Bursts and Bubbles 2025

Today we wrapped up our inquiry journey for the year by sharing our final reflections with colleagues and the wider Manaiakalani community. Each of us had just three minutes to present - hardly enough time to capture the depth of learning, challenges, and growth we’ve experienced throughout the year!

If you were in the audience, chances are those three minutes flew by, and you might not have caught everything I shared. So, I’ve put together a more detailed version of my presentation below - a fuller reflection on what this year’s inquiry has meant, what we’ve learned, and where we’re heading next. 

There is still more to come including data analysis of pre and post evidence of student progress and learning. For now, I hope you enjoyed watching everyone's presentations. 

Accelerating Reading Progress: My 2025 Inquiry Journey

Talofa everyone,

This year my professional inquiry focused on a question that challenged and motivated me throughout:
How can we make accelerated shifts in reading for Year 7 and 8 students reading at an 8.5-year level — around three to four years behind?

The Beginning of the Journey

At the start of the year, I was looking for a framework that could guide, support, and push me to be intentional about improving reading outcomes. The Reading Practice Intensive (RPI) programme quickly became that lifeline. It offered structure, checkpoints, content, and motivation - essentially an online coach that helped me stay focused and reflective throughout the year. I’m truly grateful to Manaiakalani for this opportunity and for the RPI team’s ongoing support.

My Focus: Two Catalysts for Learning

Two catalytic aspects of learning guided my practice:

1. Think Alouds – I became very deliberate about planning what I said during reading sessions and explicitly modelling my thinking process out loud. This helped students “see” how a critical reader thinks - questioning, connecting, and inferring as they engage with a text.

2. Extended Discussions – I wanted to increase the output of academic language. Through deliberate modelling, reflective videos, and the use of text sets, students were able to draw on multiple sources of information to synthesise ideas and deepen their understanding.

Why This Became My Focus

Early on, I noticed that many students didn’t actually know how or what to think critically about during reading. My video analysis confirmed this - teacher talk dominated up to 60–70 % of “group discussions.”

Another challenge was access: lower-level readers often missed out on participating in class topics because the texts were simply too difficult. Thankfully, Gemini Gems helped bridge that gap by providing accessible reading material aligned with our topics.

Building a Rich Picture of Learning

To understand progress and needs, I drew on multiple sources of data:

• PAT results and running records to measure growth in reading levels.
• Student voice surveys and face-to-face reflections to understand perceptions and confidence.
• RPI reading surveys and video recordings to capture shifts in participation and discussion quality.
• Regular RPI checkpoints every three weeks to stay on track.

Patterns and Insights

Strengths observed:

• Genuine interest in the topics we covered.
• Positive attitudes toward the change in reading routines.
• More than half of the students receiving extra reading support outside class.

Weaknesses identified:

• Decoding and managing unfamiliar words or phrases.
• Reluctance to contribute - students often too shy to share ideas.
• Uncertainty around what it means to think critically.

Profiling My Own Teaching

Through self-analysis, I recognised my strengths in:

• Breaking complex learning into manageable steps.
• Bringing life to “think-alouds” through expression and character.
• Consistent, positive reinforcement to build confidence.

But I also realised my students would make greater progress if I developed a scaffolded, self-sufficient routine for learning. This meant:

• Embedding vocabulary and critical thinking tasks into our daily routine.
• Using follow-up sessions for consolidation, not new content.
• Maintaining a steady rhythm of learning so new strategies became habits.

Changes to My Teaching Practice

Some of the biggest shifts I made included:

• Fully implementing RPI tasks as they were released every three weeks.
• Practising wait time - being comfortable with silence while students processed and led the discussion.
• Becoming more reflective in balancing reading apprenticeship and guided reading, knowing when to lead, when to guide, and when to step back.

Key Influences and Readings

This journey was supported by incredible mentors and research, including:

• Naomi Rosedale, Kiri Kirkpatrick, Janet Lee, and Toni Nua from the RPI team.
• Rudine Sims Bishop’s concept of “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.”
• The Reading Apprenticeship model from Reading for Understanding by Schoenbach, Greenleaf, and Murphy (2012).

Impact on Student Learning

Overall, I would rate the changes as highly effective. Students began:

• Thinking critically through purposeful “think-alouds.”
• Engaging with multiple texts to make meaning.
• Using academic vocabulary more confidently.
• Sustaining richer, student-led discussions.

