TAI 2020 WFRC #8: Self Reflection...
Plan and conduct detailed inquiry into specific aspects of your current teaching that are relevant to the hypotheses you identified in the literature. Inquiring into your teaching should give you:
Formative information about your current strengths and areas for development
Baseline information that you can use at the end of the year to provide evidence of shifts in teachingUse multiple tools such as self- or peer-observations, analysis of your class site, student voice.
One of the specific areas of my teaching practice I looked into was how I was conveying the learning intention to the students. How well did they receive this? Did they take it in? what evidence do I have that reflects whether or not students understood the learning?
Before purposeful intervention: The structure of my lessons went like this:
Warm up game related in some way to our learning intention
Share learning intention with the class
Watch related video together
Explain whole class task - pull out 1 group at a time to work with while the rest of the class are completing whole class task.
We normally work right up to the bell time leaving 3-4minutes to pack up at the end.
A normal maths lesson lets me see 2 groups thoroughly working through different problems from the ones set for the whole class. This is then followed by 1-1 check ups with students who are maybe off task or who I feel have not grasped the mathematical concept being learnt.
Upon reflection, and breaking down my lessons so that I could review what I was currently doing and what needed change, I realised there was no room in my maths lesson where I checked back in with students about the learning intention for that lesson. I also gave no allocated time for students to construct the task description that goes with their learning up on their blogs.
This gave me a good lead for questioning that I was able to conduct with my learning through a student survey. Students were simply expected to get their learning on their blog when they've completed the task. There was no clear understanding about which learning that was: whether it be the teacher session they had with me or the slides they completed independently. This I noted down quickly on the board as a reminder for what I needed to change, and make time for in each maths lesson.
One piece of evidence I used to collect this data were the students blogs. I am using students blog posts about maths to see the effectiveness of my purposeful change in maths program, allowing students time to create a maths blog during the maths session, co-constructing the task description with learners (and therefore revisiting the learning intention and constructing a success criteria together), and clear expectations of what maths can be posted. This can be their working out, the teacher session, how they used materials or their completed slides.
My next steps will be to get a colleague to observe me and take note on the following things:
1. The structure of the lesson
2. How many times I refer back to the learning intention
3. Opportunities for students to share their learning/thinking - whether it is in groups, working with a buddy, or on their blogs.
4. Co-construction of task description/success criteria
If you are reading this and feel there is something else that would benefit my inquiry and can be observed please leave us a comment and I'd like to include that in my observation.
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