Term 1, Week 10 - If Not Now, When?

Focus #1 - continue to work on the work-life balance
Focus #2 - grow my own passion for literacy
Focus #3 - grow my practice in numeracy
Focus #4 - building my practice in a traditional space

How’s this week been?

No gym sessions this week - energy levels were still not 100% after the weekend and I got into a routine of getting jobs done after school so will look to make up for this week over the upcoming holidays.  Great to notice that I actually missed exercise, so that is a bonus of not going this week!

I am still reading “The Invaders” by John Flanagan and enjoying it more as I read it.  The characters are being fleshed out more, particularly the supporting ones so I am glad I made the investment into the next two books in the series when I discovered them on sale a few years back.  Something that I am noticing though is how I need to put aside time for our class read-aloud as we are not making traction with the book and I do enjoy reading with the class.

We have selected our PLCs for next term to support our inquiry into numeracy.  I have chosen to join the group focusing on “using concrete materials to develop a rich understanding of mathematical concepts” as I feel this is what a number of my class require as we start to delve into new territories of numeracy next term and it will also build my confidence with how to properly utilise materials in my numeracy programme.  I am looking forward to having a shared focus on my inquiry as this is an aspect of teaching that I am missing from my previous experience at Stonefields.

We have had some great discussions in Room 13 this week about reflecting on the term that we have had and what we are looking forward to next term.  It has helped me identify who may still not be feeling part of the wider class and got me thinking about class culture over the holidays for anything that I can look to introduce in Term 2.

Teaching Highlights:
As mentioned above, we had a couple of great sessions this week on how we are finding life in the class and what things are missing from the kid’s perspective.  I did a bus stop activity where the kids had to respond to the following questions:

1. What have you enjoyed about Term One?
2. What have you found challenging about Term One?
3. What can we do differently in Term Two?

Without prompting, the kids got into the activity and I took the moment to stand back and observe.  At first, they were intent on adding their own responses on the sheets of paper, however, after around 10 minutes, I noticed that some of the kids started to talk to each other and ask each other questions about what they had put down on the paper.  This then turned into a whole class discussion and we made some goals that we wanted to achieve in Term 2.

Another thing that I was proud of the kids this week was that I decided that I wanted to grab a writing sample from them so I could assess over the holidays and plan based on what I found in these assessments.  These kids love to write, however, the writing sample prompts are never that fun so I discussed with them the day prior to them doing about why I was doing this and what could we get from doing this piece of writing.  Come Wednesday morning, I had 29 eager kids wanting to write about the life cycle of a monarch butterfly “because it would help me help them in their learning”.  Direct quote, no prompting needed.

Term 1, Week 9 - Feeling Fine?

Focus #1 - continue to work on the work-life balance
Focus #2 - grow my own passion for literacy
Focus #3 - grow my practice in numeracy
Focus #4 - building my practice in a traditional space

How’s this week been?

Only 1 gym session this week as I found myself getting a bit tired and run down.  This ended up with me taking Friday off to rest up.

The upside of being sick on Friday was that I was able to finish The Song of Achilles and have moved into the second book in the “Brotherband” series by John Flanagan.  I got into the Ranger Apprentice series a few years ago and ploughed through that so have started this series which I really enjoyed.  The backstory as to how John got into writing was something I found interesting where he started writing these stories as his son, at the time, was not interested in reading.  I have managed to hook 1 boy in my class onto the series so far as he was not enjoying Percy Jackson.

This week in numeracy I have been focusing on our Statistics strand as we near the end of the term.  I was also fortunate enough to have our Maths Lead come and model some number knowledge activities in class to a group of my focus learners as they move from Early Stage 5 (numbers up to 100) to become more confident with numbers past 100 leading into 1000 and 10,000.  As I have Learning Support in my class on alternate days, I will need to plan for this group of kids to have a boost of knowledge activities on those days.

I have also noticed that I am doing a lot more whole class teaching which is something that I need to look at for Term 2.  The majority of this term has been the build-up of our expectations and routines in Room 13 however it is slowly becoming the default for most of my literacy and numeracy teaching so now that I am getting a better understanding of the kids and what they are capable of, I should be starting to differentiate based on their needs.

