Vocabulary Building Needs?

My Home Class Data is above, although we cross group for Reading. 

I have looked at the STAR data as well as my own observations of both my group teaching and one on one reading time with my students, and see Vocabulary as being a key gap to support students in their learning. 

I have noticed that depending on the subject matter, genre and text type, the children's understanding of the vocabulary in their texts at their regular reading level can really fall down. 

At our staff meeting after school yesterday, Mrs Nua recommended some school holiday reading of Dr Jannie Van Hees book "What Every Primary School Teacher Should Know About Vocabulary". So I am hoping to draw some inspiration from these pages, for a clearer direction moving forward in Term 2.

Reflecting on my second CoL Meeting

We met this afternoon at school to talk about our Inquiries with each other and reflect on our thoughts thus far. We did an activity called 'The Last Word' in which we dug deep into an article around changing teaching practices to affect student achievement outcomes. 

I chose the following quotes, which resonated with me:

* Using a broad range of data is recommended, including data from assessments, observation of students in class, homework and ‘student voice’ (e.g., student questionnaires).

* the literature indicates that focusing primarily on achievement information, such as on national standards or high-stakes assessment, has failed to improve students’ literacy achievement (and by implication, failed to improve teachers’ practices),

* it is not always evident what teaching practices to change given the student achievement patterns.

* to comprehend written text, a reader needs to be able to decode accurately and fluently and to have a wide and appropriate vocabulary, appropriate and expanding topic and world knowledge, active comprehension strategies and active monitoring and fix-up strategies. In addition, the poor score could be due to student self-efficacy and more general motivation and engagement (Wang and Guthrie 2004). It could be one or several of these issues that is the cause of the poor score, and teachers need to know how to put together a teaching programme that can address these issues.

* connecting achievement patterns to teaching patterns is essential if teachers are to draw the appropriate inferences from the achievement information to develop more effective teaching practices.

* solving the ill-structured problem of linking teaching practices to student

achievement is an iterative process of repeated cycles of developing, testing and

revising hypotheses about what combinations of instructional events best address students’ learning needs (Robinson 1993). This requires openness in rethinking and revising initial hypotheses of teaching practices, where ambiguity is tolerated and judgment reserved until there is more evidence to gain clarity about the hypotheses.

I feel these quotes really do highlight the complexity of teaching. Particularly in knowing which parts of your practice to change, without in turn creating the potential for negative change and learning opportunities being lost. 

The red quote is of particular interest to me as I formulate my approach to implementing change in my Reading teaching. There are key words within that quote that I feel are going to become fundamental to my practice - 'fluently', 'vocabulary' 'expanding ... knowledge', 'active monitoring', 'motivation and engagement'. How can I focus on all these fundamental elements without making my focus question and inquiry too complex?

Thoughts on my Inquiry

 I met with Mrs Wilson (our specialist reading teacher) today to talk about my ideas for my Inquiry and see if she could recommend any Readings or research for me.

She looked at the activities that I have planned for my groups and we chatted about extending my turquoise+ readers, with the goal of them becoming silver+, through a rich focus on building comprehension. 

I’m going to look at ways I can track their task completion, through to blogging of their work. I’m thinking I could assess this group of learners through a basic rubric model, as well as giving them the chance to self-assess. We talked about using the empty (open-plan) classroom space. I could send them in there to voice record and put wall displays up such as mind maps for them to refer back to. Using concrete as well as digital resources.

I am going to refer to Sheena Cameron & Louise Dempsey’s resource ‘The Reading Book’, with a focus on comprehension and rich tasks to extend learners and enrich their vocabulary and critical thinking.

I need to figure out some sort of observation tool to look at how much dialogue we are having in our reading groups as I want to focus on this to inform my planning.

How am I going to track their progress?

I am also going to go through previous CoL teachers blogs who have looked at similar subjects and see if that can spark further ideas.

Notes from ‘The Reading Book’:

‘A bank of researched reading comprehension strategies supports students with comprehension.’

• Activating Prior-Knowldge

• Self-Monitoring

• Predicting

• Making Connections

• Questioning

• Inferring

• Visualising

• Summarising

• Synthesising

Reading a range of texts. Reading with expression. Making time for reading to?!!!

How can I make sure I am purposefully teaching and assessing these things?

Critical Thinking:

Levelled Goals for Guided Reading Groups:

Looking particularly at moving from Gold to Silver:

2024 and a focus on Reading

 I am back to work after a year on maternity leave with my beautiful twin girls, and I am looking forward to a change of pace, stepping back from my Team Leader role and focussing more on the learners in front of me in my own class. 

