TAI 2020 WFRC #4: Collecting evidence and data...

Begin to collect evidence and data and come to the next session ready to share your preliminary findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge i.e. using your baseline student data and evidence.

This year I will be working with a group of six Year 7 students. My thinking is that if I set these students up for success this year, they will be able to maintain this as they move into Year 8 next year. By choosing Year 7 students as target students, we will hopefully have an exemplar group who can, in their capacity of being our future school leaders, become role models for our younger bloggers. 

After analysing my data last term I was in the process of identifying my target students when we went into Alert Level 4 lockdown. Whilst for many reasons this has been a challenging journey, when looking only through my 'teacher as inquirer' eyes this has been an opportunity I have been able to use to my advantage. 

My intended inquiry focus this year was to find out if 'strengthening connections to Smart Relationships will help our tamariki to understand and use maths language and vocabulary in context', however with the current situation of distance learning I have decided to alter my focus to match our wider school focus, to find out if 'strengthening connections to Smart Relationships will help our tamariki to understand and use content specific language and vocabulary in context'. Basically this means I have widened my scope to capture a bigger picture of the curriculum as a whole. My reason for doing this is that my class have been blogging a wide variety of tasks linked to our distance learning. The group I have chosen to focus on are all connecting to different curriculum areas, so, as my strategy is to use our blog comments to promote dialogical discussion and strengthen learning, I need to adapt my thinking.

To establish a starting point for this inquiry I looked back through my target group's blogs. I noticed was that 6/6 students have a similar amount of blog posts, and post regularly as per the chart below. My plan was to make a similar visual representation so I looked back at the last post of each month of 2018, 2019 and 2020 (to date) as way of gathering a snapshot of data. What has opened my eyes is that only a very small number of these posts on 6/6 students blogs, have comments. Where there are comments I can see that these are being mostly generated as a result of participation in the SLJ. I do however, want to reiterate that this observation was made based solely on the last post of each month and does not include any other posts.

Student voice gathered through a google form tells me:

• 6/6 students understand how to write a quality blog comment but have not yet made the connections to the purpose of receiving a quality blog comment. 
• 6/6 students do not make time in their own time to read blog comments
• 6/6 students reply when given class time and prompted by a teacher.
• 6/6 students (prior to lockdown) most often reply with 'Thank you for commenting on my post.'
• 6/6 students (during lockdown) are replying by responding to the questions asked in a comment when prompted by me in our online meetings.
• 2/6 students (during lockdown) are replying by responding to the questions asked in a comment independently.
• 4/6 students understand what is needed in a quality blog post.
• 2/6 students are still at the stage of writing 'Here is my DLO of....' or 'Today we had to...'.
• 6/6 students replied 'I forget' when asked why comments are often overlooked.

Evidence gathered from a baseline task:

• To enable me to measure time point one data with time point 2 data I set a task that required my learners (whole class) to write a blog post that would share the information found in the Manaiakalani Quality Blog Commenting poster. I will give them the same task at the end of the year to allow me to make comparisons. To make it authentic I got creative in a Google Draw as this gave me the added opportunity to leave a visible feedback/feed forward trail in the comments section. 

• 3/6 students included a learning intention.
• 2/6 students used an explanation structure with three paragraphs to express their understanding and elaborate with little or no punctuation errors.
• 1/6 students wrote 'This DLO explains what a quality blog comment is. Read it for yourself to understand how to do this.'
• 3/6 students wrote a paragraph to describe the contents of the poster but did not elaborate. 
• 6/6 students used the content specific vocabulary found within the poster.

The evidence I have gained so far tells me that I need to revisit how to write a quality blog comment and how to write a quality blog post. In addition I need to make this visible in my classroom and embed time to do this in our timetable to ensure my learners are able to apply this knowledge in context. We need to be able to walk the walk not simply talk the talk.

TAI 2020 WFRC #3: Building an accurate profile of students' learning - tools, measures and approaches...

Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge. Justify why you chose these approaches and tools.

My challenge is to explore if strengthening connections to Smart Relationships will help my learners to understand and use content specific language and vocabulary in context. I feel that by doing this it will help my learners to make accelerated shifts across the board in reading, writing and maths. In all assessments our students are required to read and respond to questions. As with my previous inquiries I am very aware that it is often the content specific language along with the language of questioning that causes disconnects in learning. My idea this year is to use their blog posts and blog comments to help strengthen these connections.

