Bursts and Bubbles 2020

This afternoon the Manaiakalani COL teachers shared the impact of their 2020 Teaching as Inquiry as impact bursts in a panel setting that gave me many valuable insight to take forward into 2020. Thank you so much to everyone who shared their inquiry journey tonight. I have thoroughly enjoyed walking through my 2020 inquiry alongside you and the support I have been given as a member of this awesome team. Here is my journey...




This year I wanted to explore if 'strengthening connections to Smart Relationships will help our tamariki to understand and use content specific language and vocabulary in context in maths, reading and writing'

Our feedback from the Summer Learning Journey team was that our Panmure Bridge School students had strengths in blogging, however, seemed to drop the ball when it came to the commenting component. Many of our learners had either overlooked responding to comments made on their blogs, or simply replied with a thank you. So I wanted to find out why this had happened.

My thinking was that by learning how to leave feedback and ask questions of others, their own connections to the learning would be strengthened. I wanted my learners to refer to learning intentions, confidently use content specific language, ask questions that prompted the recipient to justify their thinking, and understand that giving and receiving blog comments was an important part of our learning.

Having looked closely at my target student's blogs, I noticed that learning intentions were often omitted and explanations of tasks began with 'Today we had to...', or 'Here is my DLO of...'. The detailed content and purpose for learning was actually missing from the post, and prompted questions like this one, 'Mrs Anderson how can I comment on the learning if I don't know what they were learning?'.

Before we could focus on commenting, we needed to first create quality blog posts. Once this was in place, the challenge to create dialogic comment threads began. I use the word challenge because my learners wanted a competitive element. They spoke, I listened and each week my target group and I came up with a new challenge, with the winner from the previous week having the final say.

My learners now:

• Write quality blog posts which have become the expected norm, with this group of students being quite critical of each other. The unexpected bonus of this, was that these students were also very supportive of their peers. I saw a number of posts being rewritten or edited without me intervening in any way.
• Have a shared ownership of the learning which saw the depth and regularity of comments increase as confidence levels grew.
• Seek clarity and use content specific language. This is not only evident on blogs, but has also become the norm in our classroom

The achievement data and student voice evidence I have for this is on my blog, but something I want to celebrate today are the timestamps on blog comments. These show these students are engaging in, and thinking deeply about their learning outside of school. However, this success is not yet the norm for all my learners. I chose to work with this group of Year 7 students so that I will move into 2021 with an 'expert' group who can model best practice and help me continue this journey.

Changes to my practice that my learners benefited from were:

• Regular meetings as a group
• Co-constructed blog post scaffolds with explicit connections to the learning and vocabulary
• Explicit instruction and modelling of content specific vocabulary, blog posts construction, questioning and blog comment construction.
• My learners and myself became accountable
• Commenting time was actively planned for.

The most important learning I made through my inquiry is that by embracing change we strengthen our ability to provide our tamariki with the tools they need to strengthen their connections to the learning.

TAI 2020 WFRC # 10 To what extent was the intervention successful in changing teaching?

I initially linked my inquiry question 'Will strengthening connections to Smart Relationships help our tamariki to understand and use content specific language and vocabulary in Maths?'  directly to our school wide professional development of maths, but due to the changes lockdown and distance learning presented, I widened my focus to incorporate the additional curriculum areas of reading and writing. This is something I see as a bonus as it afforded me the opportunity to reinforce and make connections across these curriculum areas. 

Since beginning my in-school COL teacher journey in 2017 I have realised the power knowing how to transfer learning across the curriculum areas really has. This isn't something new or something I hadn't done previously, but rather something I learnt to take time to think about and actively try to facilitate by consciously drawing attention to, and is something I feel is one of the key changes in my practice this year. 

