Key changes I've made in my Inquiry

1. Summarise evidence about key changes in teaching and other factors that influence student learning.

At the start of the year, I had a few blog posts which covered the achievement challenge my focus in class fell under. This was achievement challenge #5: Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/key competency using language symbols and texts.

Initially I started looking towards a TESSOL approach in this blog post, then while analysing more the problem at hand, these were my findings in my blog posts 'Why I selected this challenge', and 'Why is it catalytic?'.

This inquiry process this year has been very useful for me and my teaching practice, making me reflect and pinpoint exactly what my deliberate acts of teaching (DATs) are before and after the chosen intervention. The 'Tools, Measures and Approaches' blog post sets out how I had planned to monitor this change in my teaching.

The following slides show the 2 main changes in my teaching practice.
1. Deep Dive sessions: Used a combination of Jannie's higher expectations and Words have power workshop and Betsy's Agility with sound workshop. This unpacked words into syllables and known word groups. It also extended into word families, root word and synonyms.
2. More fluid discussion amongst the group. (Jannie refers to it as generating dialogic conversations). This needed students to have a keen interest/buy in into the topic and some someone to have some prior knowledge about the topic.

This is my blog post about 'Collecting and Monitoring the changes in my Teaching'.

One thing worth mentioning is the change in STYLE of learning as this was a major factor to getting my target group on board and interested in wanting to learn to read in order for them to be able to read to learn. This change was bringing in the use of iPads and Explain Everything. It was a new and exciting new way to learn for the whole group. This gave them 2 days of learning and the other days were back to normal site work.

Here is evidence in the change in my planning for reading.

Here is the change in my site layout over the year to accomodate for the different style of learning, and being able to work independently from the site and not waiting for the teacher.

Words have Power - By Jannie the Tuatara

Quantities of Quality Text

Having Jannie PD sessions can sometimes be daunting because she challenges us as teachers to think critically about our practice, about our actions, words, and at times shuts down some of the things we actually think are really really good for our students. BUT what she does in return is she prompts us to critically analyse what we say and do, why, and talks about being explicit about what we say in class with our learners.

Jannie's first task was getting us to talk about capabilities: Knowledge, vocabulary, language structure, thinking and meaning making capabilities. How is this looking in our classes? This led onto the types of texts we have in class, going back to quantities of quality text. That 'text' being not just written text but also oral spoken text. From this conversation came talk about "talk accompanied books" and what kind of mileage this gets in our classrooms. Not just reading the text with your group but also talking and having discussions along the way. This way the 'uptake' from the learner would be higher.

One part I really enjoyed of Jannie's presentation was her "SAY MORE. TELL MORE DEATIL" part.

Rather than saying "that's interesting" but instead "because you added more detail, I now know what you mean".  

Jannie also spoke a lot about "optimising learning conditions" for both teachers and the learner. To consciously provide language ready for the uptake. At the same time leaners need to focus and notice.