Having settled into my new classroom and gained an understanding
of my children I have noticed that there are two large areas of need that
require focus. These are their maths knowledge and their writing - a
large number of students are working below and well below the standard. I
have been thinking carefully about how I can address both of these and which
one of these is most pressing to address.
I have completed a mini inquiry around developing maths knowledge
during the time when we are doing statistics. In order to develop my own
professional knowledge around this I have read the following research amongst
others:
As a result of this mini inquiry my knowledge sessions are now
varied for the students and include a range of interactive websites that offer
explanations, teaching hot spots around certain knowledge areas, interactive
games for students, games that students are able to share in with a partner,
the development of sheets that allow students to see where their knowledge gaps
are and to choose how these can be filled using a variety of different texts
and materials and the opportunity for students to use songs and music to help
them retain their knowledge. This seems to have worked so far and is
proving successful. Within the last week of term I will retest these
students using summative assessments and be able to use evidence to confirm my
observations and formative assessments.
The inquiry that I have decided needs to be largest focus is
around writing and develop within these students knowledge around where they
are at and knowledge around what tools that they can use to help them progress
and achieve their ultimate end goal of working at/above the standard by the end
of the year so that they are ready for high school. Within my class I
have students working from between a 2a level and a 4b level with the majority
of them sitting around a 3b level. I have decided to focus this inquiry
on these students that are classed as sitting well below as they need to make
hugely accelerated progress in order to be where they need to be by the end of
the year.
Key findings that I have noticed so far from the students who are
working well below:
- Students are not planning their work
- Students are not confident editing their work
- Students are not comfortable knowing when to use basic or
complex punctuation
- Students are still developing the ability to recognise
grammatical errors
- Students do not know what they do not know, and therefore
are unsure how to improve.
The one that stands out to me the most is that these children do
not know what they do not know - they are not aware of how they can improve and
they are not aware of what their errors are. In order to help students
with this, they have been provided with requirements that have them working
towards the national standard at each sub-level of the curriculum. They
have now identified within their sub-levels the goals that they wish to work on
and we have co-constructed success criteria for these goals. The other
findings will be discussed and explicitly taught over the next term across a
range of contexts so that they can be understood and applied within a range of
contexts - however through having developed goals, students are already far
more motivated and are already noticing areas in which they can improve and are
wanting to learn.
Inquiry, curriculum integration, thematic units - these words were tossed around interchangeably when I first took up my new role at this school nearly nine weeks ago - however throughout this term we have begun to make changes around what our school curriculum looks like and how it is played out in action. This was due in part, to the leaving of both the previous principal and deputy principal within a short time period. As a result of this, lots of questioning is happening regarding the terminology that is used and what it actually represents. Through discussions and readings around inquiry and curriculum integration we have decided that as a school what we are currently doing is a thematic approach to learning, rather than true curriculum integration - and that true inquiry where it is led by the students is something quite rare within our classrooms and something that has not traditionally happened. This has aligned with the minimal focus that has been placed around student voice and student led learning that is future orientated due to other huge factors that have influenced the staff at the school. The students that I am working with came to me with quite a fixed mindset about what they could and could not achieve and it has taken eight weeks for them to begin to be at a stage where they are able to talk about their individual goals and their progressions towards these.
As year 7 and year 8 students, I think it is highly important that these students are introduced to, and confident working within, an inquiry style of learning both within the "core"/national standards subjects and all other subjects that make up the New Zealand Curriculum.
In order for me to provide my students with this opportunity I have done research over a wide variety of areas - regarding what inquiry is, best practice for student centered learning in areas such as maths, reading and writing and the benefits and challenges of true student centered learning. A lot of this has overlapped with reading that I did last year around the POGIL styled programme that I was teaching and so this has been most helpful to make comparisons with.