Drawing attention to the learning intention helped us to identify the purpose behind the learning. In maths for example, the purpose of the lesson may be to 'make ten then add', and in reading might be to 'identify the main ideas', however because the word 'purpose' has been unpacked and used in context, the outcome is that my students know why they are learning what they are learning in both curriculum areas. Revisiting learning intentions (LI) to strengthen my own knowledge has meant these have become more specific. For many years I have written learning intentions on my teaching DLOs and discussed them at given points in the instructional lessons. One big change I have made this year is to record the LI's on the board, in modelling books or on whatever I am using to build the rewindable opportunities that allow visual connections to be made. I now make a conscious effort to begin each instructional lesson by introducing the learning intention. It has a dedicated place within each lesson and is referred to throughout so that I can show my learners where the connections are between the purpose of the task and the actual task. Even though I write these LIs before we begin the learning, on many occasions these are now tweaked and reconstructed with my learners using their words. The latter being highly valued as I think as teachers, it is important to embrace opportunities to learn from our students.

Identifying the learning intentions on blog posts became our point of focus when commenting on each others blogs. When I asked my learners to comment on their peer's blogs I taught them to first look for the learning. Knowing the purpose of learning intentions helped my learners to find the learning in the post. We followed this with a focus on questioning and explored the difference between open and closed questions. This enabled feedback to be given and questions to be asked that dug deeper and linked directly to that learning rather than surface level comments linked to the visual features of the DLOs. As a direct result dialogic and rich learning conversations in the form of comment threads emerged.

                         

At the beginning of my inquiry this year I realised I needed to revisit how to write a quality blog post so that my learners had the tools they needed to work with when creating comment threads. The way I chose to do this was to create a blog post scaffold, and was something that forced me to really think about what learning I wanted my students to take away from each lesson. 

our blog post scaffold was created during our first round of distance learning and was  initially written by me, we progressed to co-construction as the year went on. Each scaffold gave my learners the title, blog post labels, the learning intention, a few points of information and / or a short co-constructed blurb that used the content specific vocabulary we had been using to unpack the learning, and a prompt to give a personal insight to the task. 

As with any class, my learners have a wide range of abilities. Some learners need a lot of scaffolding, while others use that scaffolding as a prompt, in this case, to help them write their own task description. By co-constructing these scaffolds with my learners we first get an opportunity to revisit the purpose of the learning and the content specific vocabulary we have been using, then get a further opportunity to think about the title and labels. 

By strengthening this area my students were then able to leave quality comments as they had the vocabulary tools to work with. 

I linked our cybersmart lessons directly to the learning taking place in our classroom. This allowed for immediate connections to be made. We revisited the purpose behind leaving a comment and discussed how this would help us strengthen our own connections to the learning. When I looked at the way I taught my learners to be cybersmart I realised I was skimming over components I believed my learners had already connected with and knew how to use. This was something I changed immediately. I realised that despite having participated in cybersmart lessons about how to write a quality blog post and comment since their digital learning journeys began, many of my students across all ability levels had not actually made a strong connection to this. 

To effect change here I began weaving this into all our sharing sessions. The words I used were the same, the scaffolds I used had the same structure and my expectation was that all blog posts would contain each element needed to allow our audience to make connections to our learning. Blog commenting was unpacked, scaffolded and given a place within the timetable. I found by actively planning for these opportunities they became the expected norm. 

Modelling and purposefully using the content specific vocabulary was another area I concentrated on in my own practice. In day to day classroom life often we think we are doing something, but the reality is often it this doesn't happen. To support this my observations this year have all focused on my use of content specific vocabulary (CSV) and how I am supporting my students to use this in their blog posts and comments. 

What do you want me to notice during the observation?

• Do the student blog posts match my teaching DLO?
• Are my instructions explicit?
• Am I using content specific language throughout the lessons?
• Does this language link to the task and the LI and cybersmart?
• Are the students using CSV in their blog posts to explain their learning?
• Do comments left use CSV reflect a connection to the learning?

Kiri Kirkpatrick observed my practice in Term 2 and then again in Term 4. Both observations had the same focus to allowed us to have a rich discussion. From these observations I see that I:

• Provide very explicit learning intentions, both verbal and written
• Vocabulary introduced by teacher and generated by students is recorded on the board so students can refer back to CSV
• Students are engaged and ask questions for clarification.
• Opportunities for peer to peer talk to strengthen connections

The most important learning I made through my inquiry is that by embracing change we strengthen our ability to provide our tamariki with the tools they need to strengthen their connections to the learning.

