Emma's Teaching as Inquiry

  Which  Achievement Challenge are you considering as an area of focus in 2022 and why? Include in your WHY both evidence and your own passion/expertise   Achievement challenge 5.  32% of our learners at Stonefields School on the Student Support register.  literacy interventions with a group of student support learners across year 3 and 4.  strength in building positive relationships with learners and whānau  seeing these learners make progress (even small steps) and igniting the spark for learning has been so rewarding.  I really want to know more about how to best support these learners.  I have observed that many learners who are coming into year 3 have low oral language, they have little knowledge about phonics and how to read chunks in words and therefore do not have the confidence or ability to write.    What learnings from the 2017 - 2021 CoL teacher inquiries have informed or inspired your thinking?   it has been insp...

This year my inquiry focus was: ‘How does feedback develop assessment capable learners and cause shift in writing?’  At the beginning of this inquiry I gathered learner and whānau voices about what they believed to be the barriers in writing. From this, I discovered that the learners did not understand their next steps. Whānau were concerned about spelling and handwriting and a lack of enthusiasm for writing. I looked at Schooltalk gap analysis, e-asTTle results and guided writing sessions to identify that the areas with the most gaps were vocabulary, sentence structure, spelling, writing legibility and punctuation.  My initial hunch was that if I offered regular opportunities for feedback from peers, whānau and teachers, they would become more assessment capable. To begin with, I created success criterias based on the genre of writing we were exploring. After attending Murray Gadd’s course ‘What makes a great writing programme’, I made some key changes. We moved away from ha...