Inquiry 2016

This year I will be inquiring into how I can have higher order activities with a create focus that learners can work on independently? My hope is that these activities will increase student's engagement and promote higher order thinking.

My first steps will involve looking at what sort of activities other teachers are using to get some ideas. I will then trial some higher order create activities with my top reading group. If these go well I will try them with the other reading groups.

Initially I will be looking at create activities with a focus on inference and evaluation. From looking at Probe data from last year and my existing knowledge of the students this was identified as an area of weakness for a lot of my students.

Reading Inquiry T4

The above presentation outlines the shift my students made in reading this year. My teaching has been guided by my 2015 inquiry which initially had me wondering how I could develop the behavioural engagement of my students. As the year progressed my inquiry shifted into developing the dialogic reasoning, vocabulary and inference skills of my students. To see how my inquiry spanned out across the whole year please read the previous posts.

Screencast Screencast Screencast

At our recent Digital immersion PLG we created screencast to share how our learners navigate our website.

Vocab & Oral Language Inquiry

Having had PD with Dr Rebecca Jesson and Dr Jannie van Hees my Term 3 inquiry has been about developing student's vocabulary and oral language. To develop vocab I experimented with concept circles which saw the students link words within a text to a topic. This activity was effective as in order to connect the words to the topic students need to understand the context of the word. To develop oral language I experimented with 'talking points'. Students were given statements about something they had read and had to discuss the statements with others in their group stating if the agreed/disagreed with the statement and why. Students were encouraged to ask questions of each other with limited teacher intervention. At first this exercise was met with a lot of awkward silences but after a while students began to grow in confidence and some great discussions were had. Some of the student's reflections are in the above presentation.

Engaging Boys

This term I have been inquiry into engaging boys particularly in writing. We completed a unit which had students looking at the porquoi story called "Why Do Dogs Sniff Bottoms" by Dawn McMillan & Bert Signal. The unit culminated in students writing their own version of "Why Do Dogs Sniff Bottoms". Due to the nature of the story it immediately captured the student's attention both boys and girls alike. It was amazing seeing the boys fully engaged and actually enjoying the writing process.

The inquiry topic for term 2 was 'Tinkering Tools & Toys'. The students were asked 'What can you design/create/build to improve school life at Pt England school. I encouraged the students to think big, informing them that if possible we were going to try our hardest to see their ideas come to fruition. After  6 weeks we had a fully functioning go cart, shoe rack, outside bench seat, cubby hole, mini foosball table and some art work to go around the school. The students really enjoyed this unit particularly once the planning had been done and the making process started.

The greatest highlight for me was watching one boy who really struggles with the 'normal' classroom environment absolutely thrive while making the go cart. He was like a totally different child. He was fully engaged and took a real ownership over the project. There were no behavioural issues to deal with (which is highly unusual for this student) and he took a leadership role, teaching the other boys in his group how to do things such as drill holes & saw timber.

This term I have really seen the importance of hooking students in and getting them engaged in their activities that they are interested in. Bored boys = trouble, trouble for me, trouble for them and trouble for others in the class. It has made me question the engagement level of my lessons in other learning areas. It's all to easy to turn out a lesson that tick all the boxes but are really boring. I want to generate lessons that engage and motivate children. I know this is a big, ongoing goal which probably will never be 100% achieved however I have to start somewhere.

PD with Dr. Jannie van Hees

Recently teachers form the senior school had PD with Dr. Jannie van Hees. She spoke about 'Developing  a Dialogic, Orally Expressive Classroom'. She challenged us about how much time we spend in the class developing students oral language skills. She highlighted the importance of gifting new vocabulary to students and giving them the opportunity to practise retaining information then recalling it later. I have to admit currently there is not a lot of this going on in my classroom. While students are given the opportunity to express and justify their thinking in various learning areas this needs to be done more explicitly. Currently there is no explicit opportunity for students to practise retaining and recalling information, and the new vocabulary they are being exposed to is minimal. In the next few weeks I will be endeavouring to start developing an orally expressive classroom. Watch this space.

Inquiry