Anita's Teaching as Inquiry Blog

My openness to facing the challenge of reducing barriers in reading. As part of my community of learning Teaching  inquiry goal I’ve been looking into what are the barriers in reading and identify what we can do to overcome these barriers. I work in an innovative learning environment, in a hub with 86 learners and 4 teachers. 12 of the learners have been below national standards in reading. This has allowed me to work intensely with learners who are below their chronological age group throughout the year. After looking at the huge range of challenges these learners are faced with, it’s given me a sense of urgency and motivation to build their learning capacity and cognitively engage these learners so they can make an accelerated shift in their achievement. We are a 1:1 Ipad hub, so students have the opportunity to become digitally literate and drive their learning. I’ve created rich tasks that specifically work on decoding, phonological awareness and comprehension dependi...

Some great discussion around engaging our Maori Parents and whanau more to raise student achievement at our last Thursday's PLD at Stonefields School. Our hub team came up with... Having a shared morning tea, invite parents in to discuss what they see could help parents more in supporting their children.  Talk about what does currently happen, how could we continue to support you (parents)? Get to know the parents more, who they are, their background, their heritage and what is important to them. Another idea is to keep our Maori learners on a separate group in school talk as a way to communicate with parents, teacher aides and teachers to monitor the progress and make learning visible. We have regular connects with our Maori leaner parents and they respond well to these connects. We would like to continue these and now try these suggestions we have come up with.

Manaiakalani Teachers Inquire into the CoL Achievement Challenges This is the achievement Challenge I am working on this year... "Lift the achievement in reading for all students, with a particular focus on boys and Māori students (both genders) years 1-13" We have a Y1 learner who is NZ Maori this is her progress in 2017. This learner has been at school for 1 year and 6 months.  She started at Stonefields at the beginning of the year. From the graph above you can see that she has made steady progress.  She is now reading at Green .  We want her to be at Orange to meet National Standards and be 'at' her level. The goal now is to get this learner to Orange level by the end of the year 8 weeks to go!! Steps taken to make this progress Regular parent connects twice a term. The content covered in these connects... How to use the Reading Prompt Cards at home and in association with the home readers. Sharing content from reading together ...

What have I tried?                                    What was successful?                   Where to next? Ocean Phonics Student Voice: “The balancing is helping me hold my pencil and write and not get squiggly lines, I can write up and down.” “The jumping the words out because it helps me read and remember the words better.’ “Eye tracking it helps me to get to the words and concentrating and not just taking to my friends “Jumping on the words is cool, I can remember the words better.’ Noticings: Creates student agency. Next steps: How can we collect evidence through school talk, maximise progressions eg learner qualities, graduate profile, work attack skills in Reading… Learner video ea...

What have I tried?                                    What was successful?                   Where to next? Reading Together workshops Reading together blog post Had a great Parent turnout, helped to build relationships with parents too. 18 Parents came. Parent Voice “Thank you for explaining so clearly how we read with my child.’ “This has been great for me to see how take the pressure off, and have less battles at night.’ ‘Broch really hits home, now I see why my child would struggle.’ Next Steps Timely to do another one now that we have new learners and learners at a higher end now so it’s about modifying the workshop to cater for both extremes.   Core 5 and STEPS professional developmen...

What have I tried?                                    What was successful?                   Where to next? Hitting the Word attack Progressions Creating student agency through making learning choices to cover word attack strategies. Student Voice “I knew where to go and what to do when I am not with the teacher.’ “I have about 7 work attack progressions which I work on in the week.’ ‘I like taking charge in reading, I am doing really well.’ “This is fun because I can tick off what I have done.’ Noticings: Learners who find it challenging to work independently, need one on one support to maintain concentration.  This way learners are taking more control of their learning and are accountable fo...

What have I tried?                                    What was successful?                   Where to next? Learners are beginning to use the prompts now to help them with making inferences about the text. Student Voice “These bookmarks help me when I am reading. I like the learning pit one because I say to myself I feel…, and then I can say I want to feel…’ ‘When I am self aware in reading I think about what the characters could have differently.’ Learners who have moved to a strong ‘Orange’ level are more confident to use the bookmarks. Where to next? More scaffolding required with learners who are blue and green readers. Re-create a bookmark with the learning process broken up and verbs - e.g....