Reflecting on my 2020 Inquiry

Looking back at my TAI 2020, I must admit that it was a bumpy year for my teaching and learning. In this post, I'd like to reflect on my professional learning through my last year inquiry cycle.

The challenges that the pandemic and lockdowns forced educators through revealed the strong need for a drastic pedagogical shift. Like many other teachers, I had to act fast and extend my repertoire of pedagogical strategies and tools in order to meet my teaching intentions for children’s learning. 

The inquiry process that I followed was well pre-planned and led by the Manaiakalani leaders and the Woolf Fisher Research Centre (WFRC).  However, I felt the strong urge to act faster, especially during some of the inquiry stages, e.g. collecting initial data, profiling my students and making a hypothesis. 

I found our COL meetings, especially Talanoa group times, quite useful. Such conversations helped me get connected with my COL colleagues and learn about their inquiries, challenges and successes. Professional reading was also a great part of my TAI as it supported me to make informed decisions when designing and trialling my intervention. 

What worked really well and is supported by evidence:

- introducing blogging to my young Y2-3 learners and actively using their and class blogs to share our learning, learn from others and express their opinions or give feedback.

- actively listening to student voice and appreciating their learner identities when planning activities and topics.

-  the gradual release of responsibility

- purpose behind each and every learning task!

Please refer to this blog post for more details.

I believe that all of the changes that I had to make during my TAI 2020 led to my students' successes and great progress.  I would rate the changes for my learners as highly positive, evident and measurable. The evidence for my rating is supported by the EOY data both in reading and writing along with huge improvements in their key competencies, growth mindset and achievements. 

I believe in the spiral nature of TAI and I'm ready to take my last year's professional learning to my new TAI 2021 journey.

Burst and Bubbles

The catalytic aspect of student learning my inquiry focused on this year was a strong need to improve reading comprehension and poor vocabulary in our junior classes.

At the beginning of this year, I identified this as my inquiry focus after analyzing my new class data and discovering that most of my Year 2 students were well below the expected levels both in reading and writing. My year 3 students were working at different levels; however, many of them experienced a ‘summer drop’ and required lots of support and immediate actions to improve their outcomes.

To build a rich picture of my students’ learning in literacy, I used Running Records, e-asttle, vocabulary and spelling tests, a range of formative assessments of their reading and writing across the curriculum, and student voice.

The weakest aspects in their literacy learning that I identified during the profiling phase were a lack of comprehensive strategies, poor vocabulary and limited general knowledge. 

The profiling of my own teaching showed that I had strengths in designing various cross-curricular projects and effectively pulling deeper learning out of them using the Learn-Create-Share pedagogy. 

After analysing and evaluating my students’ profiles, consulting with the literature research, reading blogs of my COL colleagues and reflecting on my own teaching practice, I finalised and implemented the following  interventions:

• Designing authentic LCS projects taking into account their cultural and personal identities 

• Using digital and traditional tasks designed to improve their vocabulary and reading comprehension at the appropriate levels. 

• Creating a culture of blogging and commenting (new to our junior school).

• Implementing drama activities that according to the literature research are ‘giving students the chance to use all skills in decoding and comprehension, expand vocabulary and build metacognitive knowledge’. I believe this led to our success during the Manaiakalani Film Festival.

These changes allowed my Year 2/3 students to take ownership and responsibility for their own learning, explore, take risks, make mistakes and learn from them.  For example, my young students created their own Kahoot quizzes and riddles. To be able to successfully participate in such high-thinking level activities, the students had to research, process, design and present their learning. They got so extremely excited that I couldn’t stop them even during the school holidays! 

Overall I would rate the changes in student learning as highly positive, evident and measurable. The evidence for my rating is supported by the data collected in Term 4 both in reading and writing along with huge improvements in their key competencies, growth mindset and achievements. All of my students showed great progress and the vast majority are working ‘at’ or ‘above’ the expected levels including four boys and two girls from my control group. 

Coherence in putting my students at the very centre of their learning and developing cognitive engagement and critical thinking across the curriculum was my hunch and it proved to make a difference during both in-class and online learning.

Comparing Reading data - Y2/3 (3 classes)

My students’ progress compared to two other Year 2/3 classes in my school. 
(Assessments used - Running Records Term 1 and 4).

Collecting and Evaluating Data

Repeated measures/Pre-post design: Compare evidence and data collected before your intervention with evidence and data collected after your intervention. What has changed?