I know that as these students do not have a student centered learning background it is important for me to give them appropriate tools so that they are able to understand and talk about their learning in order to be able to have more guidance over the direction of it. An interesting reading that I stumbled across today The Benefits and Challenges of Student-Designed Learning talks about true inquiry learning (within a high school context) and letting students have complete control about the direction that they take with their learning and how they present their learning. It emphasises that from a student point of view, whilst it was exciting to have control over their learning at first it became difficult when they did not have any guidelines. It also discusses the importance of students having goals when directing their own learning and how this was helpful to them.
This has helped me to have confidence that I am on the right track with these students and developing them to be students who can work within an inquiry style of learning. At the moment there is both clear guidelines about what skills and knowledge they need to be developing, they are presented with a range of ways to do this which is helping to allow them freedom over the style of learning that works best for them and they are consistently setting and achieving mini goals whilst working towards their bigger goal which is allowing them to achieve success along the way.
This year I have set up a new blog for my class. Again I have done it on weebly, however I have made a new address so that it aligns with the other weebly addresses at my new school. A further reason that I have kept them separate is that I think it is lovely for students to be able to look back on and reflect on the learning that they did last year, and so I have left that one open for the students to access - which will be especially helpful for the students who are now in BYOD classrooms.
This year in addition to having the normal features of learning, sharing. go to etc I have included my planning on my weebly so that students and parents are able to access it from home. The amount of positive feedback that I have received from parents regarding this already is astounding. They have commented both directly to me and to the principal that having the planning their really opens up the conversations that they can have with their 11 or 12 years old about their learning. In their words, they have gone from receiving a grunt/very minimal reply when asking about their child's day to having a proper conversation regarding the learning rather than the doing. I have also shared google docs with the students that have all of their upcoming WALTS based on pre-assessment tasks and games/interactive websites that they know they are expected to look at before they see me for these WALTS. This has been very successful as it is allowing the conversations to be focused on the learning of the day in depth rather than staying at the lower end of Blooms Taxonomy.
With term four comes reports, and with reports comes up to date summative assessments.
As a result, summative assessments have already begun being carried out in my classroom - so far students have all sat an IKAN test and some students have completed running records. The great thing about summative assessment is it shows visible growth that students have made as they have sat the same standardised test earlier on this year. It also shows me as a teacher where I need to place more focus and which students continue to/or are starting to need specific help or extension and as a result I am able to make changes to my programme. I was especially pleased with the IKAN results of my students as it demonstrates that our math warm ups and number knowledge revision games have been effective in helping children to grow and maintain their number recall. The running record results of the students who have sat it so far have all been positive as all students have moved up a reading level and the students have all made progress in their comprehension also. The moment that inspired me the most with my running record data however was when a student took the ability to transfer her summative assessment and make it into a formative assessment for herself - she said to me - I know that I need to work on inferencing now - I am going to make that part of my self directed learning programme for the rest of the term.
However, the one thing that frustrates me is about summative assessment is that all students are required to sit the same/similar tests - and this is where assessment for learning becomes a real positive - this is no longer the case with assessment for learning.
Each child is provided with feedback and feed forward based on where they are at and the assessment becomes real for them - it becomes a tool that they can utulise - whether in the form of feedback and feedforward from me as a teacher or whether via self/peer assessment and feedback/feedforward.
When I came back on Monday of term 4 I was unsure how much of the work around success criteria influencing assessment for learning that my students would retain as Term 3 had left them all very tired and they had just had two weeks break. However, within the first block of learning time I overheard a number of students referring back to their success criteria both individually and to help others achieve their WALTs. This was a real positive for me as it showed that the work that my students had been doing on having clarity about their learning was transferring through all curriculum areas for all students - making assessment something that they then began to see as something that helped them learn rather than something that was there to judge what they had learnt.
As a school we have been focussed on ensuring that our learning intentions and success criteria are developed alongside our students in a way that enables the students to both develop ownership and achieve success. We have been working through the book 'Clarity in the Classroom' by Michael Absolum. I have really enjoyed seeing the link between university studies and working within the classroom as this is the first book that we have used at university that has linked directly into what we have been doing in the school setting.