Keeping my Inquiry going in Level 3...

Level 3 saw our weekly planned group meeting move from face to face to online. We have these meetings to reflect on the challenge from the previous week and set ourselves up for the current week's challenge. 

As I mentioned in previous posts, this term my focus students have created their own blog commenting challenges to help them develop the quality of their comments and strengthen their connections to our learning. Last week's challenge built on from the previous week's challenge of creating a comment thread of three comments, to creating a comment thread of five comments. By increasing the number of interactions my learners are now able to see this is an authentic way of having a learning conversation. 

The content below is an example of the our challenge. I have copied the comments directly form the blog to maintain anonymity but am sharing this will full permission from my learners.

                           

Comment Thread:

Kia ora G2

I liked reading your blog post today. All the information in the blurb and document makes your blog post very informative. I liked that the document consists of the information related to the topic and the blurb consists of the information on what you did in school. Did you find the concept of summarizing the text easy? If yes, than in what way and what are the advantages?

                             ___________________________________________________________________

Kia Ora G5
Thank you for commenting on my blogpost today! I think with alot of information from videos and online sites the concept (science) was quite easy to summarise. Me and my group all collaborated to complete this task. Did you and your group find this concept easy to summarise?

                             ___________________________________________________________________

Thank you for replying to my comment! Me and my group also found watching the video and learning from various sites quite informative and knowledgeable. We thought that the summary table made our work easy as well. I think that using the poster notes as a way of moving the important points ahead was the best strategy as it was new and we could write notes in a more detailed version. What were the three facts (related to science) you found most interesting in the whole task?

                            ___________________________________________________________________

I also think using the poster notes were quite helpful. In my opinion, the 3 most interesting facts about science that I found were:
Science is divided into 3 branches, Physics, Biology, and Chemistry.
Basic science is knowing something and applied science is using what we know.
Science is the knowledge behind every question.

What were the 3 facts you found interesting? Or, what were the 3 most vital information you and your group found using the poster notes?

                             ___________________________________________________________________

I agree with all the interesting facts you have said! In my opinion the three most vital and interesting facts I found were:

1. Applied science is dependent on basic science as the experiment is done first and the conclusions and discussions are done later.
2. Science can be quite dangerous as well as beneficial. It all depend on the way it is used and seen.
3. Science is used in the most basic tasks in life such as making a lime juice. Mixing lemon and sugar results in juice is chemistry, the force through which it is mixed is physics and the benefits we get from drinking it is biology.

Do you know any other experiment which includes all the three branches? (Physics, Chemistry and Biology) If yes, then what is it?

 ___________________________________________________________________

Your 3 most vital facts look very interesting! I think an experiment using all 3 branches would be making a coffee using coffee beans which comes from biology (nature) then you apply force to grind the the coffee beans together which comes under physics. Then lastly combining the grinded coffee with hot water and milk making hot coffee.

Did you know some points about science before did this task?

 ___________________________________________________________________

Wow, I never thought that making coffee also includes all the three branches of science. Yes, I knew that science is divided into three branches which are Chemistry, Physics and Biology as I have studied the various topics under it in India. I also knew the steps included in an experiment which is the things needed or requirements, method or hypotheses, experimenting or verification and at the last the conclusion or answer. Did you know that each branch is related to a different occupation? Doctors study biology, Mathematicians study physics and scientists study chemistry! Which branch do you like the most and why?

 ___________________________________________________________________

I never knew that each branch is related to a different occupation! In my opinion the branch I enjoy learning about has to be Geology and Astronomy. Even though it is not apart of the 3 branches it is still included. I think Geology and Astronomy because I enjoy learning about celestial objects and the terrestrial planet. Which branch do you like/enjoy learning about the most?

