TV show Raising Children features my class!

Check out this Raising Children episode because it features Pt England School and my class!  Only two days left to watch!

Watch Raising Children - Sunday 3 May - TVNZ OnDemand

The next leg of the Steps to Success journey

Here is an update of what I have been doing in my inquiry and where I am heading next...

Developing a dialogic, orally expressive classroom.

This term as part of our personal inquiries we have the privilege of having a number of professional development sessions. This week we had Dr Jannie van Hees present on how to develop a dialogic, orally expressive classroom. 

In Jannie's presentation there were a number of points where I was challenged to reflect on my practice. She began by asking us two questions. How do you encourage and promote oral language and dialogic teaching? And how do you explicitly grow your student's expression? When reflecting on these questions I found it hard to pinpoint when during the day do I actually explicitly teach and promote oral language. During the day I am continually in conversation with my students but there are not many times when I am deliberately teaching and enabling oral language. Every week when I take literacy reading groups I have 10-20min with a small group of students. During this time we read our text and discuss it with preprepared questions. I am often encouraging students to share and explain their thinking because I am interested in their ideas rather than focused on developing their expression. These times would be perfect opportunities to teach, model and encourage further dialogic expression. 

Another major point that I took away from this presentation was the need to gift students with language and vocabulary. Unfortunately many of my students have not had vocabulary and language rich childhoods. Of which this means many of them have limited vocabulary and more importantly limited ability to process and express language. Students need to have this ability to express language because language makes meaning. Meaning is foundational to developing, interacting and communicating fluently in this world. Jannie challenged us with the point that if we continually question students and aren't gifting them new language then they can and will only ever recycle that which they already know. We need to deliberately input language into our students otherwise there will be no increase. Once we gift students language then their brains can be pushed and their expression can grow.

As practical application from this discussion there are a couple activities that I want to incorporate within my daily classroom practise.

• Provide extended texts, talk and videos to students to gift them vocabulary. Then to establish this vocabulary and challenge their brains get them hold, discuss and retell the information.
• Before completing a piece of writing get students to sort the information in their head, retain their whole story and share to their peers or back as a whole class.
• Have a word of the day where as a class we explore a new word and challenge ourselves to use it throughout the day/week.

Prize wheel - Positive behaviour!

This term we have been wanting to introduce a new positive behaviour system into our big learning space. So after some thought and a days work this is my next big idea. Throughout the day students will be rewarded for positive behaviours and focused learning. Each rewarded student will have their name written onto the Wheel of Fortune. Once the wheel is full of names the wheel will be spun and the lucky student(s) will be rewarded. After this all the names will simply be rubbed off and another round will begin.

Term 1 Pitstop

Term 1 update on my inquiry.

Steps to Success

Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying to develop an chart that will enable students to identify where they are and what they need to do to achieve a higher standard. To begin my inquiry I have focused on writing and specifically punctuation. Before getting to my final chart I went through a number of steps to ensure that they would be accurate and also work well digitally on student blogs.

Chart 1: I inserted progressions into spreadsheets but these were too broad to be effective.

Chart 2: I took on specific writing progression and using SOLO made a chart which students could identify themselves on and see their next step. The downfall with this chart was when embedding a Google Spreadsheet into a blog the size adjustments are not very smooth and it is too difficult for students to do it themselves.

Chart 3: Using the same information as the previous chart I make this chart in Google Presentations. This worked much better because the process of embedding a presentation into a blog is easier and students can easily adjust the size to fit the layout of their blog nicely. The bonus of this chart being embedded into the blog means that student can add links to pieces of writing as evidence and they don't need to update their blog because it updates automatically. Also another bonus is that these links work when embedded on their blog so any viewer of their blog to click on and see their writing evidence. 

Chart 4: After presenting this chart and working through it with a number of students I quickly discovered that I needed to make each step very clear and give more detail. For example I needed to state how many sentences a couple is. So my final process has been to amend each steps and this is the final chart of which I am using with my students at this stage. 

Going SOLO

How can students being aware of what they are learning and what they need to learn to accelerate cognitive engagement? 

Over the past few weeks I have put much thought into how I could physically carry this out. Initially my plan was to use progressions with each student to identify what level they are working at. Then to make these progressions visible to the students so that they can see what is expected at the next level. But, I have faced a number of problems with this initial plan. Firstly our school progressions are very broad and are not worded in such a way for students to understand and identify achievement clearly. Secondly because the progressions are per year, the progress of a student is going to be very minimal. Therefore, such a goal could potentially be too hard and take too long to give students any sense of achievement and motivation. So this has left me with the need to have small achievable learning steps for each specific learning intention/WALT. 

The new direction which I have now taken to try satisfy this need is to use SOLO Taxonomy. In a recent meeting as a whole staff we explored SOLO and how it provides a model of understanding with several steps. From previous experience I value how SOLO breaks down learning intentions to give the learner explicit steps of their understanding. Therefore students are able to answer these three questions. What am I learning? How is my learning going? What do I need to learn next? 

As a result of this new direction with SOLO my original goals are the same but instead of using progressions directly I will break down each progression with SOLO to create achievable and visible learning steps.