Teaching Highlights:
Writing has been a highlight this week as we finish up our recounts of Garden To Table to send onto Anita at Stonefields for her learners to read and engage with.  Having this authentic audience has been really interesting as it has helped the kids focus on the following elements of their writing:

• The actual physical aspect of writing - as a class we chose to handwrite these pieces of writing as I noticed that when I said publish, the kids defaulted to thinking about typing their ‘good copy’ out and printing it.  
• The focus - while typically a rowdy class, when it comes to writing, Room 13 love quiet so we have made it a tradition to try and have as much quiet for around 15 minutes.  I have tried to implement the noise monitor on Class Dojo to help with this however the majority of the class seem to be able to manage themselves and are quick to let others know if they are not following suit.
• Feedback - we had a great session on Tuesday after I noticed I was starting to get the queues for conferencing (10 kids deep at one point!).  After some diagrams and discussion about them potentially only having a teacher edit and check their writing up until now, the kids were receptive to reading their writing to one another and I even had a few of the more confident writers start to critique and give feedback to each other.  This is very promising as I have also started to teach the class how to use both a dictionary and thesaurus in their literacy sessions so I will continue to grow this capacity as we move into Term 2.
• The level of detail - from my initial assessments, I noticed that the majority of the class were confident with simple recounts, however, these lacked detail.  Due to our prompt of writing recounts for another school who did not have similar experiences to ourselves, the kids really thought about how they could portray their messages.  This led them to use more adjectives, a range of different sentence types and a lot of them injecting their own voice into their writing. 

Term 1, Week 8 - A Bit Late!

Focus #1 - continue to work on the work-life balance

Focus #2 - grow my own passion for literacy

Focus #3 - grow my practice in numeracy

Focus #4 - building my practice in a traditional space

How’s this week been?

I am slowly getting into a routine with the workload with working to 5pm three nights a week so I can head straight to the gym afterwards.  I am finding that this time helps me finish any jobs after school as well as get organised for the next day.  This also means that I am getting around 3 decent sessions at the gym before going home.  I’m finding that this also means that I am not taking as much work home so once I get home, I do not have much to do in the evenings.

I have been using Goodreads to track my progress with reading books.  I am currently reading The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller which was her debut novel.  I had previously read Circe, her second novel which helped me remember all the Classical Studies I did at university.  I also found a Myth Atlas which I added to our class library and it has been great to see the kids show an interest in myths and legends.

Numeracy has been interesting - I have been doing some addition/subtraction diagnostics with the kids and moved into showing the kids some different strategies for this.  I have been showing them the reversibility of addition and subtraction as the majority of the kids are saying that they are confident with addition, however, struggle when it is subtraction.  We have been practising family of facts which I have been able to adapt for my four maths groups with the numbers used.  I need to explore resources in the Junior School as I have a student operating at Stage 1 of the New Zealand Maths Standards.  While challenging, I am excited to work at that level of maths as it will help me build an appreciation for the foundation of skills that all my class need to progress.

I have also noticed that I am doing a lot more whole class teaching which is something that I need to look at for Term 2.  The majority of this term has been the build-up of our expectations and routines in Room 13 however it is slowly becoming the default for most of my literacy and numeracy teaching so now that I am getting a better understanding of the kids and what they are capable of, I should be starting to differentiate based on their needs.

Teaching Highlights:

I was really proud of the kids this week as we had our first set of goal setting conferences with our whanau.  For all the kids, this was the first time that they did this and they handled it amazingly.  From previous experience, I noticed the majority of students tend to freeze in the moment so I thought I would keep this clear and simple of the kids by using a template.

The result was that all the goals presented were ones that I co-constructed with each student meaning that their voice was more present in the conference rather than me taking the lead.  The majority of the feedback was that the kids are enjoying being part of Room 13 and love coming to school so I was really happy to hear that.

