Inquiry 2016: How can I increase student independence in writing (lowest group)?

Writing and reading are passions of mine in the classroom. I enjoy teaching both of them. In my current class I have some very able readers and the average reading age is much higher than that of my last yr 3 class. However, I do have some very reluctant writers and others who i can confidently say find writing immensely difficult. I am determined to improve the writing of the children in this class. To do this, I will need my lower writers to become more able to write independently of the teacher and be able to meet my expectations without looking over their shoulder all the time as I want to make myself more available to the other children to help push them in their writing and provide feedback whilst they are writing, not when they have "finished".

I have started observing the writing that is produced and taking note of how I am teaching and how the children are responding.

It is early days.

2016: Term 1: Week 1

The week went way better than last year. I felt more confident in what i was doing and felt like i had some strategies and method. I struggled a bit with the new timetable. Creatures of habit us teachers apparently. But we must adapt or die. I need to really consider the time allowances that the new timetable provides more carefully. My reading activities were too difficult. Next week I am going to use the same template for my EE activities for all groups and introduce new templates to the whole class and then eventually pick and choose templates according to need and appropriacy. The class has some good writers but I am going to treat them like an ESOL class as of next week to push their sentence structure and grammar. Next week I will continue enforcing expectations and introduce the class rule-system (thinking space first time, out the class, the second). Still have to think about how i am best to distribute ipads and I need to make sure the kids feel accountable for the work they produce. Lovely kids. I'm looking forward to our journey together!

Term 4 Final Inquiry Presentation

Looking back, the year in Rm14 started with an overload of reward based management systems. We had The Throne, Teams, The Marble Jar, Brian the Bear. I found that these tools were successful to an extent: Children came to the mat quickly, they tidied their desks quickly, lined up well - but they were making my life too complicated with tallying points, making sure the same team didn't win week after week, nominating people to take Brian the Bear home etc The reward based system also wasn't something I was 100% sold with. I want to see intrinsically motivated children and I don't think constant chocolates is encouraging this. I also could see that many of the kids who i was really trying to target with these rewards were often indifferent to them. My lack of total buy-in also may have been evident to the kids. I also had too many systems running at the same time and for too long a timeframe. The kids possibly also lost interest I can appreciate the usefulness of an extrinsic reward as it DOES work, to an EXTENT. I think it could be useful to have 1 form of simply run reward system for the first term to help entrench routines and expectations. But it would have to be extremely simple and very easily managed. 

 I also had an incredibly useful piece of feedback from Helen King, one of my mentors at PES, who noticed that although I had expectations of classroom behaviour, I was not insisting upon them being met in the classroom. Specifically, I wanted the kids to sit quietly on the mat while I introduced the next stage of the day's learning. Some children were quiet while others were not meeting this expectation. So keen was I to carry on with the lesson, I would talk over them rather than insist on their quiet. This was a major learning for me and guided my classroom management for the rest of the year. This is also the key learning I will take into Term 1 Day 1 next year. 

Through my term 1 inquiry group chats with Russell Burt and Rob Wiseman, I came to see the role that an engaging activity can have in managing behaviour. Consequently I have spent lots of time working on creating engaging and challenging Explain Everything Activities to follow on group reading sessions. My first activities were too complex and not scaffolded enough and didn't encourage learner autonomy. They have come on since then with recorded audio instructions, making full use of digital affordances, repeated slide templates etc.  

What I need to do more of next year is provide more constructive feedback on the finished EE, share good EEs on blogs more and direct the children to them. My data was interesting. kids made more of a shift in the 2nd half of the year better readers made bigger shifts than average readers So what? get routines and expectations down quickly so learning can happen take regular running records of children and act on what i discover record the data beautifully and work with it use EE templates regularly and change up as we shift to a new term.

And finally ... I tried hard to create positive relationships with every child in room 14. Shaking their hand every morning and high fiving them on their way home. For me this felt like the right way to go about forging a classroom environment from which to build good behaviour, engagement and a love of school, and some learning.

Off to the museum: Managing at the museum

Room 14 went to Auckland museum last week. Our timetable was pretty full on, which meant we had 2hrs of self-guided museum time. This was a lot of time. Our team had put together an awesome scavenger hunt booklet which helped engage and guide the children during this time. The class was split into groups of 5/6 and allocated an adult. I took 2 of the most interesting boys who were tired but engaged throughout. I found the best way to help my group was to make the tour as structured as possible with them lining up, boys at the front, in between each stage of our visit and being very aware of their need for a rest or food. I also tried to take a genuine interest in what they were telling me about their experience at the museum and that I was enjoying being with them.

A "Yay Moment"

Ever since watching the Jim Henson's TV series "The Storyteller" as a nerdy 10 year old, I have loved stories and have been wanting to really tell a story to my class since day 1. I read to them everyday after lunch from a picture book and this engages the vast majority but until today I hadn't told them a good, old fashioned story.

I had read the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" to my 7 year old son the night before from a book and he really enjoyed it. So I thought why not give it a go with room 14?

I localised it to make it a bit more relevant to the kids (eg. the prince was a successful rugby league player) and it really worked. The whole class was totally engaged, some of the boys had never been so engaged in a story; to the point where the one boy who is rarely capable of sitting still long enough to follow a story was crying out "You see girls, that's what will happen to you!". Eyes were wide, faces looked worried and shocked in the right places. The transformation of prince into beast was greeted with a round of applause.

A few girls recognised the story as "Beauty and the Beast" but this didn't seem to stop them from enjoying it again.

Now, what to read next?

What can I do with the one slow reader in my guided reading groups?

In as couple of my guided reading groups, I have readers who are processing the texts much more slowly than the other readers in the group. Consequently, they are reading much more slowly and finishing texts much later than the others in their group. This is creating a problem in my management of the guided session. Do I cut them off before they have finished? Do we all wait patiently? 

Suggested remedies included:

putting them down a group

• child wont be challenged by the text and therefore may make less progress.

reading the same text before class

• child may see this as a punishment. The child also often arrives late.

having the child become aware of their reading speed 

• could be quite easily achieved as a post reading activity. Would she hear her "slowness"?

encourage a buddy reading time

• easily do-able. Paired with a more fluent reader could enable her quickly to compare speeds. 

End of Term 3 Inquiry

Before entering the classroom on day 1 of being a BT, I had these lofty dreams of creating autonomous, self-regulating children.  3 terms on, I realise that these were indeed lofty dreams that need scaffolding and support strategies and routines to help their realisation.

I have started to implement techniques and tools to try to ensure that the children are able to work successfully, independently from the teacher. These include having audio of instructions embedded in Explain Everything slides, going through follow up activities as a group before-hand, keeping follow-up activities straightforward and replicable and creating expectation where children realise that they need to work independently of the teacher.

I fear that I may have been responsible for encouraging a degree of dependency on the teacher but I have been made aware of this; of how some children will attempt to monopolise their time with me. I feel I am making positive steps away from this and i think that the children are benefitting.
Looking to term 4, i will persist with the strategies I have implemented and more than anything try to discuss "independence" and "autonomy" with the kids so that hopefully they can see where I am coming from and what i want to achieve which is, ultimately, children taking charge of and responsibility for their learning.