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.
