Inquiry focus 2024: Part 1

Sharing my inquiry focus at this point in time will be done in 2 parts. This is due to the fact that after some hard hours of delving into data as a cohort and year groups of year 7 and 8 students at PES, it has NOT supported my initial hunches or observations in class this 1st half of Term 1. That was definitely an 'interesting' and confusing find for me, but here is a break down so far.

Learning Focus: Mathematics

Why mathematics? My automatic go to for inquiry focus over the last few years have been reading. This is due to a high number of students in Year 7 and 8 reading 4+ years behind their expected reading age. Our end of year data from 2023 supported this as well as cluster and school data from Ed Potential. 

However, upon discussions with our Team 5 teachers (5 of us all teaching Y7/8 at PES - 31 students per class), the whole team were all focussing on reading for their inquiry and had agreed to feed back to our group their findings as well things they are implementing in their classes. So because of this, I have decided to switch my focus to Maths, so we could share something for Maths with the team as well.

Along with this, MPI is set to start for Manaiakalani and would support this inquiry and findings as well. 

So going along with this, we've has many discussions in our team about making use of materials in our daily teachings of maths lessons this year. This is a follow on from our PD sessions with Manaiakalani Maths facilitator - Fiona Fox at the start of the year. 

Using this as a starting point, I used my first few CoL release days to make resources so my whole team could start with resources ready to go in their classes. 

What we discovered in our team meetings, was that a lot of our students struggled with 'imaging'. They could manipulate numbers in their heads based on their basic place values knowledge, but when working with materials, and having to cover big number properties, students found this part hard to do or grasp this concept. This was a common theme across our team of teachers.

After all our PAT testing was done, I decided to collate our data and back track the same group of students from the start of 2023 to the start of 2024. Here are my findings below. It actually showed a shift to the right with a bell distribution curve looking better this start of the year in comparison to 2023.

Upon seeing this, I took my findings to our Acting Principal Toni Nua, who has helped advise me on my next steps. My next steps will be to set up an asttle test for this same group of students and see if we get the same results.