Beyond a Blackboard

 After consulting the research literature I came to the conclusion that I need to explicitly teach metacognition alongside reading comprehension strategies (particularly those involving vocabulary) and that I need to be aware of the amount of scaffolding I give my students when reading with them. So how does this fit with my current teaching? I used observation feedback, observation of my own practice (that I filmed and later reviewed) and an analysis of my reading planning to identify what I am already doing and what needs to be changed. 1. Am I teaching metacognitive strategies? Last year I began an intervention into this extremely late in the year. I had about eight weeks to roll out and modify my intervention. In that time I created a five point framework with my students to enable them to rate their understanding of a text. After reading a text, the students rate themselves and explain why they gave themselves this score.  This is something I have continued using and the ...

 In my last blog post, I looked at the overall trends in my data to get a better understanding of my student challenge. Overall I recognised that my students have low confidence/motivation, struggle to comprehend the key ideas in a text and need strategies to make sense of unfamiliar words. After identifying the student challenge, I went on a bit of a mission to scour through research literature to understand the pedagogy that might cause it.  Metacognitive Reading Strategies Can Improve Self-Regulation .  Susan Nash-Ditzel (2014) As I recognised that these students have some similar challenges to my 2020 target group, I began looking at literature that related to this, specifically about students not identifying when they don't understand something. Nash-Ditzel (2014) looked at students whose teachers had taught reading strategies such as questioning, but did not teach the students to be metacognitive  - to recognise when they needed to apply them. This case study f...

 Throughout term one, I collected and analysed sources of student data to identify what was causing my students progress in reading to stall. I used both summative/formative assessment (PAT/ Probe/ ARBs/ Student's learning in class) and collected student voice through an interview and survey.  I analysed some of these in greater depth and posted about them here and here . In this post I will be looking at the trends I discovered after analysing all of my student data. This will enable me to identify the aspects of reading that my intervention needs to address, as I will be aware of the things that my students struggle with. Low motivation/ confidence From my student voice collection - both my interview and survey, the students expressed a disinterest in reading. Only one student reported reading for fun outside of literacy class and shared that reading is their favourite subject. The other students all shared that they prefer other subjects and don't feel very good about read...

 New Zealand Maths is a hot topic at the moment. There are heated debates across a number of mediums in response to our latest global rankings. Much of this debate can be summarised by the speakers in this episode of Q & A with Jack Tame .  I appreciated that the majority of the speakers simply discussed the challenges and didn't claim to have a 'one size fits all' approach to fixing the problem. Some of the main issues discussed were teacher training/ education, the reliability of testing and the various different approaches to teaching mathematics.  Teacher Training This morning my colleagues and I discussed our experiences from our teaching degrees. Our experiences varied hugely based on the papers we chose, the year we were at university and our provider. We were lucky enough to have a student teacher present who also noted she was receiving very limited instruction in terms of maths teaching - covering only some aspects of the curriculum. When I was at University...