Emma's Teaching as Inquiry

  Monitoring my inquiry:  There are many ways that I plan to monitor the progress of my intervention:  As spelling, handwriting and phonics are taught in isolation, I will need to be checking the writing books to see if the learning is transferring into the independent writing. It will be good to compare with writing from the beginning of the year and middle and end.  The success criteria will be a great tool for measuring achievement. I will be able to see if they are noticing what they are including in their writing.  I will monitor the assessment capabilities of my learners by seeing if they are able to use their success criteria to identify which skills workshop they need to sign up for.  Reflection:  After some thinking and conversations with many colleagues about the success criteria, I have reconsidered how I use it... As a year ¾ team, we have developed a list of writing codes that the learners can use in their writing. The idea behind this is ...

 My colleague Rob and I ran a workshop on Reciprocal Reading in our literacy PLD this morning. It was basically a discussion with other colleagues about how they could make it work in their hub. 

 My amazing colleague Sammy and I ran a workshop at our staff literacy PLD. We wanted to share some of our learning from Murray Gadd's course and what is working for us in terms of success criteria. We had a really thought provoking conversation about what is working in different year groups across the school.  Thanks team for making us think and reflect on how we can leverage success criteria's in our writing programmes. 

As part of my research for my inquiry, I was lucky enough to go on a course with Murray Gadd. I was blown away! The course gave me so many take aways and inspired me in so many ways.  Unfortunately I cannot post all of the notes here but some of my top take aways were:  - Ways to motivate and engage ALL writers - Murray uses a lot of picture books to engage his writers. His videos are on YouTube for future reference.  - Vocabulary is a key focus area for writers. How can I give learners more opportunities to explore different verbs and adjectives? Mainly verbs.  - Effective teachers ensure that ALL writers know that they have something to say and something to write.  - All writing tasks need to be goal oriented. This means asking 'What am I going to have to be good at as a writer to do this task well?' 'What does achievement/success look like?'  - Murray talks about giving learners a success criteria that involves using looking words (words I can see on my ...

 My amazing colleague, Melissa and I ran a workshop for whānau around how to support your child at home with literacy learning. It was a huge success w and we were given loads of positive feedback from parents.  There were 3 sections to the workshop:  Reading at home  Writing at home  Spelling at home  We made the workshop interactive with a game or activity for parents to complete at the start of each section. We also had a takeaway pack filled with loads of resources including: spelling lists, reading question prompt cards, spelling games and ideas for writing at home.  Check out the slides :) 

  Restate my inquiry:  How does feedback develop assessment capable learners and cause shift in writing? Implementation:   Through this inquiry, I hope to have 3 outcomes that will lead to a shift in writing achievement:  Learners able to articulate next steps.  Learners will use a wider range of vocabulary Learners spelling and handwriting will improve  Changes i have made to my practice:  Using the writing process to scaffold the learning. The planning stage of the writing process involves a lot of build knowledge before we even get into planning. For example; we look at examples of writing and identify what makes this a good piece of writing. Organising my groups so that each group can have targeted goals. Note this is their initial writing groups - they later opt into skills workshops. Learners use their success criteria to evaluate their writing.  The learners use success criteria to identify what they have done well in their writing. They hi...

I was fortunate to facilitate a Share meeting just before we went into the latest lockdown. Myself and educators from around the country were able to connect and share strategies around writing and our learners. We had rich dialogue, lifted each other and shared resources. Thank you for joining me, I feel inspired :)