Kete Talanoa

Today I sent home my first two Kete Talanoa. A huge thank you to Heather Collins who shared her fabulous resource with me. I am excited to be able to provide two learners in my inquiry focus group with this fantastic opportunity to not only increase their reading mileage and confidence, but also to increase whanau engagement. It is so important to introduce a resource with a practical walk through of the process so, after my initial introduction I tapped into the Samoan language expertise within my classroom. This allowed a connection to be forged that meant when these kete started their new journey, they went home with their new caretakers knowing what they need to do when they read with their whanau. 

 

Digital Fluency Intensive... Day # 6

DFI Session# 6 reminded us about connecting with Manaiakalani. Being connected digitally empowers our learners. The default is VISIBLE so connections can be made. We are connected to a powerful network. 

Connectivity is a way of life for our students if we take it from them and they will check out. If you are all paddling in the same direction, you have greater power, you are more efficient. There is an impact on the nature of teaching and learning because if the teacher and student each know what it is you’re meant to be focusing on you are more likely to reach your goals. -  Dorothy Burt 

Connected learners share. To make a connection both parties need to SHARE. Sites help close the geographical gaps of the wider connected network. Twitter and G+ increase the audience for our blog posts and helps connect our learners and our teachers. Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu (Write to me, write to others) creates a connection with a meaningful audience  for our learners and online toolkits allow us to share good practice.

Google Sites

Clarelle Carruthers shared a few insights into the rationale behind creating a google site. When thinking about putting together a class site you need to think about:

• Who your learners are
• How they are accessing the site
• What your theme is
• Why you are using the site

Designing your layout and having a plan before you begin will keep your site organised and easy for the user to navigate. Here is the link to the presentation Clarelle shared. We then explored each others class sites and left feedback. It is both interesting and valuable to find out suggested changes from your colleagues. It was suggested to me that I include an image of myself so that visitors to my site can make an immediate visual connection to who the teacher of LS2 is. It was also suggested that the images of my students also needed to be more visible. This lead to a bit of rearranging and organising but I love the fact that regardless of where we are in our digital journey, we are always learning and adapting. As you can see in the image below our landing page now has a photo of me, my contact details and an image carousal that reflects student life in LS2.

Useful Takeaways:

• Think about colour, layout and font
• Think about whitespace to avoid cluttering
• Put all site docs etc in one folder with open sharing permissions to ensure its visible on your site
• Need to access links within 3 clicks
• Use a layout (in site tools) to ensure buttons are aligned
• Create a Screencastify to show new students how our site works. This will create an excellent rewindable opportunity that can be shared at home as well.

Term 2 evidence and data update (links to WRFC #1,2 and 5)...

In Term 1 I collected the data and evidence I needed to give me my baseline data that reflected both academic achievement and self efficacy levels. At the end of Term 2 I carried out a similar process with my reading and maths data which met the requirements of our school-wide standardised testing cycle. This data collection gave me an insight to the data shifts (or not) in reading ages and maths strategy use. As we do not test strategy levels in Term 1 I used the historical data gathered in Term 4, 2018.

Link to Google Draw

This paints a very positive picture in both learning areas. When looking at reading ages I can see that 3/5 of my Year 8 students have made shift. 2/5 show a shift of 6 months which aligns with time at school this year and 1/5 has made a 12 month shift. 2/5 remained at the same level. Student G1 panics during any assessment situation and tends to overthink her responses which leads to disconnects, and B3 has a pattern of irregular attendance which results in disconnects that affect his confidence in his own ability. 

When looking at the Year 7 data I am really excited as 3/4 students are showing shift, with 1 student moving off the colour wheel and onto the Probe tests. The really exciting part was she asked me if she could do the same test as her friends, so we tried, and it was a success! Our discussion after was a celebration of the strategies she knew how to use to make sense of the story without looking at any pictures. This was such a boost to her self efficacy as she now sees herself as just like everyone else and not someone who needs help. In reality she still needs teacher or teacher aid support but she is now much more willing to embrace and try new learning. 1/5 show a shift of 6 months which aligns with time at school this year and 1/5 has made a 12 month shift. Ironically the student with the 12 month shift tells me on a regular basis 'reading is not her thing' but she is also the student who in our term evaluation, identified as reading at home.

When looking at the collective maths data 8/9 students have made shift with 1/9 remaining at the same strategy stage they were at in 2018. This student also has an irregular attendance pattern and is often late, meaning his disconnects to the learning are increasing. 

Link to Google Draw

Why is there shift in these two snapshots of data? Possibly because I know I'm paying more attention to asking my learners during our maths and reading lessons to tell me 'how they know', 'where they found' or 'how they got their answers'. I encourage the use of content vocabulary and make a point of identifying the comprehension strategies that could be used. In both learning areas my learners know they need to be prepared to show me the evidence they used to support their thinking. My focus students tend to shy away from sharing their thinking in front of others so I move around the room asking them in a 1:1 situation. Collaboration and talk, or learning conversations as we call them, continue to play a huge part in all learning situations as it provides the scaffold that these students need to help them continue to take risks.

Link to Google Draw

When I look at my previous summary of what I notice during learning time I can see that many of my initial observations have become my current observations. There are however a few significant changes. Conversation levels are now much louder as a much higher percentage of students are actively engaging in the conversations and only two of my focus group fall back on the known coping strategy of waiting for reassurance before beginning work when the learning is new. My next step is to analyse the similarities and differences between the time 1/time 2 self efficacy responses. At a quick glance I can see that responses in the Term 2 evaluation are more detailed and specific than Term 1's responses. What is interesting is that my class are given free rein when it comes to telling me what they feel they have improved in, and I can see that in both terms maths and reading remain in the forefront. 

Critical friends are awesome!...

