Teacher Only Day - CREATE!

 We had an action packed Teacher Only Day at Panmure Bridge School today.

I really enjoyed the talk from Dr Craig Hansen and all the websites he suggested in which AI can make the life of a teacher easier! TeachAid in particular caught my interest.

Next it was time for my session with Toreka Tele'a, from Panmure Bridge. I really enjoyed the ideas she provoked with her workshop on using the AI platform Craiyon to inspire rich, detailed setting descriptions. Here is an example of my work:

I then presented my own Workshop on Animating in Explain Everything. I have inserted my Slide Deck below:

My Causal Chain!

 Here is my best effort at putting my thoughts into an action plan. 

"Any intervention you design will (consciously or not) be based on a causal chain you have in mind - this is your theory of action."

CoL PLG - 30th May

I enjoyed talking with my colleagues at today's CoL PLG.

We have a cluster Teacher Only Day coming up tomorrow, and it will be interesting to see what insights I glean about the use of AI in education. I am also presenting a Create workshop and look forward to Toreka Tele'a's presentation on using Craiyon as a means to enrich setting descriptions in Writing.

Today, we shared about our research and hypothesises in groups. There was a lot of agreement as to the challenges we face and the overarching themes of our goals. So much keeps coming back to vocabulary enrichment to aid understanding and engagement. 

Fiona talked to us about the Causal Chain and gave us this task for our blog post:

"Causal Chain - Why is thinking about a causal chain important before you design your intervention? The purpose is to tighten up your intervention and to understand more deeply what you did that resulted in a shift in student achievement."

I like the template that was linked into our Slide Deck. An example of a Causal Chain from Karen. I am going to make my own based on her template structure as a way of organising my thoughts more clearly.

Here is what Karen's looks like (stay tuned for mine on my next blog post):

Where to next? My plan in a nutshell.

 My plan going forward is to plan vocabulary rich lessons with creative independent learning tasks that I ensure get completed to a high standard and published on the students' blogs.

I am going to track the consistency of task completion across my priority learners and assess the quality of their work.

I am going to choose a task mid term with the opportunity for children to showcase their vocabulary and put their work through the online tool:  https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/kids/. Then I will compare their vocabulary to their end of term task, using the same tool. I plan on doing this twice a term throughout the year.

I will also be doing Running Records on all of my Reading class ahead of report writing, which I am looking forward to assessing.

There will also be a STAR Reading Assessment at the end of the year, which will enable me to see their progress from February to November.

Academic and Professional Reading

Share three pieces of academic or professional reading and explain how they and other sources helped you form hypotheses about aspects of teaching that might contribute to current patterns of learning.

I enjoyed reading Jannie's chapter on Word Consciousness. This is a wonderful goal for how a classroom should operate:

"Imagine a classroom where learners are excited about meeting new words, where they bring words they have met outside class to explain to their classmated, where they immediately look at breaking an unfamiliar word into parts and connecting it with other realted words they know, where they know where to go to find out what a word means, and where the teacher has the goal of developing learners' word consciousness."

I have also been reading Sheena Cameron & Lousie Dempsey's The Reading Book. This has been a great resource for looking at ways in which to teach and increase students' comprehension.

On Engagement and Motivation (which I feel links well to the ability for children to complete their learning tasks) I have enjoyed reading these articles from The Education Hub.

https://theeducationhub.org.nz/an-introduction-to-engagement-in-educational-settings/:

https://theeducationhub.org.nz/motivation/

This morning I had a discussion with my Deputy Principal, Toni Nua. She shared a rubric with me that I believe she said Jannie van Hees supplied it her. We talked about the importance of children being able to explain a new word to their peers using their own bank of known words, and how it is a powerful and confidence boosting skill.

Hypotheses

 My hypotheses are a work in progress.

I have enjoyed the conversations I have had so far with my fellow CoL teachers and peers at school. Here is what I have so far:

Goals for Term 2

 This term I am enjoying the opportunity to integrate our school's Drama Inquiry 'Transformers' into my Reading Class through exposure to poetry and play performances. So far, I am seeing an improvement in engagement from all my learners in my Gold-Silver groups. I haven't yet taught poetry and plays to my Yellow groups, but look forward to including them more in this, as the term progresses.

