2015 - Looking Backwards & Forward

Where has this year gone? Looking back at the year gone it seems such a blur. When I began the year I was unsure of what I wanted to inquire into as part of my professional teacher development. So I began the year by focusing on establishing a digital tool, Steps to Success, that students could use to self assess their writing and therefore make improvements. I then moved the focus of this digital tool into Mathematics to guide students to use numerous strategies when problem solving. Within both of these areas it was difficult to get students to engage with the tool due to their lack of engagement and ultimately their low key competencies levels. While I was inquiring into these areas the whole staff actually had a professional development focus around vocabulary and reading. Therefore my professional teacher inquiry began to focus on my reading instruction and specifically the teaching of vocabulary. So as I look back at the year I recognise now that I actually put more attention into inquiring into reading without realising and documenting. Now that I am at the end of the year I have reflected on the year past by documenting my reading inquiry and what my goals will be for next year as I will continue to develop and inquire into my reading teaching practice. I hope as you read this or have followed my blog over the year that my inquiry may have proven valuable for your own teaching development and practice.

Term 3 - Journey to engagement & ownership

This term the two words that come to mind when I consider the next part of my journey are engagement and ownership. At this stage I have the structures in place for my students to be able to identify where they are working at within a SOLO based rubric for mathematic strategies. But I need my students to fully engage with it in order to get results.

Previously I have had my students complete problem solving tasks, then use the Steps to Success rubric to identify what level they are working at and what they need to do next in order to move up a step. The main constraint to this is that the students simply find it just another thing to do and another thing that they can't really be bothered with. When thinking about this issue, I think engagement and ownership are the keys to enabling students to use these steps. If I can get my students to take ownership of their mathematics learning then it would hopefully change this attitude. If students were aware of what level they are at, and then feel personal responsibility to get themselves to a higher level, then lack of engagement would hopefully not be such an issue. Whilst ownership is the ideal goal I think there needs to be other goals/motivations in order to achieve ownership.

This term my focus is to get students more engaged and take more ownership within mathematics. I have a couple ideas of how I could use competition based strategies to get students to engage in their Steps to Success with the hope of their attitude and commitment to learning mathematics improve.

Term 2 Pitstop

Term 2 Reflection on my personal inquiry. This term my inquiry took a big change from being focused within Writing to now within Maths. I introduced a number of new learning methods which my students quickly took on board. These methods are to give my students the opportunities to develop their strategies for problem solving. These strategies are what they are then able to track their progress with and use to decide what their next learning step is. Here is a presentation that I presented to a group of teachers as an update on my Term 2 journey.