We're ALL on the same page...

Over the last few staff meetings we have all shared our teacher inquiries. This capitalises on the learning we have made through our teacher inquiries. To capture a school-wide picture I met with everyone to identify the most significant changes in teacher practice. When asking teachers what practices we want to carry forward a common thread emerged. We all want students to see that learning used in one area can be transferred to another - linked to vocabulary, instruction and strategy. This shared understanding shows our way forward and has determined our school’s focus for 2020.

Here is the link to a summary of the picture captured

Bursts and Bubbles

This afternoon the Manaiakalani COL teachers shared the impact of their 2019 Teaching as Inquiry as impact bursts in a panel setting. Here is my journey...

This year I wanted to find out if an ‘increased emphasis on reading comprehension instruction would lead to better subject achievement in reading, writing and maths’.

Having spoken to my students and analysed a summary of current and historical data, my hunch was that my target group struggled to read and interpret written questions. This meant many learning situations, and all testing situations were seen as highly stressful and overwhelming experiences.

After the Term 1 assessments my target group shared the fact that for most questions, they simply clicked on any answer. This honesty meant I did not have a true picture of their achievement as I was not actually assessing their ability to interpret, recall and use their knowledge; instead I was in reality, assessing their skills of random selection.

Deeper analysis of student data and my own observations showed none of my target group were able to respond accurately to questions that were asking them to infer. So rather than focusing on reading comprehension as a whole, I narrowed my focus to only the comprehension strategy of inference, as often it is the inferential component in written questions that cause the disconnects.

What happened for the learners:

• Engagement and agency increased through the co-construction of scaffolds and shared ownership of the learning.
• Overall confidence levels increased. Meaning these students are now asking and answering questions, and trying hard to apply new learning when working independently. Something that was not happening at the start of the year. So this is a huge change.
• The increases in student self efficacy has had a positive impact on the amount of work completed and posted on blogs. 

What evidence do I have for this:

The detailed data analysis on my blog shows most of my target group made the expected achievement shifts across the board and in some cases, accelerated shifts. These students are not at the national norms yet but now, unlike the start of the year, none of our Y7/8s are on the colour wheel, below level 2b in writing or below stage 4 in maths.

To make this happen I...

• Actively sought and embraced help from colleagues
• Personalised the language of instruction to make it explicit
• Used think alouds, learner talk and written exemplars to unpack new learning and vocabulary.
• Used the same lesson structure in all curriculum areas to help my learners to see that what we learn in one curriculum area can be transferred to another.
• Identified opportunities to practise using and reinforce connections to inference in all subjects.
• Adapted support programmes with ongoing help from Donna Ryan in literacy and maths, that include an inferential component and align with our Y7/8 content. Running these in-class has meant the students are not missing learning time in one curriculum area whilst trying to fill gaps in another.
• Made my learners and myself accountable for unfinished work.

The most important learning I made from my inquiry is that changes in teacher practice are paramount to success. If strong connections to learning are to be made, the learning must be accessible to all students. We need to be mindful of the external factors affecting our tamariki that we can not control, as we gently nudge these same students out of their comfort zones using factors we can control.

WFRC#13 Summarise Key Changes in Student Learning...

'The average scale score progress for each year group is described by a benchmark scale score for each year level from the Term 1 trials. They can be used as a guide to compare individual student /class progress between two assessment time points.' - source NZCER

To build a rich picture of my students’ learning I used their historical data, their current data (PAT Reading and Maths, STAR, e-asTTle writing, Probe running record analysis, IKAN and GLoSS), student voice (T1, T2, T3) and my own in-class observations.

Student self-efficacy and self belief about their own ability to understand, interpret and answer questions when in a test, determines the level of confidence or anxiety they bring to that testing situation. The insight my previous inquiry has given me in regards to student self-efficacy and self belief has strongly influenced the way I introduce new learning, guide and feed back to my learners. By this I mean, I have reflected a lot on the changes I made to my teaching practice last year. The excerpt below is taken from a blog post I wrote at the end of 2018.