Show Me Your Understanding - Update

I have been fortunate enough to pick up some time with our Agency team where I spend time observing another teacher's lessons to see how they are promoting agency within their practice.  Based on discussions had so far, I realised that I have been promoting aspects of agency within my numeracy programme based on the initial hunch I had earlier this year about the learners I am teaching.  Student agency is something that I have been wanting to investigate more due to moving to a different year level so I am grateful for the opportunity to spend this term doing so.

Reflection:
I have always given learners the opportunity to reflect in various formats however I noticed that this year I needed to dedicate specific time each session for learners to reflect on their learning.  I updated my modelling books to add in a slide like the one below where I ask the learners to reflect on what part of the learning pit they found themselves in during the session.

This is the basis that the learners to use and I found that it reflects the concept of the knowledge action gap that I heard about when attending the NZAI presentations earlier this year.  Each session learners have the choice to upload in SchoolTalk an element of evidence on that session.  Historically learners have seen this as completed work however I have been encouraging them to upload learning that they are still completing or reflections on how they have been finding the learning.  This is great as I am getting snapshots on all the groups thoughts.  Here are some examples of how the kids have been reflecting:

This has been going for a few weeks now so now the next steps is to build the kids confidence in the articulation of what specific elements of the learning that they are having issues with so I can tailor learning to help them with those.  I am still modelling thinkalouds to boost discussion and reflection in the moment so they feel confident to discuss at any part of the lesson.

Looking ahead:
I have had some conversations with the kids and their whanau about anxiety in maths.  When we discuss where this may come from, a lot of the conversations come back to some of the kids feeling surprised when we start a new unit of learning.  While at Claremont, I saw a wall display where the teachers encouraged questions from their learners on the next week's learning.  They will display both the learning goals or main objectives for the next week as well as resources for the kids to help them to make meaning of the topic.

As the kids love Padlet, I chose to create a digital format of this display which looks like this example:

After asking questions on the learning goals, I give the kids the option to book into a workshop based on their confidence in this topic.  So far the kids have really enjoyed this weekly part of our learning as they are coming to the relevant workshop with a lot more confidence and the questions they ask help me tailor the learning to any specific knowledge gaps.

Next Steps:

So how has this focus on communication impacted on the kids understanding?  I did some analysis based on the learners' Gloss assessments from Term 4 2017 to Term 2 2018 and for the majority, they have made shift in at least one element of this assessment (green). 

Looking forward to working with these kids for the remainder of the year!  We have moved into a strand focus with looking at elements of geometry and algebra which is new to both the kids and me so I am enjoying learning alongside this group of kids as we continue to communicate with each other about our numeracy.

Show Me Your Working (Understanding) - My Hunch

Having changed year levels this year, developing my pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has become a priority for myself.

This year I am team teaching in numeracy with a group of learners operating between Level 2 and Level 3 of the New Zealand Curriculum for numeracy.  This is a natural follow on for the numeracy that I was teaching in previous years and I am grateful for this foundation as I look forward to challenge myself in this space.

As the learners are operating at a higher level, my first noticing goes to how we are struggling as a group to articulate our numerical thinking when asked to explain how we came to a conclusion or got a specific answer.  My first instinct was to explore if there were particular vocabulary gaps within our group, however, what I am noticing more is a) a general lack of confidence with articulation of numerical thinking and b) a reluctance to do this in group settings aka 'the fear of getting it wrong in front of others'.

Fortunately for me, a lot of schools in our clusters are looking into this area and documenting through the use of their blogs, especially Pt England School, so it has been awesome to read and see how some of the teachers are developing these skills within their own numeracy programs.

I have also found the app Flipgrid helpful in developing the learners confidence in taking risks in articulating their strategies.  Learners are able to record themselves on their own device and listen back to themselves before posting the video to an online forum where other members of the group can listen and respond to the videos.  This has also served as a great link with our cybersmart curriculum.

Next Steps: Continue to look for opportunities to build these communication skills within our numeracy program.  I also need to see if the team will let me pay for a Flipgrid membership as the free version only allows you to activate one grid at a time.

I am also going to connect with some of my colleagues at Pt England to see how they are finding their PD and what are their learnings so far.

What's On Top for 2018?

