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...

 To inform my inquiry, I will be using three methods of data collection about my students needs. I have so far noticed that my students are stuck between reading ages 9 and 10 and that they struggle to independently comprehend the basic information from the story; it is very hard for them to summarise the main events.  To delve deeper to determine what might be holding them back, I will use their summative reading tests from term 1 (PAT), a formative assessment and student voice. In this post I will focus on my collection of student voice.  I gathered student voice data in two ways: online via a Google form and in discussion. I know that some students articulate themselves better through speech, but others might be shy to tell me their true feelings in person. My google form questions were: What are your hobbies and interests? How do you feel about reading?  How often do you read outside of class? (multi-choice: once a week, once a month etc.) What do you like readin...

 In my last blog post , I chose reading as the subject of my inquiry focus. This was the obvious choice due to trends in our overall cluster data, reading data for years 7-10 and our school wide reading data.  I began to consider the aspects of my previous inquiries that I wanted to build upon, particularly my learning from 2020. I have also begun to draw upon the inquiries of my colleagues;  I have began going over past MIT projects and CoL inquiries to identify similar foci. So far I have been looking at the work of Amy Tofa , Angela Moala and Dot Apelu  who have had similar inquiries to mine in the past.  While I have chosen a focus on reading based on the cluster and school wide data, it is now time to consider this focus in the context of my classroom. What change am I hoping to see in student learning? As I previously discussed, both cluster and school wide data illustrate students becoming 'stuck' around the reading ages of 8-9.5. As such, I will start w...

Our Manaiakalani cluster data for 2020 painted a very clear picture as to what we need to focus on this year: Reading and Maths. While our writing data continues to show accelerated progress, we are making the expected years progress in a year in maths and reading.  This would be perfectly fine if our students were achieving at the expected level, but this is not the case.    When I completed my honours dissertation I had a focus on maths and had strong results. Unfortunately the next year we had Maths PD which meant I had to stop using the intervention and try a different approach. This year I am able to go back to my original intervention and while I will modify it and add the new things that I have learnt to it, I am confident I will be able to increase my students achievement data. Therefore, it makes sense for me to focus on reading this year. A problem that our cluster has had consistently is that the rate of achievement progress slows over time, particularly in yea...

Kia ora, I'm Danni Stone! I'm a year 7/8 teacher at Pt England School.  Over the past couple of years my inquiry has focussed on reading. In 2019 , I was interested in generating more discussion about texts and used reciprocal reading, argumentation boards and debate as part of my intervention. In 2020 I looked at teaching my students to self-reflect in reading; to identify when they found something challenging and to stop and employ a strategy to support their understanding.  In my class I regularly integrate reading, writing and oral language, which was a focus of mine when I took part in MIT .  Prior to this I completed a dissertation at the University of Auckland. This had an inquiry focus on using digital affordances in maths.  Please feel free to visit my class site , or watch my lessons on Class onAir .