#18 Describing and Explaining the changes/tweaks you have made in your practice along the way.

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! 

The effects of your changed practices/intervention:

The data shows shift in ALL of our target learners. Some learners are now able to participate in colour wheel levelled reading workshops and are seeing success in their reading. Other learners are feeling more confident to read independently and are showing an interest in reading. 

Explain the reflections and tweaks

Research: 

At the beginning of our inquiry, we took our time researching different structured literacy programmes. We had never seen SL in action so it was tricky for us to visualise what it could look like in our hub. We had conversations with experts such as Wendy (our amazing RTLB) who also modelled some example lessons with our target group. We had conversations with our SENCO and AP about what resources we could get for our school and which would be the best Scope and Sequence to follow. 

Once we had decided to use the Ideal Scope and Sequence, we designed an example lesson plan. 

Lesson Structure: 

We decided our lessons needed to have the following aspects: 

  • Warm up (game based - focus on rhyme and/or syllables) 
  • Speed sounds (revision) 
  • Heart words (words from the text that are not decodable) 
  • Sound focus for the week 
  • Explore the book 

This lesson structure worked well for the first few weeks of our inquiry. The learners were engaged and we were starting to see progress. 

As discussed previously, we did need to adjust the groups so that we could target the needs of all learners in the group. Smaller groups worked better and we were able to revisit specific sounds for learners who needed extra revision. 

Assessment:

Something we have thought about a lot was assessment. As we were not following a particular SL programme, we had to decide which was the best assessment tool to use. We decided to use Little Learners Love Literacy assessment. This assessment focused on beginning, middle and end sounds, rhyme and syllable. It was quite time consuming. We also continued to used Running Records to monitor progress even though the focus was not on SL. Our school also decided to collect data of Liz Kane’s Spelling test so we have been collecting this data as well. Over time and after discussions with others, we decided to try Liz Kane’s Phonological Awareness Assessment. This assessment focused on rhyme, syllables, beginning and end sounds, blending and segmenting. It was a lot quicker to administer as well as analyse than the Little Learners Love Literacy. In our most recent data collection, we recognised that many learners were getting 100% on this assessment so we wanted a way to discover any gaps in their sound knowledge so we decided to do a running record. We chose one of the Ready to Read Decodable texts that was a revision text. This was helpful in identifying sound gaps as well as fluency and comprehension.

The Learning Process: 

After recognising what worked well in terms of lessons structure, planning and assessment we reflected that we were not quite hitting the mark on our goal of ‘explicitly teaching the Learning Process thinking skills’. We had a discussion about which thinking skills would fit best with our lessons and decided to outline them onto our planning on slides so they were clear. We printed and laminated the Learning Process thinking skills so we could use them as a physical resource in lessons.





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