 ___________________________________________________________________

I never knew you liked geology and astronomy. I also love to study about the life outside our planet! I really like all the four branches but I enjoy learning about biology as my desired career is to be a doctor. I think that except of learning about our own body we must also learn about other living and non-living organisms as well. Biology is also my favorite branch because it still has some unsolved mysteries like the fungus and other micro-organisms are still not defined as living or non-living. I really want to find a conclusion to many such unsolved mysteries in life. Can you tell three different topics each in the three branches of science?

 ___________________________________________________________________

Wow! Becoming a doctor sounds very interesting! Three different topics for the 3 branches would be:

Physics - gravity, light and force

Chemistry - acids, bases and heat

Biology - plants, animals and humans

Thank you for commenting on my blog! It was really nice talking to you and learning about each other's opinions. I hope you feel the same way and you like my other blog posts too.

I am continually amazed with the direction this intervention is taking. The quality and content of these threads is far beyond what I initially hoped for. Our challenge over the next few weeks is to create a collaborative DLO (online) that will show others what a comment thread looks like and how they can create one. The purpose behind this challenge according to my focus students, is to create a learning tool that we can use to help all of our class understand that we can use blog comments to help us strengthen our connections to our learning by asking questions and sharing our thinking. 

Learning how to leave a Comment Thread...

The image below shows the first comment thread to appear in our 2020 learning journey. This has been a goal of mine since hearing the SLJ feedback that our student's post to comment ratio was very unbalanced with comments being an area that was not focused on. I felt from the outset that this was not because they were lazy or disinterested, but rather because they were not sure of how to do this. After all if you don't know, you don't know.

In my now weekly focus group meet up, I used the whiteboard to show my learners what a comment thread looked like, unpacked the process and identified the purpose. Explicit teaching, think alouds to promote co-construction opportunities and modelling of the task was very much the order of the day. 

Creating a comment thread is this week's blogging challenge. As a group we decided that a 6 comment thread would be achievable so that became the benchmark. Each person was buddied up by me so that when thinking about ability and confidence levels we created a tuakana teina relationship. To meet the challenge each pair needed to write quality blog comments on each other's blogs in order to have a learning conversation that allowed them to revisit and strengthen their connections to the learning. The choice of blog post was left up to the individual.

I look forward to seeing how this evolves and am curious as to what support my learners will need from me in order to sustain this momentum.

Midway Point Data...

Last week I met with my Inquiry group to co-construct a picture of where we are at the midway point in the year. I chose to do this as I wanted my learners to be able to make a visual connection to their progress. It was a really worthwhile exercise as my group could see at a glance where they were as far as commenting and replying to comments on their blog posts. This picture shows that replies are still very much a work in progress when compared with the amount of posts published. I have not included the blogging from the Summer Learning Journey in these totals as my inquiry was not in place when this took place. 

After analysing the data together we came up with a way forward. I wrote about this and the introduction of Student X to our group in a previous post. We decided to go ahead with the competition idea suggested at our meeting at the end of Term 2. The first challenge had two parts. Part 1 was to write one comment on each member of our group's blog. That meant six comments in total. Part 2 was to reply to each comment you received. 5/7 students met the challenge, with the other two choosing to catch up immediately after we met. 

            

With my inquiry in mind I found a great example of a quality blog comment and reply from G3 and B1. I can see from this that the learning is the focus with evidence of the content language being used to strengthen connections to the lesson the original post was based on. However, is still not the norm for all this group. After reflecting on the weekly challenge we noticed that although we had replied to comments received there were no comment chains. This then became our motivation for this week's challenge of choosing a blogging buddy and creating a comment chain on one post each. To make the numbers fair one student has chosen a buddy from outside this group. 

A change I have made to my practice this term is to actively plan time in class to drive these challenges because every team needs a coach, opportunities to train and game time to use their skills.

Capturing Student Attitudes and Understandings...

During our Level 4 lockdown I wanted to get some traction in regards to my inquiry so I began by capturing a picture of my student's attitudes and understandings linked blog commenting. What I found was that the picture I captured was quite different to the one I captured today (refer to the above DLO). There had been no face to face lead into our discussion and I could see that my inquiry group were trying to give me the responses they thought I wanted to hear. Fast forward to today and the picture looks quite different. The responses are linked to the learning and are informed (slide 3 and slide 5 of the DLO above). I believe that the student comments in the DLO above will allow me to make realistic comparisons at the end of the year.