'I lived by the idea of 'Repetition without boring' which when unpacked, means repurposing, revisiting and tapping into the known to help access the unknown. In other words repeat, repeat, repeat, but do it in a creative way! I used the same lesson format, regardless of text type. Began each lesson by co-constructing the success criteria and revisiting the available scaffolds and exemplars created by our group. Talk was actively planned for to front-load the vocabulary needed to unpack the topic in context, and the language of instruction personalised and explicit. Moving forward I will continue to actively plan time for front-loading, time for planning and time for talk in my lessons, but most importantly, I will try really hard to make sure my learners not only think that they’re good at writing but also think I think they’re good at writing.'

Whilst my previous focus was solely on writing, I found myself applying the same thinking across the curriculum areas. As this year has progressed I have noticed student engagement, work completion rates and confidence levels have increased so I was keen to see if this increased level of efficacy and self belief would be make a difference to my learners when we compared how they felt during data collection time point one with data collection time point two. 

After the Term 1 assessments, my target group shared the fact that for most questions, they simply clicked on any answer. This honesty meant I did not have a true picture of their achievement as I was not actually assessing their ability to interpret, recall and use their knowledge; instead I was in reality, assessing their skills of random selection.
It seems quite a lot has changed since our time point 1 testing. I asked these three questions at the end of each time point 2 assessment session to ensure their responses were authentic. The responses below reflect only the students in my target group who were at school during assessment week.

Link to Google Draw

'A rising tide lifts all ships' and I hope that the levels of confidence and self belief are strong enough to keep these students believing they have the knowledge and skills to swim with the current as they begin next year's learning journey.

WFRC #14 Evaluating changes in teaching practice ...

The catalytic aspect of student learning my inquiry focused on this year was whether ‘increased emphasis on reading comprehension instruction could lead to better subject achievement in reading, writing and maths’. After talking to Fiona Grant at the start of Term 3, I realised that I had already narrowed this from 'increased emphasis on reading comprehension instruction' to 'increased emphasis on the reading comprehension strategy of inference'. We all need an overarching umbrella question to guide our inquiries whilst giving us room to veer off and explore, but I now realise I had an overarching marquee! My question was too broad and without refining would have meant valuable stones were left unturned.

I identified this as my focus when I noticed how real the ongoing struggle is for our learners who do not have the language acquisition and literacy skills needed to make sense of learning at our level.

To build a rich picture of my students’ learning I used their historical data, their current data (PAT Reading and Maths, STAR, e-asTTle writing, Probe running record analysis, IKAN and GLoSS), student voice (T1, T2, T3) and my own in-class observations.

                                                  

The main patterns of student learning I identified in the profiling phase were that they struggled to read and interpret instructions and tasks, which meant that all testing situations were seen as being highly stressful experiences. My target students could not see that we could use the language and strategies we learn in reading, in maths. I needed them to understand that what we learn in one subject can be used to help us in another. The example I chose to explore further was the strategy of inference because the data that identified the gaps in comprehension across my focus group, reflected none of them were able to respond accurately to questions that were asking them to infer. In addition to this, my reading and conversations with colleagues identified that often it is the inferential component in a written maths question that causes the disconnects.

I have always sought and embraced feedback and suggestions from expert colleagues. so the profiling of my own teaching was done collaboratively with my critical friend, Donna Ryan who observed my practice across several different learning areas. Her observations showed that I had strengths in weaving learning from previous sessions into current lessons, co-constructing learning intentions and scaffold supports, teacher modelling of vocabulary and strategies, and questioning.

However I realised quite quickly that my students would likely make more progress if I asked them to remind me why we were doing the task we were doing. Putting the onus on the students to recap the purpose of the learning gave them an increased sense of ownership. Recording responses as they were offered allowed them to see immediate success and gave us a valuable resource to take further steps along our learning paradigm. I have always taken time to listen to and implement student feedback but this time I identified the person/people responsible for the ideas. Doing this again personalised the changes made and showed that I valued their thinking.