The evidence spoke for itself:

• A visible shift in student vs teacher talk ratios on recorded videos.
• All students made at least one year’s progress in reading age.
• Two students gained 1.5 years, and two more gained 2 years.

A more detailed analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data will follow once final testing is complete - but the growth we’ve seen already is both encouraging and deeply rewarding.

Closing Reflections

This year’s inquiry reminded me that accelerating progress isn’t about doing more - it’s about doing the right things consistently, reflectively, and with purpose.
When students can hear how we think, see themselves in the texts we read, and own the language of learning, true acceleration happens.

Fa’afetai mo le avanoa. Tofa soifua.

Inquiry Update Term 3 2025

 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. 

RPI: Sharing

 Our 9th and final session of RPI was all about sharing. More specifically, creating opportunities for students to create. It is on us as teachers to ensure students have these opportunities to share their learning to an authentic audience that has been created over their time online.

My time here has been precious as we have been gifted so much knowledge, activities and learnings we can pass on to our students and create for them. 

I can officially say I have completed the RPI course - YAY!

Memorable Gems:

Vocabulary tasks - I have thoroughly enjoyed the variety of ways vocabulary work has been pitched for our students from visual images of meanings to 3 levels of understanding for different words. This has given me so many more ideas I can set as vocabulary tasks each for my learners.

Create Tasks - Digital affordances have opened the door for endless create tasks our students could complete as a response to text. This gives the task meaning, and also gives us teachers insight to their reading abilities and comprehension of a text.

Types of Texts - Mirrors, windows and sliding doors. I still remember this session vividly as it really spoke to me to be mindful when selecting texts to ensure students are getting a variety of texts which open their minds to the wider world as well as seeing themselves reflected in the stories they read.

I could go on and on but I am just so grateful for this opportunity to take in RPI this year. I have learnt A LOT and have added so much more to my kete. Thank you to our facilitators Naomi, Kiri and Janet for encouraging us each week. Thank you!

Superhero - by Leki Jackson-Bourke

 Back in term 1our room 2 literacy class completed a whole class text called Superhero by Leki Jackson-Bourke. Our whole class loved the storyline and finding out it was actually based on true events that happened to Leki himself. This resonated with students in class and encourage them to participate in our dress up day where they got to dress up in their favourite superhero and explain what their powers were. Check out our movie we finally got around to sharing.

Causal Chain of Inquiry

 Below is my Causal Chain of Inquiry mapping out my intentions for my learners as well as myself as their kaiako. This is a visual flow chart from my planned intended outcomes to where I hope students to be by the end of my inquiry. 

RPI: Creating

Today's session was a very hands on creating day filled short, sharp and longer create tasks that can be used to help embed ideas and capture readers interest from your students. 

Dorothy took us through the pedagogy and research behind WHY create is so imperative to our teaching and student learning. We are the gatekeepers! We need to make time and intentionally provide opportunities for create in our students' learning. 

Check out my slide deck for some of our create tasks.

Slide 1 - Creative illustrator and performer - We used one of the 2 prompts provided to come up with our own take on an image that would match the text. I created mine using Gemini as it is provided for our students in their Google suite. Other apps suggested were Craiyon and Canva. 

Slide 2 - 'Tighter & looser' session - This gave us ideas on how tight or loose we made our scaffolds/templates for the student create tasks. We were provided with many ideas of the types of templates, then had to create our own based on a text we were planning to use in the up coming weeks. My text was about Lizards in the L2 School Journing - June 2024. 

Slide 3 - One shot film - We got to create a book trailer to try and sell a text to our class. I used quick time to record mine on my laptop in one of our podcasting rooms with the blue background. I then used imovie to put in the blue screen and produce my promo video for Selina Tusitala Marsh's book - Mop Head.

Kiri also took us through some great examples of longer create units that have been used throughout the different clusters. These are great examples I'd really like to get to one day - especially if I get a chance to start novels with a group of higher readers in my class. 

One thing I will be implementing next week - Will be a short create task before we read the whole text - just like we did in todays lesson. And I will also make an effort to make time for a 'tight' create task for all my groups next week.

RPI: Guided reading observations - reflections

 One part of our homework for RPI was to observe a couple of groups using one of the following tools for observation. Although I have year 7 and 8 learners, my highest reading age is 9.5 years old. So I decided to use just a scarp piece of paper to record reading strategies and behaviours shown by my different groups. Below is one of my lower level groups.