When I captured my first picture of student voice I had initially thought of using historical blog post and comment data from their blogs, however when I looked more closely at this the numbers painted a negative picture and the disparity in numbers were too big to work with. This would not have been a great source of motivation for myself or my learners so I simply captured what was being brought to the table. This time around I used data that my learners helped me gather from their blog posts, blog comments and replies to comments in May and June. We added the data to a table which can be found on slide 7 of the DLO above. Afterwards I asked "What does this information tell us?" Their responses can be found on slide 8. 

I'm always looking for ways to continue to motivate my students so on this occasion I asked our top blogger and blog commenter (Student X) to join our discussion group as I know this group respond well to the element of competition. We talked to her about what motivates her to comment on others blogs and to reply to every comment she receives. Hearing her responses that were all linked to the learning resonated with my group. It made sense because they had all experienced the same learning. I noticed when she spoke about how having learning conversations with others by asking and answering questions linked to their blog posts, had helped her strengthen her connections to her peers (she is new to our school) and to the learning, heads were nodding. It made sense! 

Moving forward and with a bit of inspiration from Student X, we have decided to run a quality blog commenting competition within this group with extra points being given for replies and comment threads. I'm looking forward to seeing if this student derived idea can help these students become more motivated and feel more confident when creating comment threads linked to the learning on each others blogs.

TAI 2020 WFRC #8: Self Reflection...

Plan and conduct detailed inquiry into specific aspects of your current teaching that are relevant to the hypotheses you identified in the literature. Inquiring into your teaching should give you:

• Formative information about your current strengths and areas for development
• Baseline information that you can use at the end of the year to provide evidence of shifts in teaching

Use multiple tools such as self- or peer-observations, analysis of your class site, student voice.

At the last COL meeting we were asked to reflect on our practise and conduct an inquiry to reflect on the strategies we use to help our learners connect to the learning. To do this I asked my learners for feedback and asked Kiri Kirkpatrick to observe a lesson (which was recorded to allow me to analyse the dialogue). If I want my students to leave quality blog comments then I need to make sure my instruction and explanations help them understand what this looks like. 

The lesson I asked Kiri to observe was a whole class lesson. It was a follow on from the guided writing sessions taken the day before where we unpacked and learnt about the prepositions we would be using when wrote blog blurbs to accompany the art we had done. The reason I chose this particular lesson was because I wanted to look closely at the words I use to see if my instructions were explicit and able to reach the wide audience. This year the ability levels in my class are wide spread. I have instructional reading levels that range from 6.5 years to 14.5+ years so when learning content is shared the message needs to be given in a way that allows everyone to make a connection. 

Having listened to student feedback earlier in the term I realised that students find writing quality blog comments is a challenge when they are unable to determine the learning or purpose behind the blog post. To help overcome this hurdle in our class there has been a huge focus on making sure we are writing quality blog posts. Behind each blog post is a learning conversation to remind ourselves of the purpose behind the learning. We co-construct the learning intention, build a content specific vocabulary list on the board (this is also visible as scaffold on our class site. My students are encouraged to make use of rewindable learning opportunities so that there are multiple opportunities to see, hear and use the vocabulary) and together write an exemplar blurb so that those who need additional support to do this are learning with and from their peers.

The example below is a snapshot of part this process. Please note the focus here is only on the words I said and not on my student's responses as my reflection is linked specifically to my instructions. I noticed I repeat the instructions a number of times, each time changing the vocabulary I use. I tend to begin by using content specific language then unpack this by simplifying the words I use. 

Teacher: "What is our learning intention? Turn to the person next to you and tell them the answer to this question."- Students offer responses and I record them all on the board. This allows us to mix and match ideas to create the most powerfully written LI.

