#21 Overall evaluation

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 page

  • Point to each word when I am reading

  • Use the pictures to help me read the story

  • Say what I see and see what I say

  • Get my mouth ready for the first sound
  • Rhyme words (e g car, far; look, book, cook)
These learning objectives were obviously not working. We thought … if we engage students in meaningful contexts and teach them the rules and patterns of the English code and how to read, then they will care about their reading and want to read more.  They will also feel confident and have the tools/strategies to read and we will reach our goal of gaining confidence in reading. We were right!! Once learners had developed the skills to decode words, their confidence grew and so did their love of reading.

Changes to our teaching: 

Using the Scope and Sequence, we were able to design a completely new structured literacy programme that worked for our hub. We identified the gaps that learners had a created fun and engaging lessons that were hands on. We used the Learning Process thinking skills to scaffold the learning. We have shared our planning with other junior teachers and staff within the school and have had many teachers come to observe what we are doing in our sessions. We believe we have influenced other teachers to start their structured literacy journey.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TAI post 5: My preliminary findings

Image
The results from the Combi Tool: From the Combi Tool data, we noticed that the learners are not necessarily shy and they are willing to communicate with others. However, they lack the ability to articulate elaborated responses. I am thinking about whether they are given opportunities to build on their responses? Are elaborate responses modelled or scaffolded to them regularly? We also notice that learners require prompting when responding and their responses are rarely spontaneous. This makes me wonder about the culture of the hub? Do we allow learners time to think about responses? Are they given time to share these responses regularly? What feedback is given to them about conversations? Student voice: What did you learn about today? "I learnt how to stop and sound out words.” Answers show that learners do not have the dialogue to discuss what they have been learning about. They touch on the surface of the learning but it is not specific. Reflection: Could I gi...
Read more

Empathetic Educators: Session 1 on CBT

Image
CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy)  I am stoked to be working closely with a lovely colleague; Naomi who has done loads of research around neuroscience around how the brain affects our emotions and behaviour.  Our first session was about CBT: Fear, Anxiety, trauma, behaviour that challenges us. We came away with a lot of things to think about as well as a bank of helpful resources to support learners who might be struggling with anxiety.  Naomi discussed the idea that often our thoughts and feelings are built up to be a lot greater than they really are and often we need to capture the thought and then break it down with evidence for and against that thought. From that we can hopefully create a change in the way that we are feeling.  Here is a diagram/visual that could be useful to explain this (for ourselves, as well as learners).  Reflection: As teachers, we often find ourselves worrying and over thinking constantly. Could th...
Read more

#8 How the data will be used as baseline data at the end of the year

Image
  Explain how some of the data you have used to build a profile of the students’ learning will be used as baseline data at the end of the year. As you can see in post #4,  we have collected formative assessment data from Running Records, Little Learners Love Literacy and Liz Kane's 'The Code' spelling tests to gather baseline evidence for where our target learners are sitting at the beginning of the year. We will use these assessments throughout the year and will monitor their progress. If we notice that there has been no shift in the data at the middle of this inquiry, we will revaulate.  We have also decided to monitor the wellbeing of these learners. Stonefield's has developed a Wellbeing Assessment Tool called Te Whare Tapa Wha. We will use this to monitor the wellbeing of learners at the beginning of the year and the end.  We are also able to track their wellbeing progressions through Schooltalk. Below is a snapshop of target learners wellbeing gap analysis:...
Read more