PD - Applying learning in my classroom

Towards the end of last term I spent half a day at a local school that work primarily with Maori and Pacifica families.  My school does not have a huge proportion of these students however nearly a third of my class have Maori backgrounds and so it is a need of mine to be able to teach these students in a way that they best learn.  I have attached a photo of notes that I took whilst observing a number of teachers in this school in action.

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Based on these observations and further reading on POGIL work I have begun to adapt my reading lessons.  

Applying POGIL to my programme, my reading lessons naturally took on a more self directed format - however these students were given a must do and a can do list - as well as evaluation sheets that they filled out every week.  The sheets look like this but usually included a can do sheet also.  

This week, we have completed two immersion lessons where the students have had the opportunity to become fully engaged with this task.  This provided opportunities to do hands on work where they were exploring the school to try and locate living and non living things within their own environment and using MRS GREN to help them determine whether or not they are living.  Armed with this knowledge the students today looked at different native animals and identified which MRS GREN life processes they had adapted to best suit their environment.  As habitats tie in closely with adaptations the students spent an hour today identifying their own habitats which they thoroughly enjoyed and which allowed them to link their lives directly to their learning.  Over the next week they will be choosing four of the six activities on the following sheet that interest them most - as well as completing activities on the blog in order to allow them to self direct their learning to their own interests but yet stay within the learning focus.  In addition to this they will also be pulled out for guided reading sessions with me about specific animals that are native to New Zealand and have had to make appropriate adaptations.

I look forward to seeing how this will engage my Maori - and non Maori learners and whether it will be more effective than the current practices that are underway in my room.