Beyond a Blackboard

  Have I used a range of sources to understand my students learning in a detailed way? I have drawn upon multiple sources of data to inform my understanding of my students learning. It is important to use at least three sources to 'triangulate' the data and ensure that it is reliable. I have used two forms of standardised summative testing, a formative assessment and an interview/ survey of the students. As the students are only with me for literacy and we have multiple classes, I have not engaged with their whānau as much as my home class. While a strong home/school relationship is important for student success, I didn't identify whānau voice as a tool for gathering information about my students learning. Perhaps this is something I should reconsider in the future. Do I understand their strengths as much as I understand their areas for development? I have identified some of the students strengths; I was able to identify more strengths in some students than others, due to...

What a way to end a term! This morning we fled our classrooms on the promise of coffee, pastries and a day full of professional development at Glen Taylor School. It was a fantastic day full of experts sharing their knowledge on effective reading practice. Ko te Kāhui Ako o Manaiakalani - Dr. Rae Siʻilata and Kyla Hansell   The day kicked off with a keynote by Dr Rae Si'ilata.  This was inspirational. My biggest takeaways were to use more bilingual texts, to broaden my use and understanding of multi-modal texts and how sharing the power in the classroom is so important. I will be looking further into these slides and reflecting more about the provocation in the holidays. Engage the High School Reader with Multimodal Resources - Kerry Boyde-Preece and Maria Krause   This was a fantastic refresher about the use of multi-modal resources, not only to build engagement but to enable students to be more cognitively challenged. This is something I am always interested in; ...

 To gain more information about what goes on in my students minds as they read, I gave them a ARBs test and asked them to talk me through how they were answering the questions and how they found the reading. I alternated between two texts: "its snowing again" by Jan Pye Marry and "Great-Grandpa" by Sue Gibbison. Both of these are set at early level 3 and the purpose of the test was to see how well they understood the main idea of a text. I chose this form of formative assessment as the tests were focussed on the aspect of reading I've noticed the students find most challenging. The texts and tests are short, so it is feasible to spend time with the students and ask them to narrate their thinking aloud to me so I can see what strategies they might apply, or where they get stuck. I chose a text at a year 5 level, which should be accomplishable for the students. The results are as follows: B1: "I mostly understood the story, but I found some hard words and har...