Recently we have been asked to build our inquiries for 2018.  Given the nature of who I am as a teacher and how my brain works, I intend to embark on three inquiries this year - one being my main inquiry for the year and two smaller ones that focus more on specific elements of my practice.

My main focus this year is how I can use space as another teacher within my literacy program.  I will be labelling these posts with Inquiry - Environment.  This goal also speaks to some of our COL achievement challenges, with particular focus on goals two, three and five.

My secondary focus will be examining how I am developing learners' articulation skills within numeracy.  These posts will be called Inquiry - We.  This also has connections to the COL achievement challenge six.

My last focus is reflecting on myself as a practitioner, especially as I am a mentor teacher to an AUT student this year.  This posts, called Inquiry - Me, will be focusing on my reflections as I build my coaching ability with an adult.

While I appreciate that it may seem ambitious to achieve all three, I think having the platform of my blog to help me articulate will help me document my thinking and build my reflection skills further.

2017 Reflection on my Impact

With the end of the year drawing to a close and assessments finished, I thought it would be timely to reflect on what impact I had this year and how I would use any learning from this year to help form next steps for 2018.

I did some data analysis on the shift of my learners this year. I measured those who had had the expected 12 months gain (i.e. maintaining their National Standard curriculum level between their 2016 and 2017 EOY results.) and those who had accelerated their learning and had 18 month or greater gain (i.e. shifting from Below Standard in 2016 to At Standard in 2017, or shifting from At to Above Standard).

Numeracy:

The majority of the learners that I taught for numeracy maintained their progress and will be moving into next year with a strong foundation for the continuation of their maths knowledge.  Looking at this data, my numeracy practice is something that I want to continue to evolve as I feel that I can improve in this space.  During the middle of this year, I moved away from the digital aspect of my instruction based on feedback from my principal when I went to her to ask for help to see how far I could challenge some of my groups.  Learning became hands on and we did tangible examples using pen and paper during instruction, allowing learners have gain success with new strategies and having these to refer to as they moved through their follow up activities.  This is something that I intend to continue moving into 2018.

Reading:

While this data looks very similar to my numeracy groups, this set shows that I have continued to push learners who are currently at 'Above Standard' for them to maintain this shift.  The reading groups I worked with were all very enthusiastic readers and now all reading at Level 2 of the NZ Curriculum.  I have really enjoyed my time with these learners as they have allowed me to blend other areas of the curriculum into my reading practice.  Using tools like GetEpic! has allowed me not only to offer more opportunities for students to access multimodal texts, but also allowed me to teach skills like research and inquiry which is something that I am going to continue into next year.  

Writing:

This has been my biggest impact and something that I am most proud of as we now have a gang of writers who are enthusiastic about writing and want to continue this journey.  For some learners, this has meant that they have made considerate progress however the attitude they know have for writing is what inspires me the most!  As a writer myself, I need to ensure that I am continuing to build my craft and practice to continue to develop and challenge others to write.  Knowing myself as a writer will allow me to see opportunities to engage with my students and colleagues as well as continue to challenge my mindset as both writer and educator.

So what's next?

I am moving into a new year level in 2018 teaching Years 4/5/6 with three other teachers.  I am excited for this challenge as it not only means that I am moving with some of my learners that I have been teaching this year, but also reconnect with learners that I taught in 2016 who will now be in Year 5.  I am also excited for the opportunity to teach at some different curriculum levels as well as working alongside some other teachers whose practices I am interested to tap into and see what impact we can grow for our 2018 cohort!

Perceptions of Progress

In order to prepare for Term Four, I got learners to do a reflection on how they enjoyed their learning this term as well as ask some other questions to get insight into how they were finding my planning and instruction.  As these learners have been with me for the majority of the year now, I chose to add in a question about had they felt that they had made progress in their learning as I was interested to see what voice came back from them in this regard.  Having used Google Forms to capture this information, I have been able to analyse and graph their responses.

NUMERACY:

All these learners are now moving from Early Stage 5 to Stage 5 so it was great to see from their responses reflect some of the different areas that we were learning about this term.  I chose to explore a more hands of approach with these learners where we problem solved together and share our ideas on a group modelling book which the learners enjoyed judging by this graph.

