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.