Last term we were videoed and after that we worked alongside a mentor from the senior management team to develop ways in which we could be more successful in helping learning intentions and success criteria become more commonplace and effective within our everyday teaching. For me, this is where all of my work with POGIL originated.
Last week in staff meeting we were shown this clip by John Hattie about learning intentions and success criteria and we discussed the importance of having these in very small breakable chunks for them to be most effective for students. Below are the notes that I took during this staff meeting and presentation. Some of this was just simply a reminder however aspects of it gave me something new to think about and consider.
Learning Intentions are about what we are going to learn not
what we are going to do. Best way to
show success criteria is to model what a successful one would look like.
If you have a clear understanding of what success looks like
you are able to get rid of what matters and teach just that. If you don’t know what you want the kids to
achieve in bite sized chunks, then it is impossible for the kids to know what
they need to achieve.
If we want to develop life long learning then we should not
be the ones who are telling them they are successful – they need to be able to
self regulate it against success criteria.
Success criteria should not just be performance related –
needs to be mastery focused also – and teachers need to show the students what
mastery looks like.
Need to have a deep understanding of where each child is to
understand what success would look like for each kid – is it exactly the same
for each child – and when it is not, how can we make it so that it is something
that every child can achieve.
I have attached the link below so that you are able to watch it - I personally found the first half of it most effective.
I love the holidays for two reasons. One - they are a time of rest and relaxation after a crazy term and two - you end them feeling like you are on top of everything and ready to take on the world. And what a feeling it is!!
Every teacher - and every student - could tell you about the importance of teachers being energetic and lively and how this impacts student teaching, however I can certainly say that in the last few days of an 11 week term those words are not adjectives that I would have chosen to describe myself.
Having spent the past two days in school I feel refreshed, renewed and filled with enthusiasm about the coming term. I have changed around my planning and have been inspired to create a mini inquiry into some of my lowest students for writing - these are students who are below and not quite well below but will still need a lot of directed and individual focus to get them to where they need to be by the end of the year. My mini inquiry is based around the question: "If I work daily with my struggling writers, instead of seeing them twice a week, will this provide them with the structured guidance that they need to have moved up a sublevel by the end of term - and to also have transferred their learning across to their independent books?" Usually I mark writing books with the students when conferencing and then make notes about what to discuss with them from their follow up sessions. With this group I will be conferencing with the three of them daily in a group session but then also marking their follow up with them in the afternoon and having them hand in their independent writing books each night for me to be able to see also.
I have attached as google docs some of the planning that we have done for this term - and also my weekly timetable for the first week. I have not yet planned my Maths as the students will be doing a pretest before the lesson - also where it says POGIL this means that the students have their own sheets of activities that they work their way through - based on the focus within the teaching session and their choice of what they need to learn at that time - decided through conferences and goals.
Below are attachments that highlight what our focus will be for the first three weeks of school.
Today we had a teacher only day where we looked at the PaCT tool and made professional judgements for our students based on the mathematics and writing aspects of this tool. Whilst this tool may still be considered controversial amongst educators I personally found it to be quite a beneficial tool to use. The judgements do not take too long at all to make and I managed to get through my whole class for writing in about three hours - not too bad considering that this is the first time that we have used the tool for writing.
Tomorrow we are making our maths judgements - as I have more experience with making Math judgements against PaCT I have found that the aspects in the tool can be quite useful in helping me to plan a differentiated programme within my classroom as they expose maths in a different light to the numeracy project.
Attached is a booklet that I found extremely useful for helping to clarify what the different aspects were in reading, writing and maths when I was making my judgements.
It is week six of term two, halfway through the term, and therefore probably an appropriate time to do a formal reflection of my teacher inquiry for this term.
My teacher inquiry question was:
How can I, as the teacher of a year six class, use strategies associated with POGIL to help my students develop independence and autonomy over their learning?