The changes I made in my teaching were that I consciously used think alouds to model explicit use of content language and/or the strategy I was teaching in all subject areas. For example, when introducing new words we unpacked the meaning then I used a variety of synonyms to show these words meant the same as known words. An example of this is the way the word multiply is broken down as times tables or groups of. Doing this each time I use the word allows a wider number of students to make the connections they need, to make sense of the learning.

                                                 

I purposely planned activities that encouraged my learners to use the vocabulary in partner, group and class discussions, and set follow up tasks that gave my learners opportunities to use and apply the vocabulary and strategies in context. To support this I provide co-constructed written models at the start of each lesson so my learners are able to continue to make the visual connections to the learning they need in order to find success. By generating these ourselves and not using pre-made versions, I found that my students saw recalling strategy steps and written structures as a natural part of the lesson. 

I took time to notice the types of questions my learners responded to and tried hard to adapt the type of question I asked to suit the purpose and the learner. What I mean by that was sometimes I had to scaffold the questions by really unpacking the language I used, and asking literal questions that I knew my learners could respond to. Other times my questioning was much more open ended for those who were able to respond to a challenge without feeling insecure. Ensuring my learners could find success was the catalyst behind this thinking. My target students preferred to respond to literal questions as they felt safe sharing information they could see. In comparison my more able students tended not to respond to these questions, preferring instead to offer their informed opinions. Over time I have been able to merge this gap by using question stems to support those who struggle with knowing how to word their responses. 

To grow my own knowledge I sought advice from colleagues who have expertise in teaching Maths. Donna Yates (Te Hiku Cluster outreach facilitator) shared an article with me and some great ideas to help learners access a wider variety of Maths language. Sheree Hodge (Ranui School In-school Maths CoL teacher) helped me strengthen my own connections to inference. The professional readings I used are listed in these blog posts - Link 1. Link 2.

Overall I would rate the changes in student learning as a success. The evidence for my rating is that despite the results achieved in the online testing, the results achieved in the GLoSS, IKAN and Probe assessments showed my learners have made progress. This aligns with what I have seen in the classroom. My target students, like their peers have become more confident when faced with new learning, are actively involved in discussions and try hard to apply strategies at their level when working independently on follow up tasks. The latter being something that was not happening at the start of the year, with my target students relying on the learned behaviour of waiting for help from their peers or from me. This is a huge change. They are no longer the students who sit quietly watching the learning happening around them as they adopt every known strategy to avoid having to answer a question or give an opinion. A lot of positive reinforcement and gentle nudging has helped them start trying to swim through the sea of learning by using and applying the strokes of their own knowledge.

The most important learning I made about whether an increased emphasis on the strategy of inference could lead to better subject achievement in reading, writing and maths, was that whilst standardised testing data is an important measure of achievement, it is most definitely not the only measure that should be observed. The external factors that our students come to school with are real. Our tamariki can not be expected to automatically disassociate from a highly stressful situation outside of school because I am asking them to in many cases, undertake the highly stressful situation of sitting a test. I am proud of the effort they put into their learning this year, even though some results do not align with the work that happened daily in our classroom.

The most important learning I made about inquiry was that change is paramount to success. If strong connections to learning are to be made as teachers we need to make the learning accessible for all students. We need to be empathetic and supportive as we push our learners out of their comfort zones. Our learners in return, need to take risks and embrace change; and where possible commit to continuous patterns of attendance to avoid the disconnects in learning that erratic absences cause. 

Some learnings that would be relevant to other teachers are that it is important to remember the external factors out of our control, should not affect the factors we can control.

Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

A fun way to teach summarising...

As mentioned in a previous post I recently attended a professional development day at the Pop Up Globe theatre. One of the activities that I formed the strongest connection to was the 5 sentence summary. This was taught to me in the context of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but even as we were working through each stage, I was thinking about the different contexts I could use this activity in the classroom. Today I did just that.

