What can I change my practice?

6. Develop a set of hypotheses about patterns in your teaching that could be changed to more effectively address the student learning focus.

Reflecting back on my teaching practice I have asked myself many questions. In this post I have been quite critical of myself. I believe that this will help me develop.

Hypothese:

Scaffolding: 
Am I under scaffolding, how much scaffolding is right? I have read a lot and had a lot of professional conversations about scaffolding. I have also been thinking a lot about this and I often think I limit scaffolding sometime because I value independence particularly in writing. So How much scaffolding is right?


Gifting: 
Am I gifting the right amount and how much should I be gifting? This links to my pervious idea and this blog post. I currently do quite a lot of gifting. I do it in dictation, word walls, examples and shared writing. I do wonder though how much is too much and what should I gift. I have some writers for whom even simple words are challenging how much do I gift and how much do I expect them to try on their own?


Connections between reading and Writing: 
Am I helping students to see the connections between reading and writing? I have seen more shift in reading than in writing, at this early stage in the year. It leads me to wonder am I making enough of a connection between reading and writing.

Sight words: 
Am I supporting sight word development in my classroom in both reading and writing? Currently sight word practice happens mostly in reading and focuses on the reading of sight words. Would linking this more to writing, through speed sight word writing games, dictation and word work support writing speed and increasing independent writing ability? How would I make this fun and different?

Rewindable:
Am I providing enough opportunities for children to rewind and revisit their learning? 
Well we capture a lot of the learning and ideas we share. I have noticed that I am not providing the time I think learner need to revisit this themselves. We often revisit as a group but how to I empower students to take responsibility for finding what they need when they need it.

Feedback: 
Can I development better feedback loops, teacher to student and student to student? 
We have a system of feedback that is very teacher to student. This limits the amount of feedback they get. How can I expand this feedback?

Student choice:
How can I cater for student choice and student voice when children need a lot of scaffolding and gifting to write? The thing I have really noticed is that many of the children in my class who struggle to write have great ideas they can share orally and even record but when they come to write them they freeze because they can't spell it, or they struggle to get the words onto the paper. I have found gifting and dictations work well for them but this limits their creative voice. So how do I cater for their individual stories and gift for their individual stories when they are all different and there are over 30 of them?