When this inquiry came about I discussed with my tutor teacher the importance of having a variety of sources of evidence to show whether or not this is working and highlight areas that need to change/develop and so I endeavour to do so below. I think that it is so important to have student voice as part of a measure of how successful I am in my teacher inquiry as realistically they are the ones whose learning it is affecting - and therefore they are the best people to be able to provide evidence. At times this is formal feedback in terms of videos and PMI charts and at times this is in the format of questions that my tutor teacher asks my students when he comes to observe me. As I will be referring to student answers to these questions throughout this reflection I have listed the questions below.
What were you learning today in …
Why were you learning that?
What tools have you used to ensure you are successful?
- How blogging has provided a voice for my students
View the hyperlink above to see how blogging has given my students a voice - it has changed the class from our classroom where it is mostly teacher led to being there classroom where it is hugely student led. Be sure to read the comments - it is heart warming to see the way that they support each other, both in terms of providing positive feedback and in the way that they help each other through providing appropriate and timely feedforward. What is most amazing is the way that this feed forward and feedback has crossed from simply being an online tool and become part of how they communicate in the classroom - even my shy students are no longer hesitant to tell other students when they think they are doing well, or how they think they can improve.
- The purpose of success criteria, and how these have influenced what and how my students are learning
- Excerpts from professional discussions that I have had, both with my tutor teacher and with other teachers within what I consider to be my professional learning community
- Reflections on my planning for this style of teaching and how these have changed week to week
Success Criteria
I have hyperlinked Reading Success Criteria that students have created since the start of this term. This is entirely written in student voice with the children referring back to Sheena Cameron's reading comprehension strategy sheets when they get stuck.
I believe that success criteria tie in very closely with POGIL in terms of helping students have responsibility and ownership over their own learning. The following quote speaks volumes about this:
" If learners are to take more responsibility for their own learning, then they need to know what they are going to learn, how they will recognise when they have succeeded and what they should learn it in the first place." (An Intro to AfL, Learning Unlimited, 2004).
Between the learning intention covering the what and the why - and the self created, and peer reviewed, success criteria covering the how students are able to gain insight and control over their own learning - and this is demonstrated both in the PMI chart and the video that are hyperlinked above.
Professional Discussions
When running a programme such as POGIL in a classroom it is important to consider what deliberate acts of teaching I am still doing as a teacher. Recently we were video observed and these were some of the deliberate acts that were discussed:
My focus now is to move away from questioning as the students have the tools and the experience to do that and move towards prompting as my key form of feedback - obviously all strategies are going to need to be applied at different times.
Reflections on Planning
My planning has changed nearly every week that I have been running a POGIL based programme in my classroom. The children contribute to the changes, telling me what they like and what they do not like - and what is beneficial to their learning and what is superfluous. Based on my most recent discussions with my Tutor teacher I will be changing three things:
Writing the learning intention for the week in the format of 'We are learning to... because...' so that students can see immediately what the relevance is and therefore be able to discuss this.
Recording the way that I frame the activity and the learning so that students are able to clearly identify the difference between the two. This is where students have been getting stuck when asked the questions identified earlier - whilst my top students are able to highlight the difference without any problem some of my lower students struggle to and this is the group that I need to be specifically targeting. An example of this is recorded below:
Giving students full control about what they learn and when based on appropriate data. An example of this: We are just beginning an algebra based unit. The students have all recently completed a pretest - the level of which was determined by me from looking at data against knowledge and strategies. The pretest has each page set out in the following format:
Each skill that the children need is recorded at the bottom of the page and once we have marked each page together they select 'not yet', 'kind of' or 'got it'. The students work with other children in their skill level and determine their learning for the next five weeks. They have decided to split their data up into two categories for them to focus on when they are with me: a revise category, based on the problems that they kind of understand, and a learn category based on the problems that they do not yet understand. An example of this is recorded below
This style of planning where students have such a high level of input develops feelings of responsibility, pride in what they have already achieved and a sense of direction and ownership in what they will achieve next. Obviously I still have to make judgements based on their self directed pathways - but planning this way and letting the children access and read their data is very much personalising both the planning and their learning journey.