Our school-wide Inquiry for the term is Enterprise and Economics and for our Year 7/8 students this began by looking at early Maori enterprise. My learners worked used their smart searching skills to build on the foundations of the content knowledge I had gifted them. Their challenge was to make notes and record new vocabulary as they worked collaboratively to fill their knowledge ketes. To help strengthen their connections and understandings I challenged them to use their notes to help them summarise the key ideas in just 5 sentences. 

With our 5 sentence summaries complete I then challenged my students to add detail and make their thinking more succinct by turning each sentence into a 10 syllable sentence. My students absolutely loved this challenge. I know this because throughout the last part of this challenge 33/33 students were actively involved, contributing and engaged. 

Sakina's blog post

Alex's blog post

Victoria's blog post

Mele's blog post

WFRC #12

Describe the evidence you have so far about the effects of your changed practices or intervention on desired learner outcomes and how you summarised and recorded these...

Explain the reflections and tweaks you have made along the way and the reasons why you made these changes. Share your evidence for these decisions...

Previous posts that link to this question and describe the some of the tweaks in my practice can be found here:

• Critical Friend Observations
• Current Events with a Difference
• Spring into Maths Reflection
• Phonics with Y7/8

What do my learners think?

Often when I ask my students a question about their learning or my teaching they will try their best to give me the answer they think I want to hear. This often involves wanting to do well or learning something so they can go to university, especially when asked about the purpose of the lesson. This is despite me having unpacked and continuing to unpack learning intentions on a regular basis. To see if their responses would differ if asked by someone else I asked Donna Ryan to ask my inquiry group the same questions I ask at the end of each term. Donna is well known to my class so my learners were confident and happy when talking to her about their learning. Student G4 was away overseas for the last three weeks of Term 3 so has been excluded from this snapshot to keep the data clean.

                           

Link to Spreadsheet

What the data linked to my inquiry shows:

• 7/7 students enjoyed being in LS2 this term.
• 1/7 identified Maths as being their favourite learning area at both time points
• 3/7 identified Maths as being their favourite learning area when talking to Donna
• 1/7 responses to what they liked about Reading aligned at both time points. What I noticed here was that the responses aligned with the learning focus at the time. 
• 1/7 responses to what they needed help with in Reading aligned at both time points. What I noticed here was that the responses were detailed and specific so as a result I have been able to adapt my current term planning to address these needs.
• 2/7 responses to what they liked about Maths aligned at both time points. What I noticed here was that the responses aligned with the learning focus at the time. I can also see from this data that the Spring Into Maths programme is popular. This is good to know as student buy-in is vital to the success of the intervention.
• 2/7 responses to what they needed help with in Maths aligned at both time points. What I noticed here was that the responses reflected the common thread of times tables, larger numbers, strategies and fractions. What is needed now is more opportunities to practise the learning in a variety of contexts. Recalling quick responses is addressed through maths games.
• 5/7 responses reflect they feel they have improved in Maths and/or Reading at both time points. A possible reason for this is that we have celebrated successes throughout the year so my learners know when and how they have achieved the learning intentions.

What does this tell me?

The responses show that the student perceived successes and gaps in learning are quite specific (although at times link to the current area of focus at the time the questions were asked). That tells me that connections have been made, and learning intentions and lesson purposes have been unpacked successfully. I will be adapting my planning to meet the 'gaps' as that will show my learners that I value their opinions. I can see what learning they like as well. This is a bonus as I now have a toolkit of learning that resonates with these students. I will feed the gaps into the Spring into Maths and Phonics sessions so that they will have the opportunity to experience the learning in guided teaching time with me and during intervention time with Linda. 

