Inquiry Update Term 3 2025

 Inquiry Focus: Accelerate reading levels for students in Year 7/8 reading 3-4 years behind.

Target Group: Year 7 and 8 students reading at L24 - 8.5 (PM books)

This group is made up of 4 - year 7's and 5 - year 8's. 6 females and 3 males. There are 2 students who have additional needs and have been working hard over the years to make it to 8.5 years. The rest have really struggled to combine the unpacking or sounding out of unknown words, together with comprehending and articulating what the text is about. 

Our Mid-Year reports tested this target group using PROBE testing. This is quite different from what they are used to using the PM testing kit. This takes away the pictures, which are often used to aid in comprehension and deciphering unknown words. 

All students bar Student A passed the 9 year old PORBE test in Term 2.

The biggest changes I made to my practice was the full implementation of the RPI course I took part in this year. This was full on not only for myself, but also a big learning curve, load or pressure on my learners as well. 

However, it was the most rewarding! Students were tested, prompted, guided, and scaffolded through phases of extended discussion, critical thinking and explanations, as well as targeted vocabulary work. 

(You can check out more of what my students covered in my RPI posts)

Evidence of student learning of before and after will be covered in a follow-up post to this.

Other forms of evidence were observations from my mentor, Vosaic recordings and AI prompts to analyse the percentages of teacher vs student talk and student learning from their blogs.

Overall, RPI has been the biggest contributing factor in my inquiry focus this year. My biggest challenge was finding texts at a lower reading level, that still enabled me to challenge students through critical thinking, expose them to themes and character changes, as well as increasing their vocabulary work. Another challenge I faced was only being in class 3 days a week. This meant I had to cram in as much teacher input and explanations or discussions about texts, as I could in the first 3 days of the week. I also didn't have my regular reliever for Thursdays and Fridays. This meant my students had a different reliever every week and sometimes a different one for each day. This meant the flow of learning was not consistent and a lot of work had to wait for Monday to be revisited or checked before moving on. 

I look forward to the data crunching process next term. 

RPI: Sharing

 Our 9th and final session of RPI was all about sharing. More specifically, creating opportunities for students to create. It is on us as teachers to ensure students have these opportunities to share their learning to an authentic audience that has been created over their time online.

My time here has been precious as we have been gifted so much knowledge, activities and learnings we can pass on to our students and create for them. 

I can officially say I have completed the RPI course - YAY!

Memorable Gems:

Vocabulary tasks - I have thoroughly enjoyed the variety of ways vocabulary work has been pitched for our students from visual images of meanings to 3 levels of understanding for different words. This has given me so many more ideas I can set as vocabulary tasks each for my learners.

Create Tasks - Digital affordances have opened the door for endless create tasks our students could complete as a response to text. This gives the task meaning, and also gives us teachers insight to their reading abilities and comprehension of a text.

Types of Texts - Mirrors, windows and sliding doors. I still remember this session vividly as it really spoke to me to be mindful when selecting texts to ensure students are getting a variety of texts which open their minds to the wider world as well as seeing themselves reflected in the stories they read.

I could go on and on but I am just so grateful for this opportunity to take in RPI this year. I have learnt A LOT and have added so much more to my kete. Thank you to our facilitators Naomi, Kiri and Janet for encouraging us each week. Thank you!

Superhero - by Leki Jackson-Bourke

 Back in term 1our room 2 literacy class completed a whole class text called Superhero by Leki Jackson-Bourke. Our whole class loved the storyline and finding out it was actually based on true events that happened to Leki himself. This resonated with students in class and encourage them to participate in our dress up day where they got to dress up in their favourite superhero and explain what their powers were. Check out our movie we finally got around to sharing.

RPI: Creating

Today's session was a very hands on creating day filled short, sharp and longer create tasks that can be used to help embed ideas and capture readers interest from your students. 

Dorothy took us through the pedagogy and research behind WHY create is so imperative to our teaching and student learning. We are the gatekeepers! We need to make time and intentionally provide opportunities for create in our students' learning. 

Check out my slide deck for some of our create tasks.

Slide 1 - Creative illustrator and performer - We used one of the 2 prompts provided to come up with our own take on an image that would match the text. I created mine using Gemini as it is provided for our students in their Google suite. Other apps suggested were Craiyon and Canva. 

Slide 2 - 'Tighter & looser' session - This gave us ideas on how tight or loose we made our scaffolds/templates for the student create tasks. We were provided with many ideas of the types of templates, then had to create our own based on a text we were planning to use in the up coming weeks. My text was about Lizards in the L2 School Journing - June 2024. 

Slide 3 - One shot film - We got to create a book trailer to try and sell a text to our class. I used quick time to record mine on my laptop in one of our podcasting rooms with the blue background. I then used imovie to put in the blue screen and produce my promo video for Selina Tusitala Marsh's book - Mop Head.

Kiri also took us through some great examples of longer create units that have been used throughout the different clusters. These are great examples I'd really like to get to one day - especially if I get a chance to start novels with a group of higher readers in my class. 

