The feedback from the SLJ team was that our participants had strengths in blogging, however, seemed to drop the ball when it came to the commenting component. Many of our learners either overlooked responding to comments made on their blogs, or simply replied with a thank you. Why did this happen? Not because our students were 'lazy' but possibly because as teachers, we had not set them up for success in this area. With that thought in mind I want to build on the learning from my 2019 inquiry and align our school-wide professional development focus of maths to find out if strengthening connections to Smart Relationships will help our tamariki to understand and use maths language and vocabulary in context?
Over the next few weeks I will be working alongside all our teachers to help them create their own backwards maps. This tool helps individual teachers to narrow the inquiry pathway they wish to travel along and they personalise their connections to our wider shared focus.
After speaking with Hannah West, who kindly shared the blogging rubric she created for her learners last year, my plan is to work with our PBS team to co-construct a rubric that is personalised to our school. This will allow our learners to see where they have met the success criteria and what it is they need to do to move their own learning to the next level. By creating a rubric specific to the shared language of Panmure Bridge School, our teachers and students will have ownership of the tool that will allow us to measure student progress, and help our tamariki see that learning linked to vocabulary, instruction and strategy used in one area can be transferred to another.
In class we actively plan for, and teach our students how to participate actively in a dialogic learning discussion. They are skilled in this area when asked to do this in class, but as yet most of our students are not carrying this thinking through to their blog commenting. In addition to actively planning time to allow our students to use maths language and vocabulary in context a number of our teachers are participating in the Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu ('Write to me, Write to others') programme. Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu helps connect learners across the Manaiakalani and outreach clusters through blog commenting and will help provide authentic opportunities for learning conversations to take place under the cybersmart umbrella.
Kia ora Robyn! Did you decide on a pre and post measure to gain evidence to whether the children have improved in their abilities to write quality blog comments? I am still finding it a bit challenging to decide on my challenge. In our last CoL PLG, discussions around my inquiry made me realise I had to decide on whether I was wanting to focus on critical thinking in blog comments/posts OR critical thinking through responding to texts in reading. I could argue that writing a blog comment is a response to reading a text...Something for me to think about!
ReplyDeleteHi Hannah
DeleteI appreciate this comment as it made me think, thank you for that. I decided to establish a baseline using the Manaiakalani Quality Blogging DLO as we discussed. My reason for this was that by asking my learners to create a blogpost about the same known DLO. By doing this I have been able to see where the gaps in this area were first as there was no prior teaching because I wanted a real picture. Quite a few were highlighted. I then asked my target students to comment on each others blogposts linked to this activity. This has given me a great piece of baseline evidence. However I have had to widen my inquiry focus as lockdown has meant different students are connecting to different curriculum areas. After having time to think. Which direction have you decided to go in your inquiry?