Important to note:

Our end of term evaluation is given to the whole class and is much more detailed than the responses I have analysed below. I use the student voice to inform my planning and welcome the opportunities to make adaptations that will help meet the specific learning needs of my students across all curriculum areas. A section I always include in our end of term evaluations but have not shared as I need to respect privacy, is the sentence starter... 'I want Mrs Anderson to know...' This is very powerful as it allows me an insight to changes in friendship circles and home environments etc. Often something our older students tend to keep close to their chests but can definitely help to explain changes in work habits, connections to learning and behaviour. Mind you it is not all doom and gloom. My students also use this section to share successes and milestones, or thank me for specific help I have given them during the term.

Engaging Shakespeare for Y1-8 PD...

Today Kiri and I attended the Engaging Shakespeare for Y1-8 PD at the Pop Up Globe theatre. The course was run by Rita Stone who took us through a variety of ways we can introduce Shakespeare to a younger audience.

We began with a behind the scenes tour of the theatre which was really interesting. We walked through the 'rat run' and made our way to the stage. This was a perfect opportunity for us to learn about the 4th wall, a theatrical term for the imaginary “wall” that exists between actors on stage and the audience. From there we moved up the stairs to the 'Romeo and Juliet' balcony, and yes we all tried to find Romeo! We then climbed another set of stairs to find out how the sound effects are created. This was a lot of fun as this was very much a hands on experience.

                                      

                                   Thunder                                    Rain                                              Wind      

After exploring the space we would be working in the practical sessions began. Using the characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream we learnt how to move and speak in ways they would have. The challenge was to not only stay in character, incorporate dialogue and use gestures, but also to remember to make use of the whole stage. Easier said than done when you are completely out of your comfort zone! This activity taught us about freeze frames and travelling. We then moved onto an activity called 'Silent Movies'. This required us to choose five words from a scene, create a frozen image for each word, select a move genre and add music. Once these performances had been shared they were all put together using the entire section of the scene. 

After lunch we were introduced to Romeo and Juliet, through my favourite activity of the day. Our challenge was to write a five sentence story that tells the story of two families who loathe each other and the two children who fall in love. This was a fantastic activity to practise summarising and could be used across all curriculum areas. After sharing our stories we were challenged to turn each of our five sentences into ten syllable sentences. I loved this! I noticed that I was collaborating and negotiating as my partner and I trialed, tested, adapted and changed our sentence structure and vocabulary choices. 

                                                5 sentences                             10 syllable sentences

We were then introduced to the 'Shaboom' rhythm. This helped us to understand how Shakespeare used iambs, trochees, spondees and pyrrich feet to show the actors which syllables to emphasise when delivering their dialogues. Using the symbols / - helped us make sense of this before we moved onto reading a sonnet and unpacking the rhyming structure within it.

We then explored the tactics of demanding, pleading and rejecting in pairs using only the words 'yes' and 'no' as our dialogue. Again we were challenged to stay in character, incorporate dialogue, use gestures and make use of the whole stage. This was a great introduction to our final performance of reading and acting out a scene from Romeo and Juliet on stage at the Pop Up Globe!

Maths PD with Marie Hirst

Last week we had some fabulous professional development with Marie Hirst who showed us how we could make connections between numeracy and our Term 4 topic of Enterprise. Our session began with Marie showing a slide that asked us to discuss which option we would choose. This question was taken from the site wouldyourathermath.com. Each question encourages you to pick a path and justify your reasons why. I can't wait to introduce this challenge as I can see so many possibilities for my learners to use their number knowledge and strategies in both collaborative and independent situations.

Following on from this challenge we explored a selection of games that use money as a context for number. What I really liked about the follow up discussion was the sharing time when we shared the strategies we had used, and discussed some possible adaptations that could be made to meet the learning needs of a wider range of ability levels.

We spent the last part of the session carrying out the practical task of finding the real cost of owning a pet through exploring costs, spending and budgets. This was a collaborative task that required us to discuss, research, negotiate and strategise. This is definitely another idea I am looking forward to challenging my class. Click here to find more challenges like this on TKI.

Current Events with a difference...