I also chose to dedicate one of our weekly sessions to building their confidence with strand maths as most of our learning had centred around either number knowledge or strategy.  By making these lessons more hands on, the learners have been able to make progress in areas that historically I have left to the end of the term to go through and they have been able to make connections to other parts of their numeracy learning.  However how did they rate their own progress?

Reading through the responses, the majority of them talk about being able to work through 'harder' or 'bigger' strategies which rings true to how I introduced the bulk of the Stage 5 strategies to the groups.  We would start with Stage 4 or Early Stage 5 strategy first and unpack that before making connections to the Stage 5 strategy.  The one learner who felt that they did not make any progress is one that I have been tracking for confidence and their response reflects this.  What was more awesome to read however was that they wanted to continue their learning and wanted more assistance (a 'workshop') to help them with this.

READING:

We have had a busy term with literacy and these learners have been able to move into more complex texts based on the learning that we had done the previous two terms.  We have also looked at building our inquiry skills with information literacy.  As I have mentioned earlier, this group are very engaged and their reflections about the term mirror my observations:

The two learners that said 'no' are ones that have recently moved to new reading levels and I have been working with them to manage any anxiety over the shift in focus.  

I also asked all the groups about what they thought their reading focus was for this term (please note, it was a bit of a trick question as all answers they could choose from were focuses but I was more interested in seeing how they responded):

Gold 21 and 22 Groups:

Silver 23 and 24 Groups:

Having asked about their focuses for the term, it was great to see how some of these had come into their responses about making progress.

I am currently looking at how learners self-report as part of my dissertation so am aware of any bias that may come from these responses however I am more happy to see that the learners are seeing themselves making progress.

Google Forms are Choice!

I am a big fan of using Google Forms in my practice.  It is a great way to capture voice, check for understanding and gain feedback on lessons.

However when I did my Level 2, I learned about how you can maximise the element of choice in your forms.  Prior to this, I had created forms that took learners through a series of questions from start to finish.  However now I can add sections to a form and have learners go to different parts based on responses that they give.

This has helped me support learners who may struggle with a concept so rather than just have them answer "no" or "I don't know" to a question, I can now take them to a different part of the form where I can ask specific questions to help me gain further understanding of what I might need to assist them in their learning.  I also learned how to add videos to help learners build their knowledge of concepts before answering questions.

I have updated a lot of the current Google Forms that I use with my groups and now really enjoy seeing how learners are making choices and decisions and then justifying these decisions.  Here are some examples of how I have updated these forms.

Reading:

I have been getting the groups to evaluate their texts this year by rating it on a likert scale, however this term I chose to change it up and allow learners the chance to give a more definitive answer which is closely followed by the chance for them to justify their decision based on their response.

Numeracy:

I am revisiting a lot of the Early Stage Five Addition and Subtraction strategies with my groups so have been giving them some activities and videos to help me gauge their understanding before moving onto the Stage Five equivalent strategy.  This helps me to structure the learning based on which learners are feeling about the current learning.

Writing:

Similar with my numeracy groups, I am trying to do some refresher workshops with my writers on how we refine (edit) our writing.  This also gives me the chance to see what learners need assistance with their current skill sets or spot opportunities for future workshops or sessions.

To sum it up, I think my title of the blog post hits home - I do find using Google Forms a key part of my practice and am looking how I can continue to challenge my skills in this area.  Stay tuned for future updates!

Mid Year Reflection: My Practice in Numeracy

Similar to the learners I work with in reading, I collected voice from my numeracy groups to analyse both engagement and shift.

In relation to results, all the groups have maintained their 'At' call in National Standards as they are all now working towards operating at early Level 2 of the NZ Curriculum.

Term One was about consolidating all the learners knowledge and strategies at Stage 4 as I had learners working at all different parts of this so this term has been developing and building their confidence in Stage 5 Number Knowledge and introducing them to a number of the strategies for both Addition/Subtraction and Multiplication/Division.  As you can see in some of their responses, some of these strategies have really stuck with them.

