Bursts and Bubbles

Talofa Lava This years Bursts and Bubbles was held at Pt England school. It’s been a year filled with new changed and adapting to life on the go with 2 lockdowns and distance learning taking place of face to face teaching. The following is my script I presented during Bursts and Bubbles.

Inquiry focus:

• How can we combine ‘best practice’ approaches to cater to students 3-4 years behind in maths.
• 2 catalytic aspects of learning I targeted are:
• Co-constructing task descriptions for blog posts
• Balancing independent learning and group work through the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy as clearly evident in reading and writing, but not so evident in maths.

Why? This all came about through dialogue with the target group discussing previous maths content covered, but not being able to find it on their blogs. They shared that there is no time to blog, and no clear ‘create’ task like in reading and writing especially when we have group time.

Identified this as my focus when I noticed:

• Out of 27 students in my class, 22 were working below the standard.
• Of the 22 target group - 12 were operating Well Below standard. That is Y7/8 students working at a Late Y3 - Early Y5 level in maths.

To build a rich picture of my students learning I:

• Looked through their blogs
• Pre and post tests
• Talked to them - student voice

Sources of data & evidence used to measure progress:

• PAT scale score data
• Quality and quantity of blog posts related to maths
• Student voice surveys & face to face discussions

Main patterns of student learning identifies in the profiling phase:
Strengths:
Interested in learning more maths - hard but willing to learn
Things looking familiar even if not concrete
Students engaged. Didn’t need buyin, just explaining and showing enough to understand learning
Weaknesses:
Retention
Blogging - whole term 1 blog for maths
Understanding

Profiling my own teaching showed I had strengths in:
Group work
Providing relevant and relatable word problems
Breaking down learning

Found students would make more progress if I developed a scaffolded self-sufficient routine for learning. This required:
Providing balanced independent and group work consistently throughout week

Providing 3 levels of support for low, middle and high levelled learners.

Changes I made to my teaching were:
Time for plenary at the end of lessons
Time to blog
Providing writing frame to explain their learning
Co-constructing task descriptions with learners

Experts and literature which have helped me make these changes:
Blog posts tracking our 2 year DMIC PD
Refresher course of Manaiakalani’s Learn, create, share pedagogy
In school PD for maths

Overall - Considering the year we’ve had with distance learning, there were many adjustments along the way. Group work became mainly independent learning and 1-1 sessions with the teacher.
A few interesting facts came out of this experience too seeing the correlation between those who made shifts and those who actively participated in distance learning.

Evidence is in: Of my group of 22, after the first lockdown this went down to 20 due to class sizes and distancing students in class.
1 student = shifted 4 sub levels up
3 students = shifted 2 sub levels up
14 students = made the expected 6months progress shifting up 1 sub level
2 students = made no shift at all

So to round it off:
Of the 20 students @ start of year 8 = Below, 12 = well belowNow we have just 7 well below, 12 now below, and 1 student is now AT the expected level for their year level.