During our Manaiakalani shared staff meeting a few weeks ago I listened to a number of teachers sharing the ways they cover current events in their classrooms. This sparked my curiosity as my current approach has been to encourage my learners to explore the provocation by unpacking the content, looking at the information from both perspectives before forming an opinion based on fact. What I am aware of though, is when you complete this type of task you walk away and often never refer to it again. 

Teacher inquiry challenges you to look closely at your own practice. If what you are doing is 'missing the mark' or has become 'stale' then you need to get creative and find ways to adapt what you are doing to help your learners make stronger connections to the learning. I still wanted my learners to be able to talk about what was happening in the world, both nationally and internationally so I merged a few ideas I saw others doing and came up with a new approach.

I needed to make sure everyone understood the difference between national and international news so we began by unpacking these words. We then revisited author's purpose to consolidate that understanding before looking at the different reasons why a news editor would decide to run or print a story. These included timeliness, magnitude, oddity and emotive to name a few. (Idea sourced from here) This was a fantastic opportunity to gift and explore new vocabulary.

 

I then asked my learners to find a partner and set them the challenge of finding an example of each of these types of stories using national news that they read, watched or listened to. Once they had found an example they would need to talk about their reasons they felt it was best suited to the chosen category, then plot where it took place on a google map. The only written component of this task was to include the title of the news item or article and the exact location it took place in the map pin. 

This was a huge success and was something that could be achieved by all my learners, regardless of ability level. We stopped periodically throughout the lesson to share our news items and justify why these were chosen. I found that throughout these lessons I was continually modelling and reinforcing the use of the vocabulary in context.  

All completed tasks were posted on our blogs. Here is one example of the learning from Mele and Marieta. To see the interactive map you will need to follow the link to Mele and Marieta's blogs.

We repeated the challenge the following week with international current events. What impressed me was the retention of vocabulary and level of understanding behind the reasons news items are run and printed. Here is Alex, Jack, Joseph, Julian and Aung Naing's international current events map. These boys joined forces and had rich and deep conversations as they tried to persuade each other to come to a shared reasoning for their selections. To see the interactive map you will need to follow the link to Alex's blog.

Throughout this learning opportunity all my learners were on task and actively engaged. They were all eager to share their examples, with responses evolving to include a short summary of the content. I'm so glad that I took the time to adapt and change the way we explore current events in LS2!

T3 PBS Teacher Inquiry Check-in...

Today I met with all our staff to talk about their teacher inquiries. I asked everyone to share with me where they were at now, what changes had been made to their teaching practice and how I could support their inquiry moving forward into term 4. These were rich conversations and provided a great forum for sharing successes and bouncing ideas. 

The list below reflects the common themes and recurring ideas when teachers discussed the changes made in their teaching practice to help us accelerate shifts in our learners from Year 0 to Year 8: 

• Teachers modelling/gifting language they want students to use in context across curriculum areas
• Increase in time spent to unpack vocabulary
• Timetable changed to cater for late students
• Phonics programmes implemented in all classes
• Changes/adaptations made to the way data is recorded to give a clearer picture of micro shifts
• Drawing connections with visual scaffolds
• Use of mentor texts as exemplars
• Incorporating elements of critical literacy to help strengthen connections
• Shifted locus of control to give students a more agentic experience in the classroom
• Increase in instructional time
• Revisiting learning when connections are not strong through rewindable opportunities and further instruction
• Making connections to prior learning
• Differentiation is needs based and can be supported with upskilling of TAs
• Adapting teaching DLOs to meet the needs of learners
• Planning for talk time
• Making use of collegial expertise

This was a very valuable opportunity as it showed that as a staff, we are all on the same page. No one apportioned 'blame' to students where innovations tried had not been successful. Our conversations instead, focused on changes or adaptations made when these speed bumps appeared. 

Critical Friend Observations...

