Profiling: understanding the nature of my students’ learning strengths and needs in detail

There is a complex of factors that influence student's learning. Getting to know your students is extremely both for their well-being and academic achievements. 
The more we understand our students, the more efficient we can ensure their learning successes. When we have an in-depth understanding of how our students learn, there is a major impact on diagnosing student needs and planning effective programmes and supports. 

I combined the data gathered during in-class learning in Term 1 and the formative data collected during distance learning ('Covid-19 data'). 

During the lockdown, I experienced a new opportunity to look inside our learners' lives and observe them learning from home, observe their learning styles, reveal their personal interests, motivation and key competencies. Interestingly, I enjoyed a very high level of engagement in comparison to similar junior classes in my school. I believe that one of the factors that contributed to this success was a love of learning and self-motivation of my learners that we have been developing together during in-class learning.  Another factor was the use of personalised tasks that helped to keep my students engaged and motivated. Effective learning takes place when the amount of task structure by the teacher matches a student's level of development. 

My 2020 inquiry is about raising student achievement in literacy by promoting deep learning that requires students to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking across the curriculum. I decided not to change my inquiry focus. After the lockdown and distance teaching I witnessed and confirmed for myself that understanding of learner identities is not just important but crucial for effective teaching and learning. 

Pre-Covid data: 
I analyzed results of the beginning of Term 1 Running record in reading and e-asttle in writing and found that most of my Year 2 students are well below the expected levels both in reading and writing. My year 3 students are placed at different levels, however, all of them require to focus on reading comprehension, vocabulary and spelling. 

I looked closely at the RR and identified that while my Year 2's need to work on decoding and comprehension skills, my Year 3's students mostly require to focus on making inferences and improving their evaluation skills.
The e-asttle writing data and their independent writing exemplars also suggested focusing on ideas, vocabulary and spelling.
All of these findings helped me to identify and prioritize 3 main areas for developing my teaching intervention: general knowledge, vocabulary(meaning and wordbuilding) and spelling (phonics, H-F and word building).

Formative "Covid-19 data".
Formative data collected during distance learning also showed that my students have limited general knowledge of various topics. Based on various reports from Reading eggs, Sunshine classics, Kahoot topic games and completed tasks on Seesaw, I found that my students need to work on their inferential skills and vocabulary. Distance learning proved that taking into account their learner identities (e.g. personal identities, cultural and social backgrounds, academic performance and learning preferences) helps improve motivation and enhance students' learning outcomes.

My next steps:
- collecting student voice: their literacy dispositions, interests and self-evaluation in reading and writing.
- finding related literacy research
- making my hypothesis

Using Kahoot for instructional practices and formative assessments

Game-based learning is considered one of the most effective teaching practices.  Research and empirical data support game learning because it engages students in problem-solving and critical thinking while building up their content knowledge. 

Today, I’d like to talk about using Kahoot in my practice! I believe that Kahoot not only helps create a fun virtual learning environment but also motivates and stimulates the learning process. 

Every morning, I use my Class site and the Seesaw blog to introduce daily activities. Students have to work at their own pace due to various reasons (different age, levels, abilities, internet access, family arrangements, etc). However, after introducing Kahoot games as part of our Google Meets, more students began to join in on a regular basis and the amount of completed daily tasks escalated. 

Playing Kahoot with junior students looks different from games played with older children. I use Kahoot games not just for doing formative assessments (without students knowing it) but as opportunities to use various DATs depending on the situation and questions. There will be more explicit teaching when we play a new topic Kahoot for the first time, then, during the subsequent games, I gradually release my control and let students rely on their knowledge and skills.

For example, my class has been working on place value and symmetry this week. 

The first Kahoot game revealed their understanding of both areas:

Every day this week we played ‘the same’ Kahoot quiz, however, it was not exactly the same game as I kept changing the actual numbers and pictures for the questions. For example, the question stayed the same: How many tens are in this number? But each day I included a different number and its representation giving my students an opportunity to think and apply their knowledge rather than memorising the previous answers. I also assign related tasks on Seesaw and provide my learners with ongoing timely feedback on their completed tasks. 

4 days later, my students played this Kahoot with the following results, the number of engaged learners has also increased:

The report for each student and his/her answers for each question is also available in the Kahoot report section. This report helps to differentiate and design individual or groups tasks to improve student understanding. I always share the reports with my learners after the game and I discovered that they find it valuable. Even if they don’t come first, my students are reassured that their knowledge is growing along with their confidence.

I think Kahoot fosters student cognitive engagement, motivation and critical thinking. The analysis of data collected during Kahoot games provides the opportunity to identify areas of weaknesses and strengths and helps to inform my teaching in order to improve student achievement.