Reflection Term Three:

So much to reflect on! What a busy place our great school is.  I really struggle to find time to get all the great things written down, due to all the amazing things we are doing.

I know our most important reflections are undertaken around our Inquiry, which this year is focused on improving student achievement in literacy and numeracy through improving teacher knowledge and application of assessment processes.

To be honest, it's been a constant struggle to be making big gains in target groups in three different areas of the curriculum, particularly with taking on the Accelerated Literacy Learning programme later in the year.  This feels like added pressure I didn't need.  My primary concern are my learners.... all of my learners and although I'm learning lots, it feels like a battle to be working so hard on a few learners and maintaining focus on the rest as well.  Hopefully in the long term it will pay off.

I feel like I've had greater success in getting my numeracy programme working well earlier in the year and some of the things I think have made a difference include:
Making an effort to continually upskill myself by using some of the NZ maths modules, the Pearson teacher books around Fractions and Decimals, always looking for new games to support the kids and undertaking more analysis into our different assessments.  I've gone back to using e-asttle now that our infrastructure is better supporting of this (internet is now amazing!) and it's been great to look at that data mid-year and use it to enhance planning.  I've also been using the e-asttle 'What Next' and ARB as additional forms of assessment.  What I'd like to do next for these learning areas is to have a goal set for the kids every week, which they know will be assessed at the week end in a snapshot, so they have a better idea of how they're tracking in achieving their goals.  I'm also working on student toolkits to help them to understand concepts, videos that they can return to, watching repeatedly until their understanding is consolidated.

In literacy, I must admit I struggle to get consistent time with my reading target group kids as two of them are absent more often than I had realised originally.  I have enjoyed using our silent reading time to work with the kids on quick reading workshops and hope to do this more consistently.  The start to the term has been quite busy with build-up for our school Olympic Day, which has taken more time than I'd like to admit.  This has certainly eaten into our literacy and numeracy time and I need to be more mindful of not allowing this to happen (though with Olympic speakers, Attitude speakers and Life Education I'm not sure how to go about this).  It's a busy place with loads of great opportunities for our kids.

Meetings for ALL have helped to clarify what we are expected to do for this professional learning and I find myself seeking out lots of learning around the teaching of reading in order to continually upskill.  For example, in the past two weeks I have found myself reading The Book Whisperer, Learning in the Fast Lane, Essential Literacy Practice and Sheena Cameron's Reading Handbook.  If only there was more time for learning!

Two points of interest that I've come across include:

Ignition is important - how we start the reading session matters in terms of how engaged we will get our students (Learning in the Fast Lane)

Much of the comprehension follow-up work we do with our kids in reading actually turns them off reading... many kids just want to silent read and enjoy the simple joy of reading (The Book Whisperer).  This one really spoke to me - as a reader!  How can we help our kids to love reading?  I wish I could sit down and read this book until I was done as I feel like I am failing the kids in not knowing where to start!

I'm so excited by much of the learning we're doing.... time is the challenge, as always.

Math and Learner Agency

Daily at the moment I am having these amazing math sessions with our learners.

Why is it amazing?
The kids are engaged, stretching themselves, seeking help and expressing their enthusiasm through their voices and faces.  As they are enthusiastic and stretching themselves, we're able to see how they're learning, how they're challenging themselves and to have important learning conversations around how that's happening and the impact it's having on the whole class.



Why are they doing this?
I can only offer an opinion on this one but I feel like they're doing it because many of them have already come with a great foundation.  On top of this though - we're providing explicit opportunities to learn, we've built on this learning from their assessments (IKAN) and are showing the application to real life and thus, demonstrating its relevance.

In fact, two of our boys stated that when they could see the question (context), they could see WHY they were learning about (for example, how to convert between fractions, decimals and percentages; or how to divide by ten by moving the decimal place).  One of them threw up his hands in horror at the idea of working with fractions or percentages, but when applied to a context he knew (buying and selling Speedway Stock cars) he intuitively knew an answer.

Following explicit opportunities to learn, and links to relevant real life contexts, we are also talking a lot about the process.  We have discussed what's important in math.  We've talked about how sometimes we feel nervous, decide we can't do it before we start, read a problem and read it wrong and so misinterpret it or make an error and decide that that x instead of tick means we can stop the learning there, instead of returning to the problem and reworking it.  So we are developing a culture of accountability, expectation, challenge (I know to learn I need to be in the PIT and it will feel horrible but that is where I learn  - so I'm going to choose a hard problem to challenge myself and if that's too easy then when I'm finished I'm going to choose another one!

Why is this working?
Again, I can only offer an opinion, but I'd like to put this back to the kids to answer sometime in the future.  Perhaps it is because our feeling successful is not just dependent on our right or wrong answer, but is in fact partly determined by our willingness to build our learning habits and as such, our agentic practices.  Also, we are building our knowledge slowly through games, activities, problem solving etc, so we are having many opportunities to practice our learning habits and our new knowledge.

It's exciting seeing our nervous learners making progress and being willing to share their challenges and their progress.  Smiles and lightbulbs all round!

Inquiry Reflection Update

As part of my learning around Learner Agency I've been looking at ways to help the kids to develop their ability to know where they're at, self-assess and how to move forward from here. On reflection, one thing I was confronted with quite strongly was that I was not providing enough formative assessment opportunities for our learners, so they were quite negative about assessment processes.  They often walked away from a test feeling anxious and that they had not been prepared well, even when I felt I had prepared them.

I've been working on finding short, sharp modes of assessment that enable the kids to have checkpoints in their learning.  One example of this is that following a couple of days of learning around a topic, I've begun the lesson with a little formative assessment where the learners pick the level they feel they can stretch to and complete the task, assessing as they go.

In working through the answers, I used our student name cards (a set that is laminated and put in a container by my front computer for ease of use) to select students for answers so most people had a turn even if it wasn't at their stage.

After a while I just went around the room asking kids in turn and the positive mood improved.  When Jasmyn nutted out a problem beyond the stage she was working and I congratulated her on "the stretch" she was visibly excited by her ability to move forward.

Following this, I worked with those kids who have set Fractions as their goal based on their IKAN assessment results

and we made links between fractions, decimals and percentages, celebrated how using intuition helped the boys to solve problems, discussed how our attitude to a challenging subject helps / hinders our learning and demonstrated how applying a context (fractions) to a real-life subject (% off the price of a Stock Car) helped Seth to grasp the relevance of fractions and be willing to have a go...... and was successful instantly.

A $50,000 stock car is 75% off - how much will you pay?

This was an awesome math session with Malakai, Seth, Daniel, Josiah and Tapa - lightbulb moments were going off everywhere! Loads of the boys were saying "I get it now!"
My heart is happy.