At the beginning of my intervention, I collected student voice about their literacy dispositions.

It was very interesting to see that in Term 1 my students had identified a strong need to focus on learning new vocabulary. However, I also noticed that many of them didn't like to spend more time and effort to understand texts and figure out new words. That showed a lack of motivation and engagement with the text and also a limited range of comprehension strategies.

In Term 4 my students showed more appreciation of text discussions and a deeper understanding of the information read in the text. They said that now they pay more attention to new vocabulary and most of them are willing to explore and use new words and phrases. 

I believe that my students are also equipped with a range of comprehension strategies that I have explicitly taught this year. In fact, I've used a multiple strategy approach using direct explicit teaching, guided instructions, providing texts with multiple encounters of the same words in different contexts, story retelling, implementing drama, use of props and objects, comprehension and vocabulary discussions. I tried to embed vocabulary and comprehension work across the curriculum.

Quantitative data (Running Records):

The data showed that the vast majority of my Y2 and Y3 students have made a great shift in their reading and now achieving 'at or above' the expected levels. 

My T4 'below and well below" students have also shown some progress, all of them have been also working with RTLB and other support programmes. 

My target group has shown great progress in both Reading and Writing and all of the students are working at 'at' and 'above' the expected levels.

My Change of Practice Reflections and Tweaks

In this post, I'd like to collate evidence of my change of practice and explain my reflections and tweaks that I have been making during this bumpy year.

A brief summary of my improvement change in a few words: Learn-Create-Share, student interests and a real purpose behind this process! 

My Reflections and Tweaks: I created a new habit of regularly asking myself a number of questions and collecting evidence to support my conclusions: 

• How did the students respond to my new approach/strategy/ tool? 
• What are their learning outcomes after implementing my changes - evidence of improvement? 
• Are things better than when typical/traditional approaches/strategies/tools were used? 
• What could be done differently to secure further learning gains or consolidate existing ones? 

2020 has been a very interrupted year and I had to adapt my teaching approaches and tools to the new learning environment. I've noticed that instead of narrowing down my focus, I had to be flexible and very responsive to my learners' interests and needs, especially during remote learning times. I tried a number of activities and I must admit that some of them didn't really resonate with my young learners when the others hugely motivated them. The students continued to work on those tasks even during their holidays! 

My students were absolutely excited to 'be heard' - at some stage I noticed that they took ownership of their learning, initiated learning and participated in work that had meaning to them and others. My target group consists of 6 boys and 2 girls and this approach helped me to turn them into passionate learners. 

My tweak during lockdown - creating an online class community using blogging and commenting tools. It was explicitly modelled and taught during the first days in lockdown. Soon, my learners began to share their experiences through their blogs and other students gave them feedback. I think that introducing and fostering peer-feedback was a big win as my learners got a real audience and timely responses to their posts. At the same time, it was a great opportunity to reinforce cybersmart learning. I continued this during in-class developing into a new norm amongst our Y2/3 learners.

What worked really well and is supported by evidence:

• Blogging and commenting is not natural for some of the learners. How can we change this? Plan for it, allow time, motivate by purposeful and interesting tasks. Make their comments important! Create a culture of blogging and commenting. I believe that "Summer journey" is successful because of the feedback they get. 
• Optional topics/ choices for writing keeping in mind that the lesson's WALT had to be covered.
• Purposeful reading and writing tasks, e.g. creating their own games, trialling them, improving, presenting to other students to play. 
• Student-created Kahoot quizzes - real purpose to read to learn, create, proofread and edit for clarity and share with other students across the school!
• Implementing drama - my boys were enthusiastic and bursting with ideas, they did lots of reading and writing gave and received feedback, took risks, etc
• Use of word problem-solving in Maths provided extra opportunities to practise their reading and writing skills, deepen their thinking and comprehension, apply these skills to solve real problems. Use of Maths vocabulary.
• Effective questioning. I had to rethink my questions to make my learners think and understand topics deeper, make connections and, as a result, apply their new knowledge and skills to come up with a sophisticated answer.

These changes in my teaching resulted in student progress and improvement. Their engagement was easy to observe in-class, it was also video recorded (various class videos, online Google Meets, Manaiakalani Film Festival and other LCS projects)

End of Term 3 Data. As stated in the previous post, all my students have moved up their reading and writing levels despite two lockdowns and an interrupted in many other ways year.

