Emma's Teaching as Inquiry

  Jess- Teacher: We are learning today to use the pictures to help read our story.  *Read a PM book page - incorrectly*  Emma- Student: Mum went shopping and got some stacks bu-uns.  Teacher: Great try with that word! Can you look at the picture to help you figure out the word? What clues can you see? Student: I can see a cupcake? A croissant with jam on it?  Student: All long camy Greedy Cat. He looked in the shop bag. Go-ba, go-ba, go-blg and that was the end of that.  Teacher: What do you think will happen next in the story?  Student: Ummm… Teacher: Who is the main character in the book?  Student: What’s a ch-ar-ater?   Jess- Kia ora, my name is Jess and this is my hub mate, Emma. We have been doing a collaborative inquiry about causing shifts in reading. We were interested in finding out if our school's Learning Process and a focus on specific thinking skills through a structured literacy approach could cause a shift in reading....

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...

  Describe how you will keep a record of each of the above in a manageable way (‘cos you won’t otherwise remember all your many micro-decisions and why you made them) We will continue to add data to the above charts for each target learner. Those that are making accelerated progress will continue in Jess’s intervention group and those that are making less progress will repeat lessons with Emma.  Each week the learners complete a word work activity in their Structured Literacy books based on that weeks learning outcome. We use this as evidence of whether they can independently achieve the learning outcome. 

  Identify informal & formal ways you are monitoring the effects of your changed practices/intervention on learner outcomes.  Explain the reflections and tweaks you are making along the way (Don’t wait to the end of your inquiry cycle and find it didn’t work) We are regularly testing our target learners on their progress. We are using Running Records, spelling tests from Liz Kane’s ‘The Code and the structured literacy assessment from Little Learners Love Literacy.  Through these formal assessments and informal observations in the target interventions, we have decided to split the group into 2 where some learners will continue with the iDeal Scope and Sequence and some learners will repeat the lessons. We will continue to monitor these as we go.

  Describe how you will collect information about the implementation of your changed practices/intervention (so it is clear what you doing differently) Observe each other teaching Structured Literacy - student engagement, structured approach and how it is different to previous guided reading sessions Student voice  Feedback from whānau  Mid way check in - structured literacy data T2, Learner voice T3, Running records t2, Liz Kane spelling results  Outside person asking our learners prompting questions

  Restate your inquiry question and your theory of action/chain of events (so you keep your eyes on the prize) To what extent does explicitly teaching of the Learning Process thinking skills impact learners shifts/achievement in Reading?

  Write a reflection in which you summarise your main learning about your teaching and next steps. This will prepare you to design an intervention next time. As outlined in previous blog posts, we were able to design our intervention early on and get started with this inquiry. As discussed in the previous post, my typical guided reading sessions were not working for my target learners. We had tried a number of interventions including: - Daily sight word practise - Yolanda Soryl Phonics sessions daily - Instructional 'chunking' sessions - One on one reading mileage with teachers, teacher aides and buddy learners - Stepsweb programme Although the above interventions will mostly still continue, we have recognised that they need something else. Below are the slides that outline our initial thinking around what we want our sessions to look like. These have been tried and adapted as we have gone on each week.

  Present findings from this inquiry about your teaching. Ensure qualitative data includes rich descriptions of your teaching and quantitative data is clearly presented. In the past I have based my guided reading sessions off Schooltalk progressions. For the emergent reading levels, these progressions focus on learning sight words and stretching out sounds in words.  These lessons have worked for SOME learners, but not all. In particular not for my target learners. We have designed a new lesson structure based off the iDeal Scope and Sequence progressions as well as conversations with our amazing RTLB, Wendy and research from readings etc. These workshops happen every day and are structured around the Stonefield's Learning Process thinking skills. 

Plan and conduct detailed inquiry into specific aspects of your current teaching that are relevant to the hypotheses you identified in the literature. Inquiring into your teaching should give you: Formative information about your current strengths and areas for development Baseline information that you can use at the end of the year  to provide evidence of shifts in teaching Use multiple tools such as self- or peer-observations, analysis of your class site, student voice. We have designed a structured intervention for our target learners. We have researched multiple different Scope and Sequences and have decided to follow the iDeal Scope and Sequence. We like the way this Scope is easy to follow and has resources to go with each progression. It is also really helpful that it shows the books that are appropriate for the progression across a range of different programmes. Formative information about your current strengths and areas for development: - Teaching reading is one of my pa...