One of the main differences that I did this term was to create four sub groups within the group so I could differentiate learning to the level appropriate for the learners.  This helped me challenge particular learners as well as support and develop confidence in others.  Here is the snapshot at where the current engagement levels are at:

This goes with my gut on how I felt learners were feeling about their numeracy learners.  The four learners (21.1%) are learners who have developed the confidence to tell me when they are stuck in their learning and this has taken a couple of terms to build this ability.  

The biggest learning curve this year in numeracy has been my own PCK - last year I was working more with our Year 2 learners in Stages 3 and 4 so moving into Early Stage 5 has been both exciting and challenging as I think of ways to engage with learners.

Using the kids love of Pokemon to teach place value was something that I thought was a bit random at first however the kids loved it and I managed to help some learners overcome the obstacle of regrouping with this activity.

That is the key to keeping thing fresh - teaching numeracy can be black or white.  Either you know the strategy and get the answer correct or you don't.  So my personal challenge is to look to develop my creative skills in teaching numeracy to continue the engagement for both the learners and myself!

Term One Reflection and Next Steps for Term Two

Something that I have noticed Ashley do really well is reflect on each term using the voice from her students to help her take stock of her teaching practice and help inform her next steps.  It was something that I wanted to put into practice for this year, especially with my dissertation focusing on the use of feedback.

This term I chose to do this with both my reading and numeracy groups as my writing groups will be focused on next term with my dissertation intervention.  With each group, I asked the following questions:

• How had they enjoyed the learning this term?  Learners could rank this on a likert scale from 1 to 3.
• What did they enjoy during the term?  This is free text where learners could give me some insight into what they enjoyed in the particular learning area.
• What did they find challenging this term? Again free text response to help me understand if I need to clarify or revisit some areas.
• What can I help each learner with in Term 2?  Hopefully getting some voice from the learners on areas that they felt they needed assistance from myself on.

Learners were given time to reflect through the term using both their progressions and modelling books and then could respond via a Google Form that I had set up for each group.

READING

I have really enjoyed the term with my reading groups.  We have managed to click as a wider group and each group has formed a close bond even with learners moving in and out of groups based on their current reading level.  In regards to levels, 85% of the group have moved at least one reading level and I am now looking at how I bridge some learners from the end of Year 3 standard into the beginning of Year 4 standards.

In relation to engagement, this graph shows that 74% of the group scored 3 meaning that they have enjoyed reading a lot this term.

From the responses, I seem to be hitting the mark with the texts I am selecting and the follow ups that I am creating however I was more excited to read some of the comments with what the learners were finding challenging or required assistance with next term.  A lot of the learners are developing their awareness as readers and I had noticed a trend with them that our word attack strategies were an area that we needed to develop further so this is a great goal for Term 2 to achieve with the learners.  I also need to look at how I am modelling and giving instructions with the follow ups as a lot of learners remarked that they were finding these difficult.

NUMERACY

It was interesting to compare the responses from my numeracy learners.  In regards to engagement, the number of learners that enjoyed it is sitting around 60%.  As the learners are at a similar stage, I had been doing a lot of whole group teaching and running opt in workshops for those learners who wanted further assistance and my gut is telling me that this approach may not be hitting the mark with some of my group.  What I have decided to do for Term Two is create numeracy groups and I will work with these groups based on their needs.  While this may require more planning time, I should be able to focus the time with each group better.

I felt that the responses from this group have really allowed me to see where I need to focus on the learning for next term.  We are all moving into Stage 5 number knowledge and continuing to develop our multiplication and division strategies.  I found it interesting that both Kahoot and Prodigy (read Chelsea's blogpost on it) had got a few mentions seeing how I had only introduced both to the group in Week 8.  I have shared Prodigy with families as a way for the learners to practice their maths skills at home so great to see that the engagement with this tool at home.

CONCEPT

I am starting to investigate our Term Two concept of "being our best self" by looking at the school's wellbeing progressions - we are meeting next week for our planning days but I am excited to be delving into this part of the curriculum.  Stay tuned for an update on both this and how I am going to be planning for my writing groups.