This proved very helpful as each student was able to see my feedback on their piece of paper, then take that paper away as part of their follow up activity with their support staff. This was also very useful anecdotal notes for both myself and students to see what they are doing well, when breaking up unknown words, and reminders to not skip over the simple words they already knew.

My higher level readers also got a taste of reading aloud together but at their own pace. I must admit, we spend so much time unpacking texts, and working on extended discussion, I have been expecting students to read the text independently before coming to see the teacher. So this was refreshing to see and hear students fluency, pronunciations and word attack skills still being used at a higher reading level when their main focus is reading to learn, rather than learning to read.

My hope is more check points and modelling of this as a whole class, will go well towards the overall reading fluency and improvement in reading for all students.

RPI: Day 4 - Small group reading instruction

Day 4 of RPI covered small group reading instruction. Rather than putting all my notes from today dumped here on my blog, I threw it onto ChatGPT to see if it could make sense of what I had written down and I was pleasantly surprised with its sense making of my bullet points. 

Reading Apprenticeship vs Guided Reading: What’s the Difference?

Guided reading focuses on teacher-led small group instruction with texts at the students’ instructional level. We use this time to:

• Introduce word work
• Observe reading behaviors
• Provide explicit teaching points (one at a time—less is more!)
• Scaffold understanding with targeted strategies

In contrast, reading apprenticeship—especially at the high school level—is about gradually releasing responsibility so students can read and reason independently. It’s built on Pillar 2: Rich content coverage and Pillar 3: Gradual release. This approach helps students become metacognitive readers who take risks like saying, “I didn’t understand that—can someone help me?”

Both methods have their place. The key is knowing when to lead, when to guide, and when to let students take the wheel.

Teaching Students to Think Aloud and Read Strategically

Modeling is essential. A digital modeling book with these four parts can be incredibly helpful:

• Learning Intention
• Success Criteria
• Vocabulary (co-constructed with students)
• Teaching Points (e.g., identifying main ideas, understanding author’s craft)

Use screenshots of 1–2 text pages. Model how to notice key details and then let students justify ideas with evidence. Encourage students to annotate and leave digital comments to show thinking and participation in group discussions.

Vocabulary: Set Them Up for Success

Gift your students the right vocabulary. Use word cards, displays, and multiple encounters with key terms. Vocabulary is more than definitions—it's about using, seeing, and understanding words in context.

Introduce new texts by previewing vocabulary, but leave room for student exploration. Foreshadow where needed, but trust them to engage with the text using the scaffolds you’ve provided.

Observing Readers: Less Testing, More Listening

One of the most powerful teaching tools is listening to students read aloud. Have cues in place for when individual students will read, and use a recording sheet or even Google videos for playback and reflection.

• Use running record-style observation:
• Left column: What they read correctly
• Right column: Omissions, misreads, errors that affect comprehension

Avoid bombarding them with comprehension questions. Instead, listen for fluency—expression, pace, volume, smoothness—and use that to inform your next teaching move.

Student-Led Discussion: Make It Conversational

The goal is to build purposeful, peer-to-peer conversations. Everything should go back to the text. Use the oral language strand to frame ground rules for talk, and support effective questioning—both open and probing types.

• Before sending students off to read:
• Annotate together
• Set a clear purpose for reading
• Prepare background knowledge using multi-modal materials (e.g., videos, anticipation guides)

Consolidation and Follow-Up: Revisit, Don’t Reinvent

Follow-up sessions aren’t for introducing new content. They’re for:

• Rehearsing vocabulary and strategies
• Consolidating learning
• Bringing together different perspectives
• Blogging or sharing outcomes in digital spaces

This is where students truly start to own the learning, reflecting on what they’ve read and how they’ve read it.

Overall, another great workshop session to add to our kete in class. As shared in our session by our facilitators, it's not meant as extra work but rather to add to our normal class routine so that students get used to the think alouds and follow up tasks.

Formulating my Hypothesis (Hunches) Part 1

As a Kahui Ako, we're constantly making observations and forming "hunches" about what truly helps our students achieve in the classroom. Here are my hunches I've gathered from readings and PD based around reading improvement for students at a Year 7 and 8 level.

My first hunch is this: if I model my thinking process (out loud) when reading aloud, then my students will know how they could be thinking when reading a story. It's about making the invisible work of a proficient reader visible, giving them a roadmap for their own cognitive journey through a text.