When carrying out an inquiry into your own teaching practice it is really helpful to have a critical friend who can see your practice from a different perspective. Their feedback and feed forward helps you to adapt your practice to continue to meet the learning needs of the students in your classroom. As I mentioned in a previous post, for me this person is Donna Ryan. I know what I think I do/say when I am teaching, but having Donna observe me taking a phonics session, and record exactly what she saw me do, was a valuable learning opportunity.

This is what I did/said to help my learners make the connections they needed to make sense of the learning:

• Recap learning from last session
• Check in to see if understanding is in place
• Co-construct the learning intention (LI) and goals for the lesson
• Asked the students "What do you need to do today to achieve this?"
• Gave students control of the learning by giving them the opportunity to choose the follow up activity
• Asked "Why are we doing this?" to recap on the purpose of the learning
• Reinforced the focus/goal as a reminder
• Modelled the learning
• Guided/scaffolded students towards next step
• Checked in to make sure understanding was in place
• Identified where they had met the LI
• Reaffirmed "I like the way you have used the commas correctly, we learnt that yesterday and this shows me you were listening carefully"
• Asked "Can you remind me what we were focussing on today?"

From this I can see that I share control of the learning with my students, continually check that connections are being made, scaffold through questioning and teacher modelling, and reaffirm to ensure self efficacy and confidence continues to grow.

Spring Into Maths Reflection...

After our first few weeks of moving Spring Into Maths from a withdrawal group to an in-class programme, my target group are all excited for Maths lessons. By taking time to step back and observe I have noticed these usually quiet students who shy away from sharing their ideas, are now confidently interacting with each other, and appear keen to share their thinking. Actively engaged is not a phrase I would have used many times when talking about this group, but if I was asked to describe their learning today it would have been exactly what I would have said!

Possible reasons for this change in confidence could be linked to: 

• opportunities to strengthen visual connections to the learning through use of materials
• the 'fun' element of maths games
• the small group size
• aligned ability levels has evened the playing field - no one is viewed as the 'expert' so everyone is willing to share their thinking
• following the SPRING format allows for opportunities to revisit learning using different numbers 
• the learning is pitched at the right level
• teacher/teacher aid shared language of instruction
• teacher/teacher aid enthusiasm
• increased self efficacy

After the lesson today I asked two of my target students to work collaboratively to write a description of their learning for this blog post. Their description of today's learning written by students G2 and G5 is below. 

'Spring into Maths is a group that develops and practises basic facts and gives students in the group an opportunity to understand the maths that is hidden in the questions for example - What is ⅛ of 24=?- This question is very similar to multiplication but instead we use the opposite strategy which is division. Today, the Spring into Maths group played a few games that involved addition, place value, and multiplication. We wrote down numbers on the white board and used the place value strategy to help find out the answer. Our warm up  energizer was using the biggest to smallest strategy to sort the number cards out. Next we played maths game to practise our times tables which was called Digi Facts. After that we used the place value house to clarify our understanding of numbers using thousands, hundreds, tens, and ones. Here is an example using the number 689 -600 is the hundreds, 80 is the tens, 9 is the ones. We got all ours right!

We like Spring into Maths because it helps us improve on the areas we need to work on in fun ways. All of us are confident to share our answers because everyone is respectful even if you get the answer wrong.'

Students G2 and G5

An additional element we have added to this programme is a problem solving challenge to help these students strengthen our connections to the maths language we encounter when reading and trying to make sense of written maths questions.  

Phonics with Year 7/8...

With my inquiry in mind I have been actively looking for opportunities within our class programme that I can use to reinforce reading strategies. The blog post below outlines one way I am doing this. We call it 'phonics' and it runs alongside our formal guided reading sessions as part of our reading rotation.

Earlier this year our senior syndicate attended a phonics professional development workshop. Phonics is most commonly used in early literacy programmes. While my data showed the need was there, I felt it was important to make some adaptations so the programme would be more suitable for my year 7/8 learners. To do this I merged ideas from the phonics PD, the 'Chunk, Check, Cheer' spelling programme and my own knowledge. Linda, our LS2 Teacher Aid and I worked together to put together a programme that she felt comfortable running and would meet the learning needs of the students we work with. Once this was in place we invited Donna Ryan to observe what we do and give us her feedback. The pretest Donna shared helped us to identify the specific blends/chunks that need to be targeted.