Link to backwards map

The tools/measures/approaches:

Planning changes:

• My initial approach will be to actively plan time in class, (and now in our current distance learning situation), for students to comment on each others blogs and respond to comments on their own blogs. This will help me to see where connections to the learning content are strong and where gaps in knowledge are evident.
• Adapt lesson formats so that regardless of curriculum area we spend time thinking about how we can share our learning effectively on our blogs, and time thinking about giving and responding to blog comments that are linked to our learning. 

Instructional lessons:

• I need to create opportunities for my learners to focus, notice and use the words that help us make sense of the learning, and model this.
• Teach and model the Manaiakalani cybersmart lessons inside core subject areas to help my learners strengthen their understanding of the blogging process and understand how paying attention to the feedback received in blog comments can help them move their learning to the next level in context.
• Provide scaffold frameworks and rubrics to support this process that are used across the school. 

PAT/STAR/Probe/IKAN/GLoSS/e-asTTLE Assessments:

• Analysing these results gives me a clear picture of what my students can do and where our knowledge gaps are. I use these results to inform my planning and identify shifts in achievement.

Student Voice:

• Gathering student voice is a vital part of teaching. It gives us a clear picture of where our students are at, what they're thinking and what we need to do to allow of learners to make their individual connections to the learning.

Feedback:

• I need to fall back on the known by repurposing an idea I used in 2015 to help my learners understand what feedback looked like. This was done by sharing the story of Austin's Butterfly to help my learners see that by paying attention to the feedback given by his peers, Austin was able to make the changes he needed in his drawing to make it more scientifically accurate. By showing this clip again and unpacking the learning within, I hope to help my current students see the power giving and receiving feedback has in strengthening their connections to the learning.

Peer to peer talk:

• Peer to peer talk continues to be huge part of our learning time as it provides authentic opportunities for new words to be used in context. I can see that buddying my learners up they can talk through a blog post then collaboratively decide the appropriate feedback and feed forward through dialogic discussion before leaving their individual comments.
• This will also provide the opportunity for my learners to buddy up and talk through comments received before responding.
• To do this effectively I will need to create speaking frames.

Explore success in schools/ cluster initiatives:

• Panmure Bridge School 
• Manaiakalani and Outreach schools
• Manaiakalani Cybersmart resources
• Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu
• Wairakei School - Link here  
• MIT/COL inquiries

Cybersmart Observation...

Edit: This observation took place in February 2020

Over the summer period my class took part in the Summer Learning Journey. As a school we did extremely well as far as participation and output, but dropped the ball as far as commenting was concerned. Our students actively commented on the blogs of other participants but did not comment in a way that created a thread of comments. I didn't know how to strengthen this understanding so I asked Heather Collins, one of our Manaiakalani facilitators to model a Cybersmart lesson for me. We have access to a wealth of Cybersmart resources but as someone who has been a part of Manaiakalani from the beginning I have not had the opportunity to observe one of these lessons first hand. 

Here are the notes I took:

• Begin by stating the purpose of the lesson (- this linked to the reasons I have mentioned above)
• State the Learning Intention - LI: To create a thread of comments

• Display the 'Quality Blog Comments Poster' and unpack
• Ask students to generate sentence starters for 'compliments'
• Model how to write a quality blog comment using a student blog post (promotes a connection)
• Explain that a question has been asked so now needs a reply.
• Ask: How might you reply to this comment?
• Co-construct a reply

Where to next:

• Actively plan time for students to comment on blogs and respond to comments on their own blogs.
• Revisit the Manaiakalani cybersmart lessons to access the resources available. The shared language of instruction will help my learners to continue to build on and strengthen the knowledge they have, and will scaffold and support my students new to Manaiakalani this year.
• Make a display that reflects our unpacking and understanding of how to write a quality blog comment - make it visible - keep it visible.