Another strong hunch I've developed is that if I provide diverse text sets, then students will be more inclined to engage with the variety of reading opportunities presented. Offering a rich buffet of genres, topics, and formats ensures there's something to pique every student's interest, making reading less of a chore and more of an exploration. This came about from the Reading Intensive Practice PD I'm currently undertaking every 3 weeks.

And finally, my third hunch: if I consistently provide opportunities for students to talk about their reading with their peers, then they'll deepen their comprehension and develop a stronger sense of reading community. When students articulate their interpretations, challenge each other's ideas, and build on one another's understanding, the text truly comes alive, and their confidence as readers soars. We've been building towards this slowly over time as we try and get some 'ground rules for talk' set for our reading discussions.

In our small groups we've been sharing our hunches with each other and also giving feedback or ideas on how we can make this practical and more succinct for our learners. I appreciated my groups practical feedback and ideas as this has helped me formulate a plan of attack going forward.  

RPI: Day 2 - Know your learners as readers

 Today's RPI covered a lot! Thankfully I have been exposed to most of this through my team leader as we had a trial implementation of mahi tracker, the task board and also the spreadsheet to help keep track of our students learning.

One of the things I was reminded of was the power of our literacy cycles we had a while back. Dorothy shared and reminded us of some of the really awesome pedagogy that took place and where Learn, Create, Share originated from. This cycle was close to what I started with some 10 years ago when I first started in Manaiakalani community.

Something I've picked up from todays session would be that despite my students being lower level readers, I still need to expose them to skills and more complex texts (and text types if they are available at a lower reading level) due to what they will face in high school. I am referring to CAA - Common Assessment Activities. It will definitely be worth my time to do some backwards mapping as explained in todays session and adapt it accordingly for my 6-9 year old readers in Years 7/8.

Learning Intentions: I completed a few of my first years of teaching unpacking and studying Michael Absolum's 'Clarity in the Classroom' text. Even after all that, I still find myself struggling at times to word LI's and Success Criteria. What I took from today was to remember to remove the content from it and focus rather on the reading behaviour/strategy you want students to learn.

One take away I'll be sharing with my team would be: Aratohu Kaiako - great spread and types of questions in the 5 categories that each test will tell us. A great guide I’d never seen before. I actually need to see more about this as I had it in my note taking but didn't link the slides.

Overall, a great day of intense learning and I will definitely be using the planning sheet to link with the Phases rather than the old learning progressions.

RPI: Reading Survey Results

 As part of getting to know our students and their attitudes in reading, we conducted a survey with questions provided by our RPI course. It delves into the thinking and attitudes of our learners in relation to what they like to read and their reading habits in and out of school.

My results weren't too surprising, and still provided great insight into reading habits outside of school, and the types of books my class likes to read. Below are some graphs to highlight some of the questions students answered. 

To give some background on my students, although we are a year 7&8 class, my highest reader is currently reading at 9.5 years old. My lowest readers are at 5.6 years and I have a big chunk (10 students) reading at 8-8.5 years. 

Here are some of my findings:

- Overall, students thought they were good at reading

- This translated to students saying they actually like reading at school (I was not expecting this)

- A high majority of students 70% do not like reading in their own time

- In terms of what their teachers think about their reading capabilities, the class was split 50/50

RPI - Day 1: Reading is core

This year I am very fortunate to join a whole lot of teachers joining the Friday RPI Cohort 3. Today was day 1.

The following are some of my reflections or things I've picked up from the day. 

Acceleration! We need our students to make more than one years progress in reading, writing and maths, in order for them to cope with the curriculum as it opens up more when transitioning into high school.

One of the things we covered today was reader profile. What is the profile of a good reader? how do we gather this? and how can we unpack or address this in order to be successful readers?

What I was reminded about, and really landed with me was the slide below about Whanaungatanga - fostering connections to learners' identities.

Todays segment on professional reading will definitely be one slide deck I will revisit to familiarise myself with more of the literature out the there in order to support my knowledge and kaupapa around reading.

A digital tool I will be making more use of will be the Canva whiteboard with sticky notes. Here is one where we shared about how we gather student data about their reading interests.

I also really liked studying the Pillars of Practice and highlighting our strengths and what we could work on. I hope to revisit this at the end of our 9 days of RPI and have made more change colour to green!

