Beyond a Blackboard

 Today I interviewed my target learners to get their thoughts about why they made such great improvements in reading. I also followed the same interview structure as I used before the intervention to see if their overall attitudes or thoughts about reading had changed. Due to some transience, my original target group have changed, so I am not comparing all of the same group which is a shame. However, I had enough of a group to identify some trends. Attitude to reading has improved! In the first round of surveys, 3/4 of the students reported that they didn't enjoy reading. In this round, the worst response was 'its okay', with three pointing out things that they liked about reading. Two students said that reading is a calming activity. I also noticed a slight increase in students reading for fun at home. Interestingly this is because more of them have discovered manga and comic books. Reading Independently Several of the students discussed our independent time as helping the...

 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...

  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...

 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...