Emma's Teaching as Inquiry

Write a reflection on your own professional learning through this inquiry cycle. To what extent was the intervention successful in changing teaching?  The changes in teaching resulted in student progress and improvement. We found our target learners were no longer "worried" or “scared” to go to a reading session. They ran to their reading workshop because they had felt successful in the structured nature of the sessions. The target learners ability to gain momentum and progress was the biggest success in this intervention. They were no longer not able to feel successful in their reading sessions.  It was successful in impacting on my planning and teaching, with which we shared with our team.  Our team has now made steps to adjust our junior school programme to align better with learning contexts that are more relevant to students needs when it comes to reading ... specific reading strategies are to be applied earlier in their learning journey rather than later....

Write an overall evaluation of your intervention in terms of the causal chain you had theorised. i.e. To what extent was the intervention successful in changing factors such as teaching? To what extent were those changes in teaching effective in changing patterns of student learning? This intervention has been successful in both changing factors in teaching and improving the progress of student support learners in literacy.  Changes to learners progress:  We recognised a HUGE problem, that year 3 and 4 learners were coming into our hubs without any skills to decode unknown words. The progressions we were designing our learning from throughout the school had a focus on the following skills: Name the parts of a book (front, back, spine, title) Explain the difference, and can give examples of, a letter, a word and a sentence Look for the difference between small letters and capital letters Show where to begin reading Read from left to right, starting at the top to the bottom of a...

  Summarise evidence about key shifts in the problem of student learning. Evaluating shifts in student achievement At the beginning of the year my target group of students’ on average had an average of more than 1 year behind. This was below- well below the norm. At the end of the year my students’ on average had a score of 6-9 months behind which is still below but with accelerated shift. On average, my inquiry students gained 60 weeks of accelerated shift in 32 weeks (a year and a half of accelerated shift in 9 months) whereas students in the normal range made a “normal” 53 week progress shift. Overall I conclude that my target students’ progress was more than expected progress.

Summarise evidence about key changes in teaching and other factors that influence student learning. Evaluating shifts in teaching Aspect of teaching Evidence of teaching before intervention Evidence of teaching after intervention Judgement about how much you shifted  Explicitly model and teach them how to use specific thinking skills like ‘identify’, ‘explore’ and ‘notice’  in the learning process to break down the different elements of reading,    Video of teaching. Not using thinking skills explicitly.   Planning has changed. The slides explicitly state which thinking skills to use in each part of the SL sessions.  Use of cut up LP thinking skills so learners make connections.  I use the thinking skills intuitively in my teaching now.  Learners have more than doubled the amount they are using thinking skills to support them in their learning.  Explicitly teach literacy in a structured and consistent way through daily workshops, ST progress...

What evidence do you have about what you did differently?   We used to think that students learning was what needed to be changed; that when students did not understand, they had to read a lower level or we had to teach a lower strategy. We would continue to teach them the only way we knew how.  We had an opportunity and thought... perhaps we need to change how we  teach them...perhaps it's our own teacher practice that needs changing.  We decided that learning needed to be more engaging. We took into consideration the recent research on structured literacy and took bits and pieces of the research to create our own new programme. It was engaging and hands on. Our new programme included parts of structured literacy (phonics based approach) and repetition of key rules for reading. Learners finally experienced success in their reading!  T he effects of your changed practices/intervention: The data shows shift in ALL of our target learners. Some learners are now abl...

  What an amazing opportunity to share with kaioko from across the country! In our connect, we had teachers from Greymouth, Okete and Christchurch and it was so cool to be able to make some connections with what we are all doing in our schools with our inquiries on Structured Literacy. Top Takeaways: It was really interesting to hear which Structured Literacy programmes each school was following. Some were using The Code and Little Learners Love Literacy and others were following the Heggarty programme. Many people shared how the problems with having a consistent programme in their schools was due to lack of resources. The 3 other schools were a few years a head of us in their journey and it was great to hear that they were still having success and even more so when their entire junior school was using the same programme.  The conversations made us think about how incredible it would be to have all of the junior school following a Structured Literacy programme so when they rea...