Last term I videoed myself taking the maths lesson I blogged about in my previous post. The purpose behind this lesson was help my students to grow their maths language, and the purpose for my video was so I could see the explicit teaching strategies I use in a maths lesson. It's always a challenge to critique your own practice as there is no opportunity for the conversations that can affect change through both affirmation and guidance. I invited Donna Ryan, one of our Across School CoL teachers, to be my critical friend. Together we reviewed this lesson and identified the strategies I use to help my learners strengthen their connections to and make sense of our learning.

When introducing new learning valuing the power of front loading helps our learners avoid disconnects between what they already know and what they are about to learn. I captured 14 minutes 36 seconds of footage, with 6 minutes 55 seconds at the start given to helping my learners make the very important personal connections to the content they need if they are to be able to draw on and use their prior knowledge to help them make sense of new learning.

During this time we noticed I:

• use teacher think alouds to capture interest and evoke curiosity
• provide opportunities for paired discussion to make connections to the known, reflect on responses given, use the language in context and problem solve
• value and accept all responses
• share my own knowledge gaps and how I might fill these
• value students as experts
• ask questions
• use teacher tell opportunities when scaffolding with materials and images
• share the purpose of task
• remind/prompt known scaffold opportunities
• question
• give feedback
• initiate opportunities for negotiation
• remind students to value their own thinking
• revisit the same content in a variety of ways
• invite my learners to take risks in a supportive and collaborative environment
• give clear explanations
• use content vocabulary in context

On reflection I am quite surprised how many ways I find opportunities to help a wide variety of students make connections within a lesson. This was really affirming as it proves I know my learners, something that is vital to effective teaching, as one size really does not fit all.

Going forward I will definitely be making use of Donna's suggestion to include more opportunities for my focus group to practise using and hearing maths language in other learning areas to help them see that maths is not just something we do at maths time. I have asked Donna to come back later in the term to repeat this process so we can see if I have been successful in providing opportunities for practical challenges that bring maths language and learning into our Reading and STEAM lessons. 

Learn Create Share in LS2

This week we have been creating our own maths games to help us consolidate the language and learning from this term. I decided to use this challenge to reinforce my student's connections to our Manaiakalani pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share. All the games were created using Google Slides. The games focus on times tables, decimals, addition, subtraction, word problems and doubles, and have been designed to encourage players to use the clues given along with their prior knowledge to find the answers. At the end of this challenge each student presented their game to the class and our special guest, Karen Ferguson. Here is the link to her blog post

Have a look at Jack's, Nevaeh's and Anglea's blog posts for great reflections of this learning.

These games are all on our class site and we would love to share them. 

Connecting to maths language...

'Imagine a teacher running her hands across her desk as she tells her students, “A plane is a perfectly flat surface.” The students listen quietly, but one of them is thinking, “I thought a plane was something that flies.' Rubenstein and Thompson, 'Understanding and Supporting Children’s Mathematical Vocabulary Development' (p107, 2002). 

This is the type challenge many of my learners face everyday. Donna Yates shared this article with me after visiting LS2, along with a great idea to help us strengthen our connections to the maths language we encounter when reading and trying to make sense of written maths questions. Rather than reinventing the wheel I used this exact example to show my learners how confusing maths language can be, and gave us an authentic purpose the challenge that followed.

I find that when my learners collaborate and have the opportunity to talk about their tasks they gain a clearer understanding, so this is how we approached this challenge. There was a lot of negotiation and rich discussion as the vocabulary was manipulated into the corresponding columns. Donna is happy for me to share the link to this task which can be found here.

Going forward I will be tapping into the TESOL strategy of repetition without boring. If I want my learners to forge strong connections with the vocabulary they need to be successful in maths I know I need to provide multiple opportunities for these students to hear the words, see the words and use the words in context.

Inference: When do we use it in our learning?...

Having unpacked and explored the comprehension strategy of inference during reading lessons I wanted my target students to be able to tap into this learning and use their inferencing skills during our maths lesson. As a scaffold for these students I asked my whole class to remind me of when we use inferencing skills in our learning. What completely shocked me was that not one person could answer this question. Incase there was a confusion between inferencing and inference I asked my students what inference was. Again no one could give me an answer! I used a variety of DATS (direct acts of teaching) to prompt a response but still no one gave me a correct response. Thinking on my feet, I recited the nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill then asked my learners two questions. 

1. Was Jack a boy or a girl? 
2. How old was Jack? 

When the answers were given I asked, 'How do you know?' I was told that Jack is a boy's name so we can assume he's a boy, and he's young because in all the books they have a little kid drawn. I then cast a written version to the TV and asked everyone to talk to their buddy and show them where this information was in the text. One student said 'We can't Miss because it's not there.' I then explained it isn't written in the text because there are enough clues in the words (and images) for us to logically guess this information. 

I think my learners were thrown by my question because we always talk about inference and respond to inferential questions during our guided reading sessions, but on this occasion I asked them a reading based question during our maths learning time. Unfortunately none of my learners were able to knowingly transfer learning from one context to another. 

We then looked at the maths question: 

197 adults and 152 children were on the afternoon flight from Christchurch to Auckland. If 176 of the people that boarded the plane are male, how many are female? 

In pairs I asked my learners to read the question aloud then reread it and find the maths. Once they had the numbers to work with I asked them to decided were they being asked to find a sum or an addend. When that had been established I asked them to use what they already knew to decide which number operation would be the best choice to help them find the answer. Alongside each step we revisited the fact that we were inferring (ie: using the clues given with our prior knowledge to help us find the answer). 

What began as a scaffolding strategy evolved into a deep dive into a learning experience full of rich discussion for all my learners that I hope to build on to strengthen the connections between inference in reading and inference in maths.