Reflecting on my Teacher Practice

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.

How I will use the data

TAI 2020 WFRC #6: How I will use the data...

Explain how some of the data you have used to build a profile of the students’ learning will be used as baseline data at the end of the year.

In my data gathering process, the pieces of data which gave me greatest insight to student learning and behaviours around mathematics was the analysis of blog posts. Although it didn't give me precise levels in terms of data, it did leave a gap as to where all their learning for the term/year goes. The lack of blog posts followed up by the student survey as to why there were so few blogs about their maths learning revealed these things:

• Students did not feel the same expectation (flow, cycle of learning - Learn, Create, Share) that they felt in literacy. Therefore this resulted in maths work left sitting in their drive.
• Similar to this, students felt maths did not follow a certain routine everyday. Some days you had hands on learning with materials, some you worked independently on slides and some you were with the teacher a lot of the time doing group work on modelling paper. 

So how do I plan on using the data I've collected?

1. Analysing students PAT test scores will help target certain questions/areas in maths majority of students are getting wrong. 11 students from my target got less than 10 of the 41 questions in the PAT test. This can attended to looking at the common areas to focus teaching.

2. Student voice surveys keep me informed about the changes taking place and also how students feel about the learning and changes taking place. This is given anonymously so students feel more confident sharing their true feelings about maths.

3. Blog post analysis. This data has definitely been an eye opener for me as a teacher and will structure my maths program to allow time at the end to talk about and share their learning for the day/week. 

At the end of the year, it will be great to see if there is shift in the number of questions students are getting correct, therefore their scale scores and stanines will also increase. For our student voice surveys, what I'll be looking for is that students are becoming more aware of just what they are learning about in maths and also have an opinion/preference for the style of learning which will enable them to learn better. My hope is that this will come out in the student voice surveys carried out throughout the year. Blog posts should see a climb in the number of maths blog posts going up. From here, we can then focus on the quality of blog posts and the task description explaining their learning for the week.