Teacher: "Who can remind me of the preposition words we need to try and use in our description? Talk about this in your groups." - Students offer responses and I record them on the board. As I mentioned earlier I have the exemplar list displayed on the tv screen so anyone who wants to refer to this is able to.

Teacher: "Your challenge is to include one hook to grab the reader's attention and at least three different prepositions in your description. I also want you to use two of these words 'prominent', 'reflection', ' silhouette' and 'background' as this will show me that you understand our learning from yesterday. Tell your partner what your challenge is." - Students immediately start reminding each other of the task ahead.

Teacher: "Remember we need to give our readers information about the learning so your descriptions need to written in such a way that your readers will be able to identify the different buildings. To do this we need to use the words on slide 7 that tell us the position of the buildings or landmarks. Choose one of the buildings in your cityscape and tell your partner a sentence that uses any one of the prepositions on the screen to describe where it is. See if they can identify the building you are talking about." - I broke this down by reminding my learners of the purpose behind the learning intention by saying. This was followed by a buzz of student talk that began between pairs and moved to sharing ideas with the table groups (these were mixed ability as friends sat with friends)

Teacher: "Would anyone like to share an example of how they have used a preposition? We'll try to find the building or landmark you are talking about by listening to your prepositions." - Several students confidently shared their work. I then reinforced the learning by giving my own example to tell my learners exactly what I was looking for.

Teacher: If I was using XXX's cityscape I might write something like this "The sail shaped building on the far the left of my cityscape is the Burj al Arab" which I then reworded to allow me the opportunity to repeat myself so that the students who need extra support can make a connection.

Teacher: "Remember I am looking for sentences that tell us for example that the tall building on the far the left of the picture is the Burj al Arab. Have a practise with the person sitting next to you and see if they can work out which building you are talking about" This was met with a buzz of conversation with all learners fully engaged in the task. I heard the content specific language being used, saw students looking at the exemplar slide on the tv screen to try out different prepositions and vocabulary, heard a lot of laughter and noticed most students were trying to 'stump' their partner by using more sophisticated descriptions.

With this specific example there was a balance between teacher talk and student talk but I think that I am providing too much scaffolding. I know my students who find learning a challenge want to find success and because of explicit scaffolding, they have been finding the success that is helping to break down the well established barriers they have in place. I can see here that in this dialogue I didn't allow any opportunities for my learners to seek clarity by asking questions. However I know learning conversations were happening as the follow up activity began, because this is something that happens naturally in my class as we have spent time building this into our learning culture.

Student blog posts linked to this lesson:

• Chris
• Sulia
• Fau
• Sakshi
• Lukah
• Akuhata

Going forward I need to start taking off the training wheels and remember it's ok for my learners to make mistakes as it is by making mistakes that we learn. Experience tells me that I can't approach this 'cold turkey style' as my learners who rely on this support would shy away from taking the risks that they perceive would make them lose face in front of their peers. Using the growth mindset thinking we have been exploring in our maths professional development would be a great way for me to move forward, encourage questioning and loosen my grip on the reigns. 

TAI 2020 WFRC #7: Readings to support my hypothesis...

Share three pieces of academic or professional reading and explain how they and other sources helped you form hypotheses about aspects of teaching that might contribute to current patterns of learning.

If I want my students to leave quality blog comments then I need to make sure my instruction and explanations help them understand what this looks like. 

'We tell children that a good summary includes "the most important ideas," but some children are left wondering how to tell which ideas are most important. Unfortunately, explanations are often unhelpful. Children can define the main idea, for instance, but they still cannot construct an adequate summary reflecting the important information in a text. Explaining a process is an improvement compared to simply assigning students work, but many children do not acquire useful strategies from explanations alone..... A model makes the process of understanding a domain of knowledge easier because it is a visual expression of the topic.'

Salisu and Ransom (2014) 

The Role of Modelling towards impacting quality education

If I want my students to engage in blog commenting and respond to comments left on their blogs then I need to make sure I allow time in class for them to be 

'participating actively and with understanding... and be able to see worthwhile challenge and purpose in their tasks.'