Monitoring the Effects of My Intervention on Learner Outcomes

Identify informal and formal ways you are monitoring the effects of your changed practices/intervention on learner outcomes. Explain the reflections and tweaks you are making along the way.

My Inquiry: How can I change my practice to raise student achievement in literacy by promoting deep learning that requires students to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking across the curriculum using Learn-Create-Share?

My interventions:

• Putting my students at the very centre of their learning and making their learning experiences authentic by designing LCS projects based on their interests and taking into account their identities.
• Scaffolding my learners during their projects by implementing and consistently using the tasks designed to improve their vocabulary, reading comprehension and writing skills.
• Utilizing drama to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking and raise students achievement in reading and writing.

Monitoring the Effect:

• Student voice (evidence of their hight engagement and positive attitude towards learning -  collected through their blog posts, in-class & online conversations and sticky post-it notes in Term 3. In Term 4 the students will be asked to complete the same google form they did in Term 1 to compare the results/ changes)

• Photos, Videos, their Reading and Writing examples, online and in-class observations - evidence of my students' learning and progress (formative assessments):
• numerous LCS projects
• blogging and commenting, peer and teacher feedback
• maths word problems - incorporating Reading and Writing to gain a deeper understanding and new vocab
• Teaching of making inferences in a fun and engaging way: inferring from a picture, riddles and other activities - genuine interest, high motivation, critical thinking, etc 
• Introducing new vocab through topics of their interest and creating situations where they have opportunities to use their new vocab (Kahoot quizzes - students created, Film making, scriptwriting experiences,  use of S.Cameron and L.Dempsey activities)
• Drama (lots of reading and writing, problem-solving and KC) - Films for the Manaiakalani FF 2020 will be available on our class blog in T4.

• End of Term 3 data: Running Records and writing samples. All of my Year 3 target students moved up their reading and writing levels despite two lockdowns. All of them are now working at the expected after 3 years at school levels. I look forward to continuing with my inquiry next term and seeing my students' successes.

CyberSmart and the Purposeful Use of Google Meet Chat for Distance Learning

In this post, I'd like to focus on the purposeful use of Google Meet Chat and being Cybersmart during online meets. 

My students felt confident and comfortable during our online meets and, and at some stage, I noticed that my students started to take initiative in our online learning by sharing their ideas and experiences and inspiring each other to try new activities. I was very proud of my learners but also realised that talking ONE-At-A- TIME was a challenge for my young learners. It looks and feels different in class as I always use Think-Pair-Share and other strategies for my students to talk and share. During our 2 x 45 minutes long daily online sessions, it was a bit challenging for my young learners to stay muted. Soon, we decided to use the Google Meet CHAT! 

It became our new opportunity to cooperate and communicate with each other simultaneously. For example, when we solved each other's riddles, brainstormed rhyming words or answered Maths questions, all student could text their answers/ guesses to our Meet Chat and we all could see and respond to individual ideas, discuss, talk, give reasons and explain our thoughts. 

For me, it was a great opportunity to monitor my students' knowledge, skills, progress and gaps and then address their learning needs by assigning individualized tasks and/or giving timely feedback.

Maths:                                                                                               Rhymes:

Answering our Riddles:

From time to time, I had to remind my students to be Cybersmart. Reflecting on some of their comments (digital footprints), we also went over our School Values: Fun, Integrity, Respect and Excellence to support our Cybersmart learning and smart relationships.

Post-lockdown reflection:

When we finally returned back to school, I shared some of our Meet chat comments with my learners on a big screen and asked them to reflect on their online behaviours and digital footprints. It was a huge surprise for some of my learners who had obviously thought that their chat comments would have disappeared after we finished our calls. 

I hope this will have a big impact on their future online behaviours because I have provided my learners with real evidence and proof that everything that they send online stays there forever! 

It was a great CyberSmart life lesson!

Riddles, Riddles , Riddles and other Fun Engaging Activities as Evidence of Students' Learning and Progress

Today is our last day of home learning! The students are excited to return back to our wonderful creative classroom. 

As a reflection on our remote learning over the last 2 weeks, I'd like to review the most engaging activities that helped me scaffold my students' learning and monitor their progress. 

