Beyond a Blackboard

 How well do your students self-reflect and monitor their understanding of a text? After inquiring into my practice and my learners reading habits, I noted that many of them were not noticing when they stopped understanding something. We had a lot of discussion and discovered that we might lose focus of a text for a number of reasons, sometimes our eyes are walking over the words, but our minds are dreaming of something else.  After consulting research literature, my class data, analysing my own practice and conversing with other teachers on this matter, I designed an intervention. In its current iteration, we are reading a short chunk of text (about a paragraph) and rating our understanding on a 5 point scale. We co-constructed this 5 point scale together and use it often to ensure the students clearly understand each level clearly. We then discuss any causes for confusion and the strategies that might support this. We apply these and re-read to get a better handle of what we...

Five weeks ago, while Auckland was in alert level 1, I made a plan to implement my intervention. My aim was to run it for five weeks, then reflect on how it was going and the adaptations that I had made. This is what my intervention has looked like over the last five weeks (I have started in week two as an inquiry intensive meant that I did not see my literacy class in week one). Week 2 They returned! It was amazing to see my literacy class altogether for the first time since week 8 of term 1 (we taught all curriculum subjects to our maths classes once they returned to school in term 2, as opposed to changing classes for different subjects). I ran my intervention this week with my two target groups. It actually took a bit of work getting reciprocal reading set up again as we had some new students and we hadn't done it in a really long time. I discussed reading strategies really explicitly with my learners and noticed that these questions came easily to me, as I had been working on...

In our last COL meeting, we discussed our chosen interventions and started to come up with ways that we would manage these. I realised just how easy it is to forget some of the micro-decisions that you make, particularly during 'live' teaching. So it is vital that you record any decisions and alterations that you make along the way.  However, it is also important to track effects of these changes and the intervention as you go, as opposed to simply taking pre and post intervention data. We can be far more reflexive, and make far more of a difference if we see our intervention as something that evolves.  Here were my thoughts following the meeting: How will you collect information about the changes to your practice or intervention? I will take notes in my teacher planning to show where I have adapted my planning or if I have done something different in my micro teaching. I will record two lessons with my focus group, 5 weeks apart. This will help me pick up on anything that I h...

After gathering baseline data and consulting research literature, it is time to plan an intervention! In my previous posts, I have outlined the methods that I used to identify my students needs, current achievement levels and my current pedagogy. I also reflected on the research that I consulted which related to my inquiry question: How can I support my students to monitor their own understanding of a text and their use of strategies? My main insights so far have been;  Reciprocal Teaching / Reading is a valuable strategy for supporting metacognition, but I am not doing it justice I discuss self-regulation strategies with my maths class, but not with my literacy class at all! While I teach reading strategies, I often don't ask my students what strategy they used to make sense of a text, or discuss using different strategies at different times. In response to these insights, my students needs and the literature I have decided to start by making a few change...

My 2020 CoL Inquiry Focus: “Will reading across the curriculum lead to improved reading outcomes?" The Manaiakalani Community of Learning is working together on this task using the expertise existing in of our community of learning. I have selected the achievement challenge of:  Increase the achievement in Years 7-10, in Reading, Writing, and Maths, as measured against National Standards and agreed targets. The teaching as inquiry framework I will continue to use in 2020 has been specifically co-constructed for Manaiakalani schools using our familiar Learn Create Share structure. Throughout the year, I will be labelling my blog posts to reflect our Learn, Create, Share structure. LEvidence Learn - Gather Evidence CPlan Create - Make a plan SPublish Share - Publish LScan Learn - Scan CTry Create - Try new things SCoteach Share - Co-teach LTrend Learn - Identify Trends CInnovate Create - Innov...