Distance learning with LS2... Week 2

This week has been a very busy week for LS2 as far as distance learning is concerned. My amazing students have created a wide variety of DLOs that showcase their understanding of the tasks as they keep their learning going. Each day Linda (TA), myself and the students come together as a class to set ourselves up for the day, celebrate achievements and share work. Having Linda join us has been a real blessing as the students see both their teachers everyday, and whilst I have been kept really busy marking the work she has been kept equally as busy commenting on blogs. Teamwork at it's best!

In these sessions I have been asking my students to present their work as it helps us to continue to learn with and from each other. What's lovely to hear is the feedback they give each other after the presentations. LS2 has always been a collaborative learning environment, but what has impressed me is that despite being in their own family bubbles, many have kept this collaboration going. I'm enjoying reading the conversations taking part in the comments section of DLO's, and on many occasions I've joined in to give feedback. 

Florence presenting her timelapse movie showing the process she went through to make her poppy wreath. 

Have a look at her blogpost here

We have had to iron out a few areas and set very clear expectations as far as avoiding the temptation to simply click 'resolve' when I leave feedback. After talking everyone through this, especially my new learners, there has been some very rich learning conversations taking place and I now have a wealth of evidence to feed forward into my future planning. 

Another area we needed to revisit was the need to make sure all work was filed in the correct folders in our google drives. We also run a 'completed work' spreadsheet where links to completed work are posted. We've had a few hiccups here with work that isn't filed being linked as I can't access it correctly. However, when I think that these have been our only glitches so far, I can honestly say LS2 have been fully engaged in their distance learning.

When I think about my own learning this week I have definitely strengthened my skills when it comes to explaining things, with step by step snapshots of a process and emailing them to the person who needs this support being a great go-to if Google Meets are not an option. I have also noticed that my instructions are definitely a lot clearer and more succinct. My biggest success has been when Linda and I used a Google Meet to guide a student who had prior to lockdown, only been at our school 3 days, with how to post a variety of DLOs on her blog. This student came to us from overseas and had never used Google Docs before so each step of our distance learning has been new for her. What I have loved is that she asks questions and whether these have been answered in our Google Meets, by emails sent to me or to her friends, or by both of us working on her DLO at the same time her initiative has meant she has found a huge amount of success. 

Year 8 working with Mr Grundy

This morning we had our LS2 catch up then went off to Tech with Mr Grundy and Ms Ferguson at Tamaki College. After Tech we tuned in for our first Panmure Bridge School livestream assembly. This was such a great way to end our learning week as Mr Johnston was able to present virtual certificates to students who are making a huge effort to keep their learning going from home. Richard, Kiri and Anna this was a huge success and an extremely awesome way for all our PBS family to stay connected.

Meet my focus students...

The best way to understand the students I am working with is to paint a picture with numbers. Last year I learnt that creating a historical data pathway would give me a much clearer picture of my learners, so I have taken this learning and repeated the process. In reality I have only worked with these students for seven weeks due to the Level 4 lockdown but in that time I have gained an insight of their personalities and working styles. 

Through capturing this picture of historical data I have come to understand that 4/6 students have continually achieved the top scores across the curriculum in their cohort data. This is reflected in their classroom interactions, willingness to begin work straight away, ask questions and their ability to naturally assume a leadership role. 2/6 students appear to find maths and writing a challenge, but are working at their chronological age in reading. The latter two students on the other hand shy away from leadership but always contribute actively to the learning conversations in group challenges. These girls do not like having the responsibility of deciding the direction their group will go in, but once given direction from their peers, confidently carry out their roles. They like to work in a more supportive environment with teacher or teacher aid support to get started. I have come to understand that this is where they feel most confident asking the questions they need to ask in order to make a stronger connection to the learning. This data has answered a few questions I had with these two learners. Both are popular and confident when interacting with others, both work well in any group they are put in, but neither like to share their ideas in the wider class forum, and neither want anyone to know they need a bit more support.

As mentioned in a pervious post... 'For the last 5 years Panmure Bridge School has claimed the Summer Learning Journey's overall prize for top blogging school, something we are extremely proud of and value highly. However this year 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. 

With my inquiry focus to explore if strengthening connections to Smart Relationships will help my learners to understand and use content specific language and vocabulary in context, I have selected this group as all 6/6 students are active bloggers, all participated successfully in the SLJ, with 3/6 receiving prizes for their efforts; but none replied to comments with anything other than a 'thank you'.