Food for Thought or Just One PAT Question Analysed

After publishing my post about PATs areas that we test on without teaching, I recalled and decided to share a story about my last year Y4 student who scored Stanine 9 in PAT but struggled with one particular question - "Visualise which shape a net will fold to make." 

At that time, I was placing an order to buy more maths resources for our school including a set of 3D folding shapes, which we used with our Year 3-4 classes. I wanted to provide our students with a hands-on way to explore and visualize 3D shapes and their nets. Little did I know that this tool would have a significant impact on their learning, even a year after using it. Surely, you can fold 3D shapes using paper, but we had an opportunity to purchase this maths equipment and students loved it!

Out of curiosity, I looked at random Y4 and Y5 classes to find out their answers to this particular PAT question for the past 3 years.

2020 - Term 4

2021 - Term 4

2022 - Term 1

2022 - Term 4 -  our Team excelled in the PAT "visualise a shape" question that had previously stumped many of Year 4 and 5 students.

2023 Term 1 (after the summer break, mostly the same students with some new intakes)

"Visualize which shape a net will fold to make." This question could be challenging for some students because of a specific skill we often do not cover in our maths programme. 

As seen from the examples above, after using the folding shapes in our team, students were able to visualize the 3D shapes and their nets with ease. They were able to apply their knowledge to the PAT assessment and, in Term 4 2022 for the first time in three years, most of Team Kea's students answered the question correctly. Furthermore, the majority of learners retained their knowledge after a summer break (this is not clean data as we have a number of new students from other schools and teams).

This set of data highlights the importance of analyzing assessment data to identify areas where our students need explicit teaching or additional support. 

Developing Team Trust during Team Teaching

"Active collaboration is particularly important for creating a growth-based learning environment and for increasing student learning progress. Research shows that teachers who work together and learn from each other are more successful in improving student outcomes than those who work alone." Through growth to achievement: Report of the review to achieve educational excellence in Australian schools, (March 2018)

I completely agree that working together helps to learn from each other in a seamless and practical way, right there at the right moment in time and this makes this learning more successful. What I've noticed is that team teaching also improves trust among the teachers. 

Another important aspect that team teaching brings to the plate is reflecting on the lesson plan. You are not planning just for yourself, you're planning for the team and this adds more responsibility and effort that each team member puts into their planning and... delivery. 

We noticed that our learners benefit from our collaborative teaching because we take collective responsibility for all learners, and we are consistent in our curriculum and experience delivery across the syndicate. We also observed that we (team teachers) model skills of collaboration to our learners.

Professional Reading to form a Hypothesis - #9

Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All 

by National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, February 1, 2024 

Eight High-Leverage Instructional Practices

• Establish mathematics goals to focus learning

• Implement tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving

• Use and connect mathematical representations

• Facilitate meaningful mathematical discourse

• Pose purposeful questions

• Build procedural fluency from conceptual understanding

• Support productive struggle in learning mathematics

• Elicit and use evidence of student thinking

This read was unpacking specific teaching practices, that are essential for high-quality mathematics education for all students.

Reflecting on my teaching practice and learning from the article, I confirmed that implementing Talk Moves, Number Talk and Problem solving are powerful tools of an effective maths programme. Another example of the HLP is a balance of group and mixed ability teaching in various learning situations.

This read resonated with my belief in the importance to explicitly focus on developing a Growth mindset and changing students' negative beliefs about 'being bad in maths' and developing critical thinking and achievement across the curriculum.

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

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.

Tools, Measures and Approaches

TAI WFRC: Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge.

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?

Firstly, I've reflected on my 2019 Inquiry and Term 1 2020 and analyzed what had been worked well for me and my learners in the past. Based on my experience, discussions with other colleagues and professional reading, I decided to focus on the following tools and approaches to carry out my TAI 2020:

• an integrated curriculum (Learn-Create-Share model)
• collecting student voice
• utilizing student interests and prior knowledge
• partnership with whanau
• developing a growth mindset and key competencies

To measure my students' progress and knowledge, I plan to use both formative and summative assessments with a bigger emphasis on formative assessment strategies. I believe this will help improve teaching and learning simultaneously. I aim to actively encourage them to be cognitively engaged and take ownership of their learning.

I think that explaining the assessment expectations to learners before any summative assessment helps them perform better. It is the same important as giving clear instructions and feedback.

Surely, along the formative assessments (observations, student voice, conferencing, tasks that require students to use skills or apply ideas, etc), I'll be using the standardized tests to evaluate my students' learning:
e-asstle writing and reading, Running Records.

I trust that 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.

2019 Inquiry Stocktake

During my last year inquiry about students' intellectual and cognitive engagement, I focused on providing real opportunities for my students to become interested in their learning. I believe that my cross-curricular approach led to their increased motivation, genuine cognitive engagement and the rewarding achievement data at the end of 2019.

I’ve used the ‘Inquiry Stocktake’ doc to reflect on my TAI 2019 and think about how I can improve my teaching practice this year.

What worked well in 2019: 

cross-curricular teaching, collecting student voice and building on their interest and prior knowledge, being observed by my COL colleagues and ALiM facilitators and receiving their feedback, working with data

Last year, I used a cross-curricular approach trying to extend our inquiry learning through various reading, writing and math activities and show my students a real purpose of each part of the Learn-Create-Share process.

I believe that I developed a range of teaching strategies and created tasks, follow-up and independent activities that supported my students not to just stay engaged and motivated during our projects but retain their new knowledge and skills and be able to apply them in real life for a real purpose.
Learning from observations: It was good to have a COL observation and numerous ALIM observations followed by discussions and feedback from my COL colleagues and the AliM facilitator.
Collecting my colleagues' voice was an interesting experience as I'd never done this before. It helped me to critically reflect on my practice, feel appreciated but also plan my next steps for improvement.
Collecting student voice in T2 about relationships and in T3 about communication helped me to identify the areas to pay more attention to. I'm glad that the students were feeling safe, happy and learnt a lot in my class (according to what they said:-)
Analyzing data and effectively using it for my planning. As a result, all of my students showed great progress in all areas of learning.

Challenges that I had in 2019: 

having a Y2/3 composite class and time challenge 

Having Year 2 and 3 students in a class was a bit challenging due to their age-specific differences (same as this year). Reflecting on my 2019 TAI, I need to better control myself in order to slow down as I don't want my students to rush through their activities as it will affect their learning outcomes and experiences. On the other hand, my advanced learners also have to be continuously challenged and engaged. It requires a lot of planning and preparations. I have to remind myself that although I have high expectations for all of my students, I must keep it less challenging for my younger students to make sure they are feeling successful and motivated.

As a professional, I am constantly learning. Whether we (teachers) are learning through PD reading or during internal or external PLD sessions, we are being exposed to a lot of new and important information that is supposed to enhance our skills and knowledge. However, there's a big difference between absorbing information and putting it into practice. Without applying newly gained knowledge, the training people have received will go to waste. It's important to have a strategy and time for implementing new learning.

The support I need in 2020

I am going to reach out to other teachers who proved to be effective practitioners, members of the Woolf Fisher research team and the Manaiakalani team to help me connect with other teachers who are passionate about the integrated curriculum.
Currently, I am meeting with GTS Principal and DP fortnightly to discuss what I’m doing to support other teachers and plan the next steps.