Overall, I feel like I had a bit of a head start as my whole team of 5 teachers have been through RPI and as a result we have implemented many of the tasks and extended discussion tasks we looked at today.

2023 - Term 1 Inquiry

My inquiry this year is still based around reading. I've decided to carry on my inquiry from last year as I had made a start but didn't get to carry out our plan and see it through. My target students are also in the same reading age range as last years. 

Here is my blog post from last years inquiry. 

This year I have 13 students in my target group. 2 boys are reading at 5.6 years old (Level 7 on the colour wheel). 2 are reading at 6.5 years, 2 reading at 7 years old, 5 reading at 7.5 years and 2 reading at 8 years old.  Here is what they look like compared to their ages.

My goals for Term 1 were to set group norms and class routines to ensure students knew what to do each day and to gain some consistency. Although this is my introductory post for my inquiry, being the end of term 1 I can also give a quick update that my 2 reading groups are well established with their routines during reading time. They know where to find the text for the day and where books are located. Their follow up tasks have followed similar layouts that they are able to complete most tasks without assistance, especially help with reading instructions. 

I have many wonderings and thoughts about my target students. They are a combination of second language learners, some with learning difficulties, behavioural problems over the years, as well as frequent absences and general lack of interest in learning. Despite these barriers, I still want to give these students the best opportunities to navigate their own way through reading so they feel even just a bit of confidence in preparing them for high school learning. So far, they have been very open to the types of texts given, and the follow up tasks they are completing. 

Goals for Term 2 

The start of Term start starts with Y8 camp and Y7 step up program. So actual in class learning will not start until week 2. Term 2, I hope to be able to test students 2 or 3 levels higher than where they were placed last year. I will only test them back if they fail the initial first test. 

I am also gathering some resources from past CoL inquiries and MIT teachers who have created sites and resources to address students reading in this age bracket. I have made connections with Kelsey Parrant who has given me some resources around the Purple, Gold and Silver levels to get me started. I'd also like to pair up with Danni Stone as she has a lot of gems on different ways to accelerate learning for students in Year 7 and 8. 

I am definitely looking forward to seeing more student progress in Term 2. Stay tuned.

2022 - Inquiry intro and update

 My inquiry this year started towards the end of term 2 and I'm only now getting some traction in term 3. 

Focus Question: How can I make accelerated shifts in reading for Year 7/8 students reading at 7.5-8 year old?

As a staff we have been encouraged to set 2-3 goals that are simple, measurable and achievable. Although my inquiry question is not a simple one to answer, I have decided to inquiry into this by setting 2 goals that can be measured and can be achievable. 

I have 8 students who are reading from levels 16-21. For testing they need to complete 2 PM reader tests before moving to the next reading bracket (8-8.5 readers). This is how I plan to measure the achievement towards the middle of term 4.

How do we plan on achieving this? Our first goal is to increase our reading mileage. Students in this group have at least 3+ new texts to read each week. Our second goal is to ensure this group is seen each literacy lesson by the classroom teacher. Along with teacher time, everyone in this group also gets at least one other reading intervention with others around school. These are AWS (Agility With Sounds), Reading Recovery and Steps programme. Our hope is that all these interventions, along with intentional in class teacher time, and reading mileage, this would help to accelerate our focus groups reading levels. 

Check back next term for an update.

Inquiry focus 2021

 Starting the year with provocations from Rebecca Jesson always get be excited for the teaching and learning journey for the year ahead. As part of our Manaiakalani cluster report for 2020, it was very clear what we needed to work on: Reading and Maths.

My 2020 inquiry looked at maths and helped me pick out just a few surface reasons why nearly half my class was failing in maths. Unfortunately, due to covid, we didn't get to unpack this inquiry into any deeper level of understanding due to the limited face to face time, and sharing of equipment when we did return back to school.

This year I would like to have another go at tackling reading. I inquired into reading in 2019 and this was a huge success. The difference then was that I was focussing on the very tip of the tail students, and finding ways to fill in some of the huge gaps very fast. A lot of them simply needed age appropriate texts at a lower reading level.

As CoL members, we are looking to work collaboratively to strengthen our inquiry in terms of what we are trialling and also sharing ideas with a collective rather than on our own. For this I am hoping to work with Kelsey Parrant and maybe one other member looking at students 'stuck' at the reading ages 8 - 9.5. Kelsey being in year 5/6 and my class being year 7/8. 

I look forward to our inquiry focus this year.