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.