 I have spoken to the leadership team in my school about where our needs are, and I am keen to inquire into the reading needs of my learners this year. It is only 3 weeks into the term and already I am excited by the opportunity to increase discussion, engagement and comprehension of reading texts from within my class. 

Language is the key to all learning. Without language we can't think, formulate and hypothesise. I feel this is the best lens through which to increase student achievement by 1.5 years across all three Rs - which is a cluster goal for 2024.

The focus for Term 1 is Identifying and profiling (no solutions yet). 

* Identifying - valued learning outcomes which include but are not limited to achievement outcomes.

* Profiling -  Investigate the nature of the students’ strengths and gaps in relation to valued learning outcomes in detail.

I am going to take this term to gather the data and observations necessary to inform my Inquiry question for 2024. Watch this space!

2022 Inquiry: What is my question?

In our staff meeting today, we talked about the challenges we are facing in our current learning environment, as well as the goals we have for our learners' futures.

We found there was a clear theme of 'connectedness' emerging as our direction in 2022. 

This leads me to a question: 

How can I build and encourage relationships in my class? 

This question encompasses peer to peer friendships, class working-relationships and a sense of belonging within the wider school community.

Hopefully by focussing on building a strong foundation of relationships within the class, learning habits and task completion, (culminating in achievement progress,) will naturally occur.

Update on my Inquiry...

I have met with my group today and discussed how my Inquiry is going for this point in the year. 

I found Term 2 a very distracting term that did not allow me as much of a chance to focus on my Maths programme as I would have liked, due to having a Student Teacher in for five weeks (I wanted to keep things consistent for her sake and didn’t change things up too much). I also had the distraction of being asked to contribute my ideas and thoughts to the new Sunshine Decodables programme, that was in the process of being put online. - This culminated in me going into the Sunshine offices in the last school holidays to record some videos of how I have been using this programme in my own classroom practice. You can view these here.

Back to my original goal of improving my Maths teaching and the children’s learning, I am excited by some changes I have recently implemented in my programme. Trying to motivate the children to stay on task, I have discovered some very useful and engaging resources as part of the Teacher Support Material, available through MathSeeds (which I trialled through my Reading Eggs membership). These are aligning nicely with my teacher-led lessons from the NZC books we are using in our school. 

I have seen some pleasing improvement (which I largely put down to our regular use of XtraMath in the classroom) in mid-year testing with many Stage 2-3 students achieving Stage 4 in Additive Thinking in their JAM tests. 

This leads to where  I am focussing for the second half of the year - improving knowledge and ability in Multiplicative Thinking and Fractions. I look forward to working closely with my colleague Sonali Carter, to plan and implement engaging lessons that achieve measurable shift in these areas. 

My Professional Teaching Inquiry for 2021!

As stated in my final blog post of 2020, I am keen to focus on my Maths programme in 2021. 

My focus question is: How can I use purposeful teaching of mathematical language to raise the achievement of my learners in Mathematics? 

I am interested in how best to incorporate the professional learning we have had in Mathematics through the DMiC PLD over the last two years, with the more prescriptive approach through using the NZC Mathematics Books as a resource throughout the school this year. I would like to try to balance the two approaches, so as to ensure full and appropriate curriculum coverage while still giving children the rich discussion and problem solving approach. 

Looking at my Y3s PAT results, we can see our Y2s from 2020 did not retain enough number knowledge, particularly in place value and basic facts. Applying this knowledge to word problems and understanding the language used is also another big problem. I am mindful of mixing up my use of mathematical terms to ensure understanding of all terms that the children may come across. Eg. spelling out that the total number means to count all. I also think ‘language’ can incorporate visuals / resources that children need to be familiar with (eg. place value blocks) and will be mindful of using an appropriate variety throughout the course of the year. 

Working with Sonali Carter we are going to try planning together, using the NZC books as well as our own experience to push number knowledge retention, basic facts and teach our children explicitly how to apply this knowledge in various word problem situations. 

 I am going to investigate both the physical NZCM texts to understand how they break down the Mathematics Curriculum at my level, as well as the online resource material provided. I am going to rewrite appropriate problems to encourage discussion and authentic understanding with my own students. 

 I am using XtraMaths for the first time with my class this year. I am finding this a great way to encourage the knowledge base growth that is needed by my students to begin to tackle word problems with more understanding. 

 I am stepping my class through learning progressions more deliberately than I have before to ensure there is a good coverage of the basics - such as making 5, 10, doubles, halves and families of facts.