1. Comprehension strategies, oral language and vocabulary

When scaffolding reading, for example, we focused on making inferences. We started with simple questions about prompt pictures, then discussed our assumptions and learnt how to support our thinking with details. When working on texts, we previewed and discussed key vocabulary, chunked the text looking for clues and trying to read between the lines. We used talk moves: add on, waiting time, thumbs up, agree/disagree, etc.

2. Cognitive engagement and critical thinking - Riddles! False or True? Two truths & one lie.

At some stage, I noticed that children started to actively search for clues and we decided to practise our inference skills.  Initially, I offered a number of simple riddles for my students to solve. They enjoyed this activity and took initiative by preparing their own riddles for our online classes. They found and read a lot of riddles and jokes trying to select the most tricky ones to share with their classmates. I believe it can be counted as their deep cognitive thinking and engagement. This activity definitely increased their reading mileage too. 

My Y2-3 students were keen to make up their own riddles! 

True or false questions and the 'Two truths and one Lie" game were also very engaging and popular during our online classes and blogging time.

3. Questioning and Feedback - Ideas, Grammar, Sentences and Spelling.

Kahoot has always been popular in our class. The students used to play various quizzes that I created. This time, they felt confident enough to create their own Kahoot games. The students took initiative and were motivated to add interest to our online meets. The student-created Kahoots showed good thinking, digital and literacy skills.

I also promoted SMART commenting on peers' blogs. The students enjoyed expressing their opinions and communicating with their friends in a positive manner. I believe that blogging and commenting helped engage learners in good conversations about their learning and experiences.

Room 5 learners are very Smart Learners who know how to leave Smart Digital Footprints and enjoy Smart Digital relationships! Ano te Pai!

The Importance of Teacher and Peer Feedback during Remote Learning

I believe that we all know that giving feedback to students can be the bulk of the workload. Is the payoff worth the immense effort and time? In Visible Learning, John Hattie noted that feedback is “one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement”, so if you’d like to increase student achievement in your classroom, feedback can be the key to making it happen.

Blog commenting is a great and powerful teaching and learning tool which cannot be disregarded. Reflecting on my own experience,  I believe that online feedback helped promote good communication and build stronger positive relationships within our Room 5's classroom community.  Blogging and commenting provides authentic experiences to purposefully utilize students' reading and writing skills. I always encourage my learners to check out their peers' blogs, give, receive and respond to feedback. 

My 2020 lockdown experiences proved that promoting peer blog commenting helps connect students with their friends, teachers and wider communities. Moreover, according to research, through exposure to a multitude of opinions and through awareness of writing for a wider audience, blogs also foster cognitive engagement and critical thinking because learners need to reflect on the possible reactions of others to their postings.

Examples of my Y2-3 learners' comments: 

Learning, Creating and Sharing - week 2

During the week following our first collaborative session, we continued to talk about our favourite books. One of my inquiry focuses is on making students' learning experiences authentic by designing LCS projects based on their interests and taking into account their identities. During this project, we put students' interests at the centre of their learning and I believe this approach inspired our young learners to create many wonderful written texts, art and digital objects.

Reflecting on our class identities, It was very interesting to observe how different classes focused on different aspects of LCS. One of the classes discussed the story elements and created their own characters and settings in response to the book they'd selected. I believe they now aim for rewriting the 'model text' and creating their own book! The students started to work on some illustrations. How exciting was to see such creative writers and artists! 

Another class focused on descriptive writing, unpacked new vocabulary and dug even deeper talking about characters' feelings in the book. The students presented their descriptions to the audience and received well-deserved Pakipaki!

My class decided to use one of the famous book characters and completely change the settings of the story! We brainstormed a lot of problems and solutions, wrote a number of short plays, acted them out and performed to the other classes last Friday. I promote the use of drama techniques to support literacy learning. I believe it makes reading and writing activities more engaging and meaningful for students,  enhances critical and creative thinking skills, thus I hope it will help my students to formulate and express ideas and opinions. 

Our Y2-3 students were highly engaged and motivated. They were proud to present what they had created and tried their best sharing authentic learning experiences. Our next step is to do some blog posts sharing our project with a wider audience and connecting our learners online.  Teachers will plan for shared writing lessons to write smart comments on the other class blogs and then allow our students to leave more smart positive personal comments.

Year 2-3 Collaborative Learn-Create-Share Book Week project

My personal goals:

Engage and collaborate with my team by involving them in the cross-curricular LCS project from the planning stage to the celebration of the school Book Day in 3 weeks

Provide our students with meaningful and exciting experiences based on their interests.

