TAI 2020 WFRC Question #2...

#2... Collaborate with your senior leadership team and colleagues to identify areas where your inquiry will make a powerful contribution to wider school and cluster goals.

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. The Summer Learning Journey (SLJ) is a blogging challenge that runs over the summer holidays. This programme 'was created in response to concerns about the annual drop, slide or slump in literacy achievement experienced by students in New Zealand schools' and encourages our students to use their literacy skills which helps set them up for success and by maintaining the gains made over the school 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. 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.

Term 2 evidence and data update (links to WRFC #1,2 and 5)...

In Term 1 I collected the data and evidence I needed to give me my baseline data that reflected both academic achievement and self efficacy levels. At the end of Term 2 I carried out a similar process with my reading and maths data which met the requirements of our school-wide standardised testing cycle. This data collection gave me an insight to the data shifts (or not) in reading ages and maths strategy use. As we do not test strategy levels in Term 1 I used the historical data gathered in Term 4, 2018.

Link to Google Draw

This paints a very positive picture in both learning areas. When looking at reading ages I can see that 3/5 of my Year 8 students have made shift. 2/5 show a shift of 6 months which aligns with time at school this year and 1/5 has made a 12 month shift. 2/5 remained at the same level. Student G1 panics during any assessment situation and tends to overthink her responses which leads to disconnects, and B3 has a pattern of irregular attendance which results in disconnects that affect his confidence in his own ability. 

When looking at the Year 7 data I am really excited as 3/4 students are showing shift, with 1 student moving off the colour wheel and onto the Probe tests. The really exciting part was she asked me if she could do the same test as her friends, so we tried, and it was a success! Our discussion after was a celebration of the strategies she knew how to use to make sense of the story without looking at any pictures. This was such a boost to her self efficacy as she now sees herself as just like everyone else and not someone who needs help. In reality she still needs teacher or teacher aid support but she is now much more willing to embrace and try new learning. 1/5 show a shift of 6 months which aligns with time at school this year and 1/5 has made a 12 month shift. Ironically the student with the 12 month shift tells me on a regular basis 'reading is not her thing' but she is also the student who in our term evaluation, identified as reading at home.

When looking at the collective maths data 8/9 students have made shift with 1/9 remaining at the same strategy stage they were at in 2018. This student also has an irregular attendance pattern and is often late, meaning his disconnects to the learning are increasing. 

Link to Google Draw

Why is there shift in these two snapshots of data? Possibly because I know I'm paying more attention to asking my learners during our maths and reading lessons to tell me 'how they know', 'where they found' or 'how they got their answers'. I encourage the use of content vocabulary and make a point of identifying the comprehension strategies that could be used. In both learning areas my learners know they need to be prepared to show me the evidence they used to support their thinking. My focus students tend to shy away from sharing their thinking in front of others so I move around the room asking them in a 1:1 situation. Collaboration and talk, or learning conversations as we call them, continue to play a huge part in all learning situations as it provides the scaffold that these students need to help them continue to take risks.

Link to Google Draw

When I look at my previous summary of what I notice during learning time I can see that many of my initial observations have become my current observations. There are however a few significant changes. Conversation levels are now much louder as a much higher percentage of students are actively engaging in the conversations and only two of my focus group fall back on the known coping strategy of waiting for reassurance before beginning work when the learning is new. My next step is to analyse the similarities and differences between the time 1/time 2 self efficacy responses. At a quick glance I can see that responses in the Term 2 evaluation are more detailed and specific than Term 1's responses. What is interesting is that my class are given free rein when it comes to telling me what they feel they have improved in, and I can see that in both terms maths and reading remain in the forefront.