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 depending o

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.