses (what's going on with my teaching)

This was actually one of my favourite parts of the inquiry, as it was fascinating to analyse my own practice. I used multiple methods to investigate my reading practice, including student voice, observations and feedback.  Despite the complication of the first lockdown, I was able to gather enough data to explore my practice. I feel I did very well in this part of the inquiry process.

5. Intervention Design

At this point I went back to the literature to identify effective approaches. I also enjoyed this part of the process as I was able to find some fantastic readings that gave me some more insight into both the problem and possible solutions. At this point I was feeling passionate and excited about my inquiry.

6. Intervention 

This is where I ran into difficulty. Due to the lockdown, I first started my intervention with a totally different reading class than the one I started out with. I got some ideas, but the students had totally different needs and I had to do something different to respond to them. Thanks to a busy schedule and school camp, I saw my real literacy class twice before the second lockdown. While I ran the intervention in lessons online, I had about eight weeks in class before term four testing began.

During those eight weeks I did monitor the changes that I made to my intervention and reflected both on my practice and the students learning. However, it took some time to have stable attendance - when a group of new students arrived it meant re-introducing the new tasks and ideas to them. This really slowed the intervention down - although I did get better at introducing it and made many tweaks to the initial introduction. 

7. Evaluation

 I was able to collect summative assessment data that illustrated changes in student learning. While there were some positive shifts, it is hard to attribute it to my intervention alone when there was a lockdown and time spent in different literacy classes! However, my observation and interviews with target students did illustrate that they had improved their ability to monitor their own reading comprehension - it was just unclear as to what difference this made to student achievement outcomes. This was quite a tricky thing to evaluate, despite having a fair amount of data to interpret.

I think it would have been helpful to collect more data regarding the changes to my teaching practice. At the end I had collected more student voice, an observation of my practice and I looked at my learning design. Had the intervention ran longer, it would have been great to look at my teaching midway through and at the end to track changes more closely. I also think I would have seen more of a change.

My key takeaways for 2021 are to run my intervention for longer and to collect more data regarding my practice at the end of the year. I need to ensure that I follow the final stages of the inquiry process as well as the initial ones.