Overall - when I reflect on the question of "How can I, as the teacher of a year six class, use strategies associated with POGIL to help my students develop independence and autonomy over their learning?" the following things come to mind:
What I have already done and need to continue to do:
- Continue to use POGIL sheets to structure students learning
- Continue to use question sheets
- Adapt my planning to meet the needs of my students
- Use the weebly to make learning interactive and engaging for students
- Allow students to direct their own learning
What I need to do next:
- Provide students the opportunities to have a real contribution to what they are learning
- Use their weebly as a place where all students have the opportunity to view similar problems (for want of a better word) to the ones that they will be working with when they are with the teacher.
- Move away from questioning and towards prompting
- Change how I structure the learning intentions for students - especially in writing and reading.
As the children now have a live blog audience with children from other schools commenting on their learning they are wishing to demonstrate the skills and knowledge that they have in a visual format. Here is an example of their first try - feel free to pop to the weebly to see all of the comments and feedback and feedforward that they have left each other.
Up until now, our class weebly has been an interactive website run by myself that allows students to share their learning, allows parents to view what happens in our classroom and becomes a noticeboard.
Today, that all changed...
We have become a part of an Australian/New Zealand blogging group which has provided student with a real life context for which they are blogging.
The students have spent this afternoon learning how to transfer all of their learning onto the blog - whether it be text, photos, or videos that they have first had to upload to youtube and hyperlink in. The students are already seeing sharing as a key aspect of why they wish to complete their work to their best ability - so that they can share it with others and help them learn also. These children know how to use categories to search for their own work and share it with their parents. Since uploading the work this afternoon, these students have had four comments on their blogs in four hours - all providing some form of feedback. This provides students with feedback that their voices are being heard, well and truly.
As part of the NZ/Oz blogging group, the students rotate around the blogs and each class has a week where everyone focuses on commenting on that blog and sharing for that week. I look forward to seeing the spin-off effects for the children wish to continue sharing their blogging with this.
Learn, Create, Share, is one of the key ways that Manaiakalani run their programme - it underpins mostly everything that they do for both the students and their staff. One of the key benefits for Manaiakalani taking this on board is that it allows them to provide parents who aren't comfortable coming into school, usually their Maori and Pasifika parents, with a way to view their children's learning in real time. I hope for this to have a similar
I aim to run a similar programme that works alongside, and underpins, the POGIL learning that is currently occurring in my classroom. The way that they do this learn, create, share framework also allows students to assess each other and provide each other and myself with insight into their understanding of the task and their success criteria.
Take a look at the last few posts of the sharing page to see how the children are beginning to take control of their blogging...
I am currently a fourth year student at the University of Waikato studying a conjoint degree in a Bachelor of Primary Teaching and a Bachelor of Sport and Leisure Studies. I chose to study teaching as I love children and the joy and passion with which they live their lives. I find the enthusiasm that children have infectious and I love working with them to bring this enthusiasm to their learning and spread it across all aspects of their lives! Personally, a few of my favourite things include sports (gymnastics), the dramatic arts, being outdoors, the beach, and most importantly spending quality time with my family and friends. Why do I blog? I am hoping to move from being a teaching student into the role of becoming a beginning teacher next year. I have decided that the best way to keep a track of my progress, inspiration, professional learning, and gems from inside the classroom is through blogging. Through sharing reflections, insights, resources, and sparks of inspiration I hope to both learn and grow from my own experiences and allow others to also! Feedback I would love to receive any contributions that you have about what I am posting! I am a true believer in life long learning and this is one way that I can ensure that I will be continually learning about how to be an effective teacher.
