Beyond a Blackboard

 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...

Over the last few weeks, I have been conducting a mini inquiry to identify trends in my current practice. One limitation that I have had throughout this inquiry is that I am focussing on my literacy practice but currently do not have my literacy class (and will have gone almost a term without teaching them). Instead, I have been analysing my literacy practice with my maths class, which may slightly alter what I notice. I am aware of this and will be conducting some further data gathering at the start of next term, to get some more baseline data for my inquiry and to reflect further on my practice. I used three sources of data to inform this inquiry, a student voice survey, an analysis of my planning/ student activities and an observation of my teaching. I have interpreted each of these independently and I am now making connections between them and the literature that I have read on this topic. My focus question for this was: how am I supporting my students to monitor their own unde...

So far in my inquiry I have been gathering information about my learners reading habits. I have a bit of a hypothesis related to these learner profiles; that they are reading texts quickly and not monitoring their understanding of what they read. This week I have turned to the literature to gather more insight into how to support my students to comprehend independently. I wanted to learn more about reading strategies and self regulation. Metacognitive Reading Strategies Can Improve Self-Regulation . Susan Nash-Ditzel (2014) This case study followed college students (with average results in a foundation programme) who participated in a reading course aimed to support self-regulation. They learnt strategies such as considering prior knowledge/ background information about the text, questioning, identifying main ideas and inferencing. They were taught to monitor their own reading over the course of a year. I quite liked reading the literature review in this article, as it discusse...

Despite not being able to conduct the pretests that I was hoping for, I have some insight into my students independent reading habits from the lockdown ( see this post ) as well as their test data from the start of the year. I am also in a unique position as I am spending a term teaching a different literacy class, which means that I am not 'living' my inquiry daily. It does mean, however, that another teacher is conducting the mid year running records with my students, which is great for reliability. To summarise the data I previously collected, at the start of the year student achievement in my class looked like this in terms of reading age:                             Interestingly, many of my students reading level (from probe/ pm running records) are close to their biological age, with a small group performing well below and a few performing well above. However, the majority of the students achieving at their...