I have been talking about lifting achievement through an engagement lens and as our Inquiry this term was a Drama unit, I have had the perfect opportunity to dive into performing plays with my class.
Here is a glimpse of what we got up to, that we made for our school news - PENN.
Inquiry at PES...!
We discussed our Inquiries today in our Staff Meeting. As Mrs Moala and Miss Scanlan were away, Mr Burt joined Mrs Nelson and I to discuss what we have been up to in Team 3.
Here is our slide of our thoughts:
It was a worthwhile discussion and good to bounce ideas around with Simone Nelson - we certainly were trialling some of the same approaches and seeing the benefit of our drama term, paying off in our literacy classes.
It has been a busy time at school testing and writing reports...
I have had a mixed bag of results from my priority learners but I am happy to see that overall progress is being made. Comprehension is definitely the right focus for these learners, as so often their achievement is depending on how familiar they already are with a topic.
Interestingly, using punctuation when reading seems to be the other noticeable theme coming out from this group. Multiple children do not read to the full stop and will read over, into the next sentence. Understandably this will be adding to their confusion and affecting comprehension scores, so this will form a little side focus for my teaching.
Running record results for my priority learners are compiled below:
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:
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."
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.
"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):
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.