I have been formulating hypotheses for my Inquiry and need to look at how I will be able to measure the progress that children will be making this year. Obviously there are the traditional tools of Running Record tests - which we usually do in June and November. These will add to the picture. I am also looking at how usage of Reading Eggspress and Sunshine Online can assist in my data collection. There are also the STAR tests from February to compare at the end of the year - particularly in the area of vocabulary.

So, what am I going to do in Term 2? What is my hunch/hypothesis?

Independent completion of tasks was very hit and miss in Term 1. I have collected the following data on how many tasks were uploaded to their Google Drives, how many were blogged and then I have rated their task completion on a scale of 0-3. 0 - being incomplete, 1 - somewhat complete, 2 - complete to the minimum standard showing no complexity of thinking and 3 - complete to a high standard. I am hoping to collate this data at the end of each term. I will be striving for all children to complete the majority of tasks to a high standard as one of my hypotheses is: "If I ensure the children complete their tasks to a blog post worthy standard then their achievement will progress measurably." 

Term 1 Data Below: 

It is interesting to note that some children must be uploading their Reading work to the wrong folder, as they have managed to blog more than I found in their Reading folders in their Drives. This has been a valuable exercise as I can see some children with very high attendance are not completing their work even though I felt I was pushing strongly for this by the end of the term. It can be a little embarrassing to share that this is an area I need to work on, but hopefully by shining a light on where we are falling down, I will be able to see some good improvement over the course of the year!

My Priority Learners - Student Profiling

Due to the way we cross group for Reading in our year level and the needs of the students I teach, my target students for my Inquiry this year are very much going to be my two Gold(ish) groups. Some of these students were more turquoise or purple at the start of the year, but heading into Term 2, they are all instructionally at Gold.

I have a Yellow group with a need for a strong decoding push, which I am confident in doing (and they also get Quick60 support already), and a Silver group that are doing really well with their comprehension tasks, so I'd really like to unpack how to get all my Gold kids over the comprehension hump and up to Silver+ by the end of the year.

With this in mind, I have 13 students Instructionally at Gold. I have been taking some time to observe their reading behaviours, attitudes and needs. I found the Reader Profile Survey which I gave them very insightful.

There are children at either end of the 'I'm Good at Reading' opinion scales. They either strongly agree or strongly disagree.... 7/9 think they are good at reading and 2/9 don't - even though they know they are in a high reading group! Sadly 2/9 also said that they don't think their teacher (me) thinks they are good at reading, which is something for me to be mindful of and turn around as soon as possible. Especially as one of those rated himself good at reading. A different 2/9 were negative about what their families think about their reading ability. Interestingly these two both thought their teacher thought they were good at reading. So it's very interesting to see how that perception can change between different children in different contexts.

None of my priority learners got more than 5/10 for vocabulary in their STAR. So, I have been reading Dr Jannie van Hees and Paul Nation's book 'What Every Primary School Teacher Should Know About Vocabulary' and came across an online tool - https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/kids/ in which you can insert text from a student and get a breakdown of their vocabulary use. I think this could be a tool I can use to compare their vocabulary from now till the end of the year, or even before and after reading a selected text and completing a follow-up task.

So potentially I could be looking at their desired learning outcomes being more word output at higher vocabulary levels? 

Here's a sample result of one of my target student's responses to a text:

So do I look at vocabulary building, or discussion time or quality of discussion time or all of it at once?

Do I start with just extending discussion in this term and build in the more purposeful vocabulary building next term?

How can I measure progress in this area?

 - Through my observations

 - Time spent talking about the text?

 - Number of actual sentences used?

 - Number of key vocabulary words used?

 - The online vocabulary tool: https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/kids/ ?

I look forward to sharing these thoughts and getting some feedback and direction from my next CoL

meeting this afternoon!