Update on last target student being tested

I felt it was necessary to write a separate blog post to update my last target student who was tested.

Originally, despite student FM being low academically, he still didn't qualify for much funding in terms of in class support as he was absent 50% of the schooling year. In Term 2, we had serious talks with other agencies and the family for a plan of wrap around support to ensure FM and siblings attend school more often. This started a new path for FM and we were also able to apply for some funding to support his learning in class.

Unfortunately, he has started to miss days again towards the end of this term hence why he missed the first round of testing with his group. Here is some data as his test results are not quite straight forward.

I tested him first on level 11 and he read well enough, but stumbled on some easy words (HFW) but showed he was able to pronounce chunks of an unknown word. The comprehension questions he did really well in and was quite confident with his answers. Because of this we decided to try level 12. This was definitely a lot hard, decoding wise, and it took a while to get through the whole text. Despite this, he still managed to get all comprehension questions correct. I decided to end the testing there and analyse the data. I discovered he got 95% accuracy rate for level 12 which puts him at instructional level, not independent. So I went back and analysed level 11 accuracy rate and discovered that was also 95%. So because of this, I've decided to bring FM back to level 11, so that he can work on his fluency and decoding skills.

Another point to note is, due to FM being absent on the groups testing day, he also missed out on the pre-test prep talk that I try and take the group through in terms of what to expect and remind them of some of the reading strategies we've been working on in class. I didn't have time during class to take FM through this same process and so his testing started without this support/reminder.

                      

End of Term 3 Update

As Term 3 comes to an end, I feel like I have lost a bit of my focus and traction with my target group and the goals we had set at the start of the term. I will be using the holiday break to review where I am in my inquiry and how best to go forward into such a busy Term 4 and still make the most of it for my group of learners.

What I can report on are the testing behaviours and results for their running records for the end of this term. Here are the levels or reading ages from the end of 2018 to now.

I have shown these shifts to each individual in my target group and I don't think they truely understood the enormity of their success until I showed their progress from the last 3 years where they hardly made any shift at all. Once this sunk in, they were absolutely excited and ready to take another test now! We talked about what this means for them, what they can now do and couldn't do before, and we also covered what they need to work on individually in order to keep doing better in the next test. My next task is to set them up to take PAT tests to the best of their ability.

One of my hypotheses I was keeping track of throughout the year is being test ready. I covered this briefly in my End of Term 2 update. My actual notes during testing look like this on the right -->

But a more cohesive version of notes for their behaviours and actions during testing are below. Although I had 1student missing from this testing, I do hope to catch him before the end of the term of early in week 1 next term.

Additional information: I've shared this post with my school-wide inquiry group as well as my Team 5 group of teachers. They have helped me by adding notes and comments to students behaviours outside my class and what they are like with them. Here I am reminded that some students have other needs. An example is student AT, who actually needs to ensure he is taking his meds for ADHD as his behaviour shows he is not. His home class teacher has also given extra information that may help me better cater for him next term.

Digital Fluency Intensive #4

Todays focus was collaborating around google sites. What a task they set for us today. It was definitely great to be able to start a site from scratch over and over again so we go used to where things were and how to line things up so it looked neat and tidy.

Here is a link to my multimodal site - Idenity.

A lot of the information or linking of texts was taken from Angela Moala's multimodal spreadsheet which is a collection of texts which make up a multi textual series of learning. The only things I had to create were the learning tasks that linked up the different texts.

Dorothy also went through some of Woolf Fishers research about T shaped literacy which our team of teachers in Year 7 & 8 have been looking at over the last couple of years. This is taking students through a literacy lesson that is both deep and wide. This is ensuring you as a teacher are diving deeply into a main text with your group of students, but also providing opportunities for them to work independently on activities with a variety of other texts/videos. This was the purpose of us creating a multimodal site.

One take away I will definitely remember to keep in mind for the rest of my planning, is to ensure I provide opportunities to empower students through free choice of texts to read. This is also added on at the end of my site.

I would love to keep creating multimodal sites like this for my teams inquiry studies or even during units of learning in literacy.
Thank you DFI for another workshop filled with useful knowledge and tools to use daily.

Monitoring Micro-Shifts

To recap what my inquiry is focussing on this year, here is the challenge I am covering.

Kahui Ako Achievement Challenge 5: Improve the achievement of students with special needs in the learning areas of English/ key competency using symbols, languages and texts.

My inquiry problem/ challenge: Students who are 'stuck' in their learning 2-3 years behind where they should be at for Year 7 and 8 getting ready for College.

One of the biggest positives to come out of this are the big shifts my focus group is making in their running records testing. This is covered in my End of Term 2 Blog Post.

One thing I need to do a better job at keeping track of, are the micro-shifts students are making from week to week. These are things that might not show up during testing time, but show progress from what they couldn't do before, to what they can do now. 

An example of this came from the analysis of their running records. The words students were getting wrong showed their reading behaviours at only looking at the initial sound (or 1st letter) and the ending. Then students started guessing whatever words they know which started and ended that way. This showed students were not looking at the middle letters/sounds and not even attempting it. Instead they looked first to the pictures or the ceiling to try and find words.

One way I thought to try and cater to this problem was Besty Sewell's 'Agility with Sound' program. I had first observed this style in action at the start of Term 2 with Helen Squires but haven't done much with it until I attended a seminar of Betsy's earlier on this Term. 

I decided to try this out on the boys in my focus group who had only made 1 level shift during the mid year testing. From this, I was trying to find who can hear the middle sounds and who can identify and retain sounds in their heads long enough to record down. Here are a few examples and observation notes of my session with them.

               

Digital Fluency Intensive #3

Our 3rd DFI day I missed out on due to being on leave. Upon reading up on the agenda for the day, I was quite guttered that I'd missed out on it as my students and I quite enjoy creating on google slides and drawings.

Here is my attempt at one of the tasks on google drawings. I've also added this as a button on the left hand side of my blog.

What I really enjoyed and find useful is the Google drawings sandpit with links to examples of it's many uses which gave me new and fresh ideas I hadn't used before. 

One thing I do need to go back and double check are the settings on youtube and organising my playlist to suit my class and their use of youtube.

Digital Fluency Intensive #2

Day 2 of our DFI course brought more learning about our Manaiakalani Kaupapa as well as exposing us to areas of the GSuite we have yet to use.

One of my takeaways from the AKO section of the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy was RATE. Recognise, Amplify, Turbocharge, Effective Teaching. This led me to a very useful blog post from one of my team members which triggered all the learning that took place in one of our Learn staff meetings at the start of the year. Here is a link to Kiriwai's blog post.

One of my biggest takeaways was from our deep diving session about Google KEEP.
Normally during a DFI session, I would make quick notes on my phone using Samsung notes so I could remember the things I needed to go back and have a look at and the most useful things for me and my class to start using. With google keep, I can use this on anything google on my laptop as well as on my phone and it would update immediately. Here's a list of all the things google keep can do which include: can take photos, shopping list, can draw, can get notes or comments shared across team and plug then in along docs and so much more. The best and most useful part of google keep which I will definitely be using in my class is the fact that it can grab text from an image! I could take a photo of a piece of text from a book and using google keep, extract the text from the photo and have students use this in docs for students to highlight and write notes/comments next to it.

Something that I could use with my team this coming holidays would be our session on google hangouts. This enabled us to talk to each other in a group setting and screen sharing. We combined this with quicktime player to record our google hangout. We trialled this in small groups of 3 so here is a short video of myself sharing with Jenny and Elena.