Inquiry: Week 7

Observations

Generally I am seeing an increase in confidence with the writing of some of the children. My more able writers are also producing some of the best work I've seen all year. My lower writers are not producing good work. Reasons for this are, I think, mainly behavioural and I'm trying to find a way to address these. They are given lots of scaffolding and support, but I'm seeing them surrounded by distracting children which results in no work.

My instinct tells me that I need to reconfigure the way the children sit as I have all the lower literacy kids sitting together so that I can help them. But what I am seeing is about 6 kids who aren't able to manage themselves sitting together, annoying each other and stopping each other from writing.

TBC

Inquiry: Term 2 update

The State of Affairs

So term 2 has begun and I have identified the children who need that extra help with their writing. These are the children who have more difficulty than the others in getting their ideas down onto paper. I have a list of 12 children. I am going to whittle this down to 5 in order to really see some progress. 

My feeling at the moment is that I definitely want to focus on the ESOL learner (Arthur), I also have a very able silver level reader (Ben), a very quiet one (Chris), one who seems consistently unable to complete class activities (Doreen), and another who is a total conundrum at the moment (Ed). A nut that is I think will be harder to crack than the others. I think that's enough to be going on with.

Arthur: Freezes when unable to spell a word correctly (cultural?), developing a sense of grammar.

Ben: Clever boy, a little nerdy, could be motivated more by the appeal of seeing writing on his blog.

Chris: lacks confidence, is starting to write more, responds well to PBL.

Doreen: a bit of a wild child, often ignore scaffolds and wants to write her own piece, needs assistance in crafting these though.

Ed: responds well to quiet and communication with whanau.

What's my goal with these kids?

I'd like to see them producing pieces of writing independently by the end of the term. By independently I mean without my presence over their shoulder. They may be using other scaffolds to assist them but I am hoping that they will be able to complete their expected work, essentially, by themselves.

End of Term 1, 2016 Inquiry: Getting reluctant readers to write

I reached a career changing conclusion this term.  One that, I guess, every teacher must reach at some point. One that is better reacher sooner rather than later: Kids learn differently. I realised that the 12 reluctant writers in my class have 12 different reasons (and some) why they do not freely put pen to paper. Each and every one of them have their own backgrounds, stories, learning needs that have determined how they approach writing. There isn't a magical broom I can use to sweep aside all these complications. There isn't 1 amazing writing lesson I can plan and teach that will blow their minds and motivate them to write beautiful sentences. Each of these 12 children has their own, unique to them, reasons why they find writing a challenge and are reluctant writers.

I have started to discover what some of these reasons are and have begun to implement strategies to try to help these kids succeed in their writing. For example the lower literacy learners are given very scaffolded templates to help them to complete the tasks, the ESOL learner is gifted quite a lot of vocab and closely monitored, the child with behavioural problems is carefully managed.


Term 2 will see me digging deeper in an attempt to help some of those 12 who I feel are still under my radar and still in need of help.

Incredible Years

I am 2 sessions into the Incredible Years programme and, without a doubt, there has been a shift in my teaching practice. I am feeling more comfortable with the way I am teaching and with the environment in my classroom. I think I am making progress with the kids who are often the most challenging and I feel I am making some closer connection with whanau.

Trying to bring large doses of positive energy into the classroom has been a challenge.  Not because I am not a positive person, just that I don't gush positivity. I have expectations that, I believe, should be met and the praise pops out when people go beyond those expectations. This has had to change. I am making efforts to praise kids for meeting those expectations, hoping that this behaviour can become viral. I am trying to catch my interesting kids being good and am choosing to ignore that which can be ignored.

I would love to know if the kids have noticed a change ... 

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.