Each session begins with the phonics element. I have repurposed activities that help unpack a blend/chunk. This involves:

• A timed challenge to list all the known rhyming words that have the focus blend/chunk in them on individual whiteboards. These lists are then shared and help to create the master list, or as we call it the 'chunk' family. To add an additional challenge element the students use dictionaries to help them add to the master list by finding words with 7+ letters. Something that has been really well received from the outset as the competitive aspect of finding the longest word has hooked everyone in.

• We then select an activity that involves circling all the 'chunk' family words in a paragraph, putting words from the 'chunk' family in alphabetical order and completing cloze sentences/paragraphs to add in the fun element.

• The next part involves establishing the meaning of any unknown words, something that helps strengthen understanding. Each student chooses a word then writes it in sentences (one simple, one compound and one complex), which allows for sentence structure and punctuation reinforcement. 

• After these sentences are shared, the students are given a challenge to write as many of the 'chunk' family words in a paragraph. We use Chromebooks for this task. The finished paragraphs are then proofread and edited in pairs. This writing becomes a blog post as well as providing an opportunity for further reinforcement.

• The final part of our phonics session involves a reading component and means all pens are put down. We use the Key Into Inference text to help strengthen connections to this strategy. The students read the text together, listen to the teacher read it, read in pairs or read silently before having a group learning conversation to unpack the questions.

Everything is recorded and stored in folders which are then used as modelling books. Although the session is run by Linda, we plan it together. This allows me to focus on the same blend/chunk she has focussed on when I am doing my guided sessions. Since this intervention began we have noticed a huge increase in self efficacy, engagement, active participation and comprehension levels. My learners are excited to participate in a literacy challenge they can do because it is hard to be the person who is 'learning to read' when the rest of the class is 'reading to learn'.

This began as an intervention for my target group but has grown and now reaches a much wider audience. We have two groups who work with Linda, and one who after suggesting it to me, that works independently. 

Spring Into Maths...

Yesterday I had the opportunity to observe Karen, one of our amazing teacher aides, taking a Spring Into Maths session with three of my students who are part of her withdrawal group. What stuck with me the most was the atmosphere in the room. My students were smiling throughout and confidently offering answers to questions, even when they weren't sure of the answer. The latter is something I see happening in the classroom only when they are confident their response is correct. The self efficacy I saw is something I really hope can be transferred back to the classroom.

Spring Into Maths is an intervention program used to provide extra support in number knowledge and strategies for students with knowledge gaps in maths. It is not new to me as I have incorporated this programme into my maths lessons on numerous occasions over the years, however is not something I have been running formally in my maths programme this year. I asked these students what they liked the most about being part of this maths group. Here are their responses:

• JA -  'The games Miss because we can challenge each other in a fun way.'
• AK - 'I like the number challenges because we can try and get a better score than what we got last time. It shows that we know stuff.'
• SB - 'I like being able to say my answer and I don't feel shy because there's only three of us and I really like the games.'

Going forward I am going to rework my maths programme to incorporate the hands on elements of Spring Into Maths into our maths sessions. I saw first hand how powerful being able to manipulate materials is, and see this as another way stronger connections can be made to the knowledge my learners need to be able to operate confidently in a mathematical capacity. 

I began this morning's lesson by explaining the changes I wanted to make to our maths learning time, and as I wanted buy-in from everyone we spent today's session playing the huge amount of number knowledge games that had been most definitely underused in my class this year. The buzz of noise meant this was most definitely not a quiet lesson, and like yesterday all I saw were smiling faces, engaged learners and some outstanding collaboration as they negotiated their answers. 

I'm looking forward to see if this change can help all my students see that they can recall and use their number knowledge skills confidently at speed.