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.

Bursts and Bubbles

This afternoon the Manaiakalani COL teachers shared the impact of their 2019 Teaching as Inquiry as impact bursts in a panel setting. Here is my journey...

This year I wanted to find out if an ‘increased emphasis on reading comprehension instruction would lead to better subject achievement in reading, writing and maths’.

Having spoken to my students and analysed a summary of current and historical data, my hunch was that my target group struggled to read and interpret written questions. This meant many learning situations, and all testing situations were seen as highly stressful and overwhelming experiences.

After the Term 1 assessments my target group shared the fact that for most questions, they simply clicked on any answer. This honesty meant I did not have a true picture of their achievement as I was not actually assessing their ability to interpret, recall and use their knowledge; instead I was in reality, assessing their skills of random selection.

Deeper analysis of student data and my own observations showed none of my target group were able to respond accurately to questions that were asking them to infer. So rather than focusing on reading comprehension as a whole, I narrowed my focus to only the comprehension strategy of inference, as often it is the inferential component in written questions that cause the disconnects.

What happened for the learners:

• Engagement and agency increased through the co-construction of scaffolds and shared ownership of the learning.
• Overall confidence levels increased. Meaning these students are now asking and answering questions, and trying hard to apply new learning when working independently. Something that was not happening at the start of the year. So this is a huge change.
• The increases in student self efficacy has had a positive impact on the amount of work completed and posted on blogs. 

What evidence do I have for this:

The detailed data analysis on my blog shows most of my target group made the expected achievement shifts across the board and in some cases, accelerated shifts. These students are not at the national norms yet but now, unlike the start of the year, none of our Y7/8s are on the colour wheel, below level 2b in writing or below stage 4 in maths.

To make this happen I...

• Actively sought and embraced help from colleagues
• Personalised the language of instruction to make it explicit
• Used think alouds, learner talk and written exemplars to unpack new learning and vocabulary.
• Used the same lesson structure in all curriculum areas to help my learners to see that what we learn in one curriculum area can be transferred to another.
• Identified opportunities to practise using and reinforce connections to inference in all subjects.
• Adapted support programmes with ongoing help from Donna Ryan in literacy and maths, that include an inferential component and align with our Y7/8 content. Running these in-class has meant the students are not missing learning time in one curriculum area whilst trying to fill gaps in another.
• Made my learners and myself accountable for unfinished work.

The most important learning I made from my inquiry is that changes in teacher practice are paramount to success. If strong connections to learning are to be made, the learning must be accessible to all students. We need to be mindful of the external factors affecting our tamariki that we can not control, as we gently nudge these same students out of their comfort zones using factors we can control.

Impact Bursts 2018

Last week the Manaiakalani COL teachers shared the impact of their 2018 Teaching as Inquiry as impact bursts in a panel setting. Here is my journey...

I chose to focus my inquiry around our hardest to shift writers in Year 8. All boys who didn’t think they were good at writing, and more affronting to me, didn’t think I thought they were good at writing. Instead of taking risks and trying the new, they opted for the safety of falling back on the known, or employed the go to work avoidance techniques they had mastered over time.

What I noticed happening with my learners was the default of quiet compliance and procrastination was replaced with purposeful chat, as word knowledge and confidence needed to join in the learning conversations, evolved. The quantity of work increased, with the students writing more than they ever have before. Alongside this, the quality of the content also improved when student participation in the learning moved from passive, to active.

I know this because of the changes in attitude and demeanour - what I mean by that is, I went from looking at a group of students who slouched at the tables, avoided eye contact and utilised every strategy known to them to avoid work; to a group of students who smiled, raised their hands and confidently shared their thinking. The shifts this group made are on my blog so I would like to use this time to tell you about the student I am most proud of. He was formerly our most reluctant writer who came to us with the historical lack of self belief that continued failure brings. This year he shifted from <2B to 2B for the first time ever!  

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To make this happen I lived by the idea of 'Repetition without boring' which when unpacked, means repurposing, revisiting and tapping into the known to help access the unknown. In other words repeat, repeat, repeat, but do it in a creative way! I used the same lesson format, regardless of text type. Began each lesson by co-constructing the success criteria and revisiting the available scaffolds and exemplars created by our group. Talk was actively planned for to front-load the vocabulary needed to unpack the topic in context, and the language of instruction personalised and explicit

Moving forward I will continue to actively plan time for front-loading, time for planning and time for talk in my lessons, but most importantly, I will try really hard to make sure my learners not only think that they’re good at writing but also think I think they’re good at writing.