One thing I will be implementing next week - Will be a short create task before we read the whole text - just like we did in todays lesson. And I will also make an effort to make time for a 'tight' create task for all my groups next week.

RPI: Day 7 - Thinking

 Today's RPI session covered 'Thinking' - more specifically Critical thinking and how we can expose, model and extract this from our learners in our classes.

Dorothy Burt started us off strong with an overview and reminder of our Cybersmart features available to all to ensure our students are being smart citizens online.

Next Naomi covered an integral part of why and how we cover reading in our session about higher order thinking.

Helping Students Think Deeply About What They Read

Good reading lessons aren’t just about reading the words — they’re about helping students think. The Effective Literacy Strategies remind us to plan for different levels of thinking: literal (what the text says), interpretative (what the text means), and evaluative (what we think about it). The deeper thinking happens when we go “above the line” — this is called higher order thinking. At this level, students are not just understanding a text, they’re analysing, evaluating, and even creating new ideas. Tools like Bloom’s Taxonomy and Solo Taxonomy help us plan these kinds of lessons, where students think more deeply and make stronger connections.

To help students understand this kind of thinking, it can help to use simple examples. We might say that learners start out like magpies — gathering interesting words and ideas from texts. But when they begin to think more deeply, they become like hawks — flying high, looking closely, and noticing things others might miss. This kind of thinking helps students realise that language has power. Authors make choices to guide how we think or feel, and readers can notice and question that. When we plan lessons that include these kinds of thinking, we help our students become smarter readers and better thinkers.

I thoroughly enjoyed our session on Perspectives and Positioning.

Kiri's session about using provocations helps students become deeper thinkers. Instead of asking easy questions, a provocation makes a strong statement that not everyone will agree with. This gets students talking, thinking, and sharing different opinions. It encourages them to explain their ideas and look more closely at what a text is really saying. This is part of building critical literacy — helping students see that language has power, and that authors can influence how we think. When we use provocations, we help students go beyond surface-level understanding and think about whose voices are being heard and what messages are being shared.

Part of our homework was to bring a text - My chosen text was Bok Choy - Paul Mason. As part of our perspectives and positioning activity we shared on Canva a provocation from our text, as well as an opportunities for students to respond - called 'create to resist' - this encouraged us to think what opportunities will learners have to make different choices as authors or creaters. Below is what I came up with for my chosen text.

Below is what I am committing to follow through with in the weeks to come. I've already started creating some of my response to text tasks here in our session today, and I look forward to implementing my extended discussions using the provocations we shared. 

End of Term 2 Update

 The end of term seemed like a distant event that would take a while to get to. But in true busy school term fashion, it has landed upon us with a bang and a rush to complete all our many mini projects and marking.

The last few weeks have been tough but rewarding at the same time. From our reports deadlines in week 6, to prepping for ERO in week 8. We had an amazing celebration of Matariki with our Dawn Service led by Matua Willis - it really was a great understanding and feeling of welcoming in the Maori New Year, Remembering our loved ones who have passed and setting new goals for the future. Check out a little snippet of our morning.

In terms of my inquiry, I'll be posting up during the holidays the running records results from the mid-year testing as well as our OTJ's that went out as part of our learners reports.

RPI: Day 5 - Planning reading for the wider programme of learning

 I really enjoyed todays sessions about reading and can finally say I have caught up homework from Day 3 and Day 4 of RPI. As I only have 3 days a week in class, I have to make sure I am super organised to try and implement or try out some of the activities and programmes we cover so that I am able to collect sufficient evidence and also students get a decent go with me in class.

Dorothy's session this morning covered the 3 click rule around our learning sites and what we need to ensure students learning is visible. I feel my team do this very well and have been doing so for a few years now. An area of improvement for our own site would be to intentional with have the following elements as shown in the slide below. 

Another part of todays session covered 'Reading Apprenticeship' - I definitely need to implement the use of this specific language so students know what is expected when they are asked to move into these groups. Reading Apprenticeship - is the metacognitive discussion on reading processes. This is for students and led by students. 

One part I really enjoyed today was in our breakout groups. My group was with Naomi and our session was called "read like writers and write like readers". This was great fun and she's modelled it just like how we could for our students. This reminded me of some PD we did some 10+ years ago called 'Reading - writing links' by Rebecca Jesson and she called it "cameo texts". I really enjoyed this session because as Naomi shared, it definitely beats trying to get 2 alliterations or 'make sure you use at least one simile'. But rather students have an extract of text which models exactly what you would like your students to replicate. The hardest part for me in creating this would be creating the scaffolded part especially when you want to use more than one text.

Having us teachers model and try out some "Think Alouds" today was very useful as without the practice and monitoring from our facilitators we probably wouldn't be doing this justice or even doing it wrong. 

I will also aim to have a better go at collecting text sets from EPIC to help with reading in class. Overall another super useful session and I look forward to using some think alouds in class.