Effective Literacy Practice Y5-8

If I want my students to see the value of, and interact with feedback comments received on their own blogs then I need to help them to see the power a dialogic interaction can have on strengthening their own connections to a topic.

'Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement.... Feedback is conceptualised as information provided by an agent... and while a teacher can give corrective feedback... peers can suggest an alternative strategy.... However there must be a learning context to which feedback can be addressed... so others can use their knowledge to suggest more effective strategies whilst growing their own error detection skills.... Feedback that is not linked to the learning focus is not effective.... those searching for feedback on the mood in their story will not be looking for feedback on spelling or presentation....' 

Hattie and Timperley (2007) 

The Power of Feedback 

TAI 2020 WFRC #6: How I will use the data...

Explain how some of the data you have used to build a profile of the students’ learning will be used as baseline data at the end of the year.

By creating a Historical Data Pathway that reflects student achievement in the three main assessment areas of our cluster wide standardised testing, I have been able to form a clear picture of my target student's learning achievement for the last three years. What I found interesting here was that whilst many students have continued to progress upwards, a few seemed to peak in Year 5 but have not maintained this level. Possibly because there are disconnects between what they are being asked to do and their confidence in using their knowledge of content specific language that they bring to the challenge. The end of year data will give me the opportunity to look closely at the shifts between the two time points to see if increased opportunities to use and transfer content specific language has made an impact on student achievement. 

When I analysed the blog comments over the last 2 years I noticed that most students were not replying to comments received. I wanted to explore this further so I met with my target group on Google Meet. We had an open and honest discussion, and used this collaborative DLO to capture time point 1 student voice and establish the group's understanding of how to write a quality blog comment. I will repurpose this DLO at the end of the year to see if there have been shifts in attitude, understanding and the quality of content of their commenting skills.

TAI 2020 WFRC #5: Nature and Extent of the Student Challenge...

Share your findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge. Make sure it is clear what evidence from your inquiry supports each finding.

The challenge for my students this year is to continue to make shifts in the learning areas of Maths, Reading and Writing. My initial focus was linked to our school wide professional development of Maths, however lockdown and postponements in PD delivery has meant I have now widened my scope to include Reading and Writing as well. 

Last year as a school we noticed it was a lack of content vocabulary that seemed to limit assessed student achievement. In many cases what we observed in the classroom was not replicated at testing time. As a school we want students to see that learning used in one area can be transferred to another - linked to vocabulary, instruction and strategy, as this was not happening. End of year (2019) and beginning of year (2020) data is evidence of this as class based work and achievement results support this theory. Refer here to the historical data pathway I created to show my target student's achievement since Year 5.

I know from observations in my class, and other classes across our school, if students are asked to have a ‘learning conversation’ they will confidently carry out a conversation using content specific language and learning intentions to give their partner (or group) feedback and feed forward connected to a completed task. However across our school in the Summer Learning Journey it was highlighted that very few of our students were practising this when replying to blog comments. Often comments were met simply with a thank you, or not responded to. The evidence to support this statement is woven throughout the SLJ comments on my class blogs. I am unable to put specific links here as this would disregard anonymity and would identify these students.

Having looked closely at the blog posts and comments on my target student's blogs I noticed that learning intentions are often omitted and explanations of tasks (blurbs) are often reduced to 'Today we had to...', or 'Here is my my DLO of...'. The detailed content and purpsoe for learning is often actually missing from the initial post and has prompted questions like this one I was asked by one of my target students, 'Mrs Anderson how can I comment on the learning if I don't know what they were learning?'.

The challenge for my learners this year is to create comment threads on blogs to help strengthen their connections to the learning. I want my learners to refer to the learning intention and confidently use content specific language when giving feedback and feed forward. I want them to ask questions that provide opportunities for those receiving the comments to justify their thinking, and I want them to understand that giving and receiving blog comments is an important part of our learning. However if before that can take place I need to make sure that my learners are creating quality blog posts that clearly identify the purpose of the learning, a detailed explanation of the task and a personal statement linked to something they found interesting or where they feel they did something well.

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.