Inquiry Focus 2023

Inquiry Focus Question

This year my inquiry focus question is: 

How can I develop the dialogic discourse ability of my children so they can freely engage in discussions about a text and what effect will this have on their vocabulary and comprehension?

It is widely acknowledged that there is a reciprocal relationship between oral language influencing reading development, and reading influencing oral language development. The National Reading Panel’s (2000; p.230) historic report points out: “Vocabulary occupies an important position in learning to read. As a learner begins to read, reading vocabulary encountered in texts is mapped onto the oral vocabulary the learner brings to the task….The reader learns to translate the (relatively) unfamiliar words in print into speech, with the expectation that the speech forms will be easier to comprehend. … When the word is not in the learner’s oral vocabulary, it will not be understood when it occurs in print.” Therefore oral language and vocabulary development is crucial to improving reading comprehension. 

The Problem

Generally speaking, many of literacy student's struggle to engage in discourse about a text. I suspect this is due to a potential number of reasons such as:

• Feeling shy, anxious or worried about sharing. Sharing in a group is a vulnerable thing to do even for adults. The unknown responses from others in the group can cause a reluctance to share. 
• Having a 'can't be bothered' attitude. 
• They don't know how to have a discussion. 

Proposed Solution/Hunches

I suspect the process to developing the dialogic discourse ability of my children will require a number of actions:

• Creating a safe classroom culture where every contribution is valued and respected. 
• Getting buy-in from the kids. Demonstrating the importance of being able to share your thinking and opinions.
• Explicitly teaching/modelling how to have a discussion. This includes outlining Rules for Talk.

• Using texts that are engaging and provocations that evoke discussion. 

Next steps

Attain some baseline data such as:

• Easttle reading  results
• PAT vocabulary result
• Observe children having a discussion about a text recording what takes place

Reading Practice Intensive Day 3 - Reflection

Day 3 of the Reading Practice Intensive gave me a lot to think about. Here are some of my leanrings and take aways. 

Summarising

In his work on teaching summarising, Timothy Shanahan's suggest an important part step is for teachers to model deleting the information that isn't necessary from a text. This was new to me when it comes to summarising and makes a lot of sense. Usually my focus has highlighting important pieces of information however this isn't any easy thing to do and deleting the information that isn't necessary may a more effective strategy. I look forward to using this with my kids. 

Mixed Groups

Historically I have used levelled groups when it comes to my reading program i.e students with similar reading ages are grouped together. After today, I am interested in incorporating mixed and flexible grouping into my reading program. There are many to consider in doing this however I think providing flexible grouping will be beneficial for my kids. 

 

T Shaped Literacy

I found the discussion around text sets interesting, in particular T-Shaped Literacy

The T-Shape Literacy Model (Wilson & Jesson, 2019) proposes that learners’ literacy learning can be enhanced when they read a range of texts (represented by the horizontal bar of the “T”) to explore a unifying concept in a deep way (as represented by the vertical bar).  - From RPI Day 3 content

Over the coming term I will be endeavouring to incorporate the T-Shape Literacy Model into my text selection process. 

Reading Practice Intensive Day 2 - Reflection

Toaday was day 2 of the Manaiakalani Reading Practise Intensive. The focus of toad was around knowing your leaners as readers. 

One of the biggest learnings for me was around tracking our kids progress. In teaching, there are so many pieces of relevant information that needs to be used to assess children's learning needs and design their learning. The challenge can be storing this information so that it is easily accessible. Today we were introduced to a comprehensive digital Teacher's Workbook that can be used to not only hold the information but plan for leanring as well - a one stop shop as such! Though initially the Teacher Workbook look overwhelming due to the number of tabs it's easy to see that in the long run a tracking and planning document like this will be of great value to my teaching practise.

I was also reminded how much useful and valuable information there is through analysing the PAT data of my children. I can use it to see common gaps in my students reading comprehension and then design specific leanring tasks to tend to them.  I'm interested as to what I'll find out.