The COVID period and its impact on my learners and inquiry.

Question: How has the Covid-19 period impacted the learners in your focus group? Will you need to make any changes to your Inquiry?

My focus students have shown consistent progress since T1 and that was assessed at the end of Term 2. I did Running records and other formative assessments including online and in-class observations. I also collected student voice about their distance learning experiences and literacy dispositions. 

For me, the COVID period was interesting for 2 reasons. First of all, it confirmed that the outcomes of my last year teaching inquiry and the tools I implemented are effective and help my students stay engaged and motivated. 

Secondly, my new teaching experiences and the structured Manaiakalani COL inquiry framework helped me shape my hypothesis and develop an intervention that I will start implementing this term. 

Before the COVID experience, I was thinking of a wider range of tools to accelerate my students in literacy; however, after referring to the research literature, analysing my own practice and my students’ voice, I decided to narrow my focus down to vocabulary and comprehension work.

Tomorrow, we’re having our reading PDL with Sheena Cameron and I hope it will help me to select the most effective strategies and tools that I could implement to support my inquiry.

Elena's COL Inquiry 2020 

Inquiry into my current teaching and self-reflection

Over the past few months, I have been looking at and analyzing current dispositions, experiences and outcomes of my students and the ways of how I can improve my own practice to address their needs and help them achieve better results in reading and writing by keeping them engaged and motivated.

By this time I have learned a lot about my learners, and it is now time to inquiry into my own teaching and analyze my strengths and areas for improvement. Firstly, I made a plan what areas of my literacy teaching I should observe and then analyze in order to grow as a professional; this included self-observation, student voice, reviewing my teacher tools and the activities that I've been using.

Many of my students identified that they need to learn more words and their meanings in order to understand texts better. I conducted a short teaching experiment by feeding forward the specific topic vocab during our dragon learn-create-share project and then giving them comprehension tasks that contained the taught vocabulary. All of my students from the target group completed the task and were proud of their results because they felt confident in using the new words and that made them feel successful in their learning.

I also identified that many students will not admit that they don't understand some words unless you ask them. I began to clarify the meaning of those words that I guessed my Y2/3 students might not fully comprehend and it showed me how many words (common from my point of view) they don't know. We also discussed the importance of understanding all words and what strategies and resources can we use to figure out unknown vocabulary.

Based on my literature review, I confirmed for myself that my hypothesis is similar to the following statement: 'nine out of 10 Year 2 students whose decoding was fluent, but whose reading comprehension was inadequate, had a low vocabulary level' (Wagner and Meros).

My next steps: 

extend, improve existing and implement new vocabulary teaching tools.

continue to use explicit instructions in inferential strategies