Day #1 

• Collecting student voice/ interests - Learner Identity

• Oral language 

• Vocabulary 

• Critical thinking

• Collecting and analysing data

• Love of learning 

• Creativity (Drama, Visual arts including modern visual arts which use technology: photography, video, filmmaking, etc)

• Cybersmart across the curriculum

• Learn-Create-Share!!!

What a day we had! Full of fun, reading, learning, creating and sharing our reading preferences and favourite books. We had to work together in a respectful manner and give our opinions. We, teachers, were blown away by our students' ideas and thinking! It was a long day but our young learners were absolutely enthusiastic to participate in this project. They took ownership of their learning and were proud to express their learner identities.

Our students' ideas:

The feedback from my colleagues after the beginning of this project was very rewarding. They found that their students were highly engaged and motivated during various follow-up writing and reading activities.  The outcomes were impressive quantity- and quality-wise. Even the reluctant writers asked to extend their writing time to complete their work.

We will meet and share our wonderful learning next Friday! The students are very excited to share with other students and find out what the other classes created during the week.

Planning my Intervention to Raise Student Achievement in Literacy

Inquiry: How can I change my practice to raise student achievement in literacy by promoting deep learning that requires students to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking across the curriculum using Learn-Create-Share?

I am a great believer that if a person genuinely wants to learn something, he/she will be successful. My job is to help my students find their interests, support and scaffold them during their learning process. I think about all the wonderful LCS opportunities that my learners and I can plan together to fully engage and explore in learning that is exciting and meaningful growing their learner identity as enthusiastic explorers and creators. 

This year, I’ve started to implement drama activities ‘giving students the chance to use all skills in decoding meaning, understanding the feelings of others, expanding vocabulary, making appropriate use of syntax, analyzing discourse, generating feedback within context, and building metacognitive knowledge’ (McMaster, 1998; Urian, 2000).

After analysing students voice and research findings, reading blog posts of my COL colleagues and reflecting on my teaching practice, I finalised my intervention that I have started to implement and already see clear signs of students successes.

My intervention is based on:

• Putting my students at the very centre of their learning and making their learning experiences authentic by designing LCS projects based on their interests and taking into account their identities.
• Scaffolding my learners during their projects by implementing and consistently using the tasks designed to improve their vocabulary and reading comprehension.
• Utilizing drama to develop cognitive engagement and critical thinking and raise students achievement in reading and writing.

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 

Professional Reading #3: Teaching Children to Read

This review of the evidence-based scientific research literature helped me to think of my own teaching practice of reading and how can I improve it to achieve good progress for my students.

This review contains a lot of information about teaching at different levels including the early school years, and it resonates with another research that I shared in my last post. 

The researchers looked at different types of instructions and discussed their effectiveness in teaching vocabulary and comprehension strategies.

Analysing both of these research reports, I've identified my next steps and will focus on these areas when inquiring into my own teaching practice and reflecting on it in order to form my hypothesis and plan my intervention:

 - teaching vocabulary (activities, approaches, material)

 - selection of texts 

 - explicit teaching instructions 

 - reading comprehension strategies

Professional Reading #2: Read about it : Scientific Evidence for Effective Teaching of Reading by Kerry Hempenstall

Title: Read about it: scientific evidence for effective teaching of reading / Kerry Hempenstall; edited by Jennifer Buckingham.

Major reviews of research on reading agree on the key components of effective reading programs:

• Phonemic awareness: Knowledge of, and capacity to manipulate, the smallest distinct sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. 
• Phonics: Learning and using the relationships between sounds and letter-symbols to sound out (decode) written words. 
• Fluency: The ability to read accurately, quickly and expressively. Fluent readers are able to focus on reading for meaning. 
• Vocabulary: The words children need to know in order to comprehend and communicate. Oral vocabulary is the words children recognise or use in listening and speaking. Reading vocabulary is the words children recognise or use in reading and writing. 
• Comprehension: Extracting and constructing meaning from written text using knowledge of words, concepts, facts, and ideas. 

The author unpacked every key element providing multiple sources of research behind each of them. I believe that our schools have been doing a lot of instructional teaching of decoding and fluent reading and we now need to explicitly target vocabulary and comprehension strategies at early levels.

