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!