Kerry Hempenstall quoted a number of researchers stating that 'vocabulary has significant corpus of research. Hairrell, Rupley, and Simmons documented six reviews and two meta-analyses published between 1998 and 2009.168 The findings across age groups from preschool through to Year 12 highlighted how important was early vocabulary knowledge and hence instruction to academic success.'

Most of our students arrive at school still operating at the 3-year-old level of language development and they definitely require supplemental intervention in addition to classroom-based vocabulary instruction in order to make desired progress. As stated in the article, in a study by O’Connor, Bocian, Beebe-Frankenberger, and Linklater, intervention at the beginning of school produced far better outcomes than did intervening later in that first year.

This reading confirmed my hypothesis sharing the research findings and emphasising 'that a multiple strategy approach is necessary for vocabulary building. The features highlighted are direct instruction/explicit teaching, guided instruction, multiple encounters of the same words in varying contexts, working with a partner or small group, story retelling, use of props or concrete objects, comprehension and vocabulary discussion, and ensuring vocabulary instruction is embedded in all

curriculum areas.'

The author explored a number of research papers, summarised and explained the proven effective teaching instructions that have been effective for teaching vocabulary and comprehension. He also compared two approaches to teaching reading: explicit vs discovery.  'There is a strong body of research supportive of a

systematic, explicit approach generally, but particularly when it involves learning of new concepts and operations, and also for students who struggle with learning. By contrast, approaches that are student-led, systematic, and rely largely on personal discovery have not been supported by evidence.' 

I found his literature review very interesting and it resonates with my hypothesis that using DATs and explicit teaching of the 5 key elements of reading will accelerate our learners. I will definitely use this review when planning (or improving) my reading programme.

Professional Reading #1: Closing in on Close Reading by Nancy Boyles

After I have finalised my teaching focus: vocabulary (H-F, word building and meaning), increasing their general knowledge and comprehensive strategies, I referred to research literature to find out the most effective strategies, approaches and tools.

I looked at the professional blogs of my COL colleagues and looked at the research literacy they recommended. I was interested in what approaches can help with the students' vocabulary and text understanding at the same time. 

Article: Closing in on Close Reading by Nancy Boyles

N. Boyles describes three things junior teachers can try to effectively use close reading: 

• use more short text;
• aim for independent reading by posing questions that go beyond the content of the text to look at the structure, craft, and integration of ideas throughout the work; 
• teaching students to observe details clearly in anything they read and analyze how those details work together

I have been using close activities in my teaching practice; however, I now look at them from a slightly different angle. I guess I see more purpose behind this exercise and also some ideas of how to run them more efficiently.

I've noticed there is a big emphasis on sentence structure along with the word choice and comprehension strategies. I'll take this on board and include into my group teaching practice.

Student Voice: Literacy Dispositions

In my last post, I discussed how an understanding of my students' learner identities is crucial for effective teaching and learning. During the lockdown, I collected evidence of how 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. This confirmed that my hunch about coherence in putting my students at the very centre of their learning and making their learning experiences authentic is crucial for their engagement and achievements and it makes a big difference in their learning outcomes.

As one of my inquiry next steps, I asked my students to complete a questionnaire about their literacy dispositions. It required my students to think critically about their own learning, self-evaluate and self-reflect. It was not very easy for my year 2 and 3 students. In the beginning, they said it was very hard and they were not sure. However, with my prompts, they started to talk about their learning in small groups sharing their ideas. It was very interesting to observe them making the first steps in thinking about their learning! After the small group discussions, I asked them to complete the questionnaire. Most of the year 3's students became very excited to express their thought and even asked if they could help younger learners with their forms. To keep the results and data truthful, all the students were asked to complete the survey independently. 

My preliminary findings showed:

• differences in students' personal interests (as expected)
• 53% students would prefer to create their own stories over recounts, reports and poems (was a surprise for me)
• girls like reading more than boys (as expected)
• the vast majority said that shared brainstorming helps them in writing (73%)
• 40% of students found that doing 'hands-on' activities help them understand topics better
• 53% use vocabulary displayed around the class to support their learning
• the vast majority identified that they need help with an understanding of unfamiliar words

Analyzing their answers and referring back to my own findings drawn from the formative and summative assessments, I finalised my teaching focus to accelerate my students in literacy: vocabulary (H-F, word building and meaning), increasing their general knowledge and comprehensive strategies. 

My next step is to make a hypothesis and do literature research to best advance my teaching practice and make an informed decision about tools and approaches that I need to implement in order to improve my students' achievements.

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.