What we think Children...

As part of my Inquiry I worked with Hannah and Danni to create surveys for the learners,  Leadership team and children about maths at our school. 

By far the most interesting and influential of the surveys was reading what the kids had to say about their maths. 

What I found interesting was the level of recognition they had about their strengths and needs. Many identified the need for more times table knowledge and the attitudes of learner in maths were very different from the completely positive view the children had when we did a reading survey earlier in the term. 

I appreciated the honesty that come through when the children wrote about what they wanted their teacher to know. 

Below are the results from the Child Survey found here. 

What we think teachers...

As part of my Inquiry I worked with Hannah and Danni to create surveys for the learners,  Leadership team and children about maths at our school. 

It has been interesting to see what the teachers think are the key areas of need and to read descriptions of what is happening in each year level. 

What I found most interesting was that well teachers felt they were teaching basic facts with a whole class approach through song, movement, Xtramath, Mathwhizz. It was also an area in which they felt there was a big need for children that wasn't being addressed. 

They also mentioned the different between strand and number knowledge teaching and the pressure this creates for doing everything well which was similarly mentioned in the SMT survey. 

What I liked and appreciated about this was the clear links to what the children thought about their maths (although these were only year 4 learners) and what the teachers noticed as needs.  

Below are the results from the Teachers Survey found here. 

What do you think SMT...

 As part of my Inquiry I worked with Hannah and Danni to create surveys for the learners,  Leadership team and children about maths at our school. 

Looking at the results has given me an interesting preceptive on what are believed to be shared challenges across the school and what are challenges that only the children identified. 

Below are the results from the Leadership Survey found here. 

The first view I wanted to share was that from one of our management team. I share that basic facts, place value and foundation teaching are strength, well more consistency, earlier teaching of multiplication and teacher knowledge building are gaps that we need to work on improving. 

Finding Out More

 To understand more about the school-wide problem of mathematics we worked collaboratively together to create three surveys. These Surveys looked at teacher opinions and thoughts about mathematics. The thoughts of the senior management team about mathematics and our school. Most importantly for me what the children felt they're learning in mathematics and how important it is to them. By collecting this data we are getting more perspectives and understanding the problem from a range of point to point of view.

Survey for Senior Management

Surevy for teacher: Surevy for Children:

My class

 The start to 2023 has been anything but normal, with storms raging across New Zealand meaning a later start to the year then planned and the school closing for a day so that we could all stay safe. 

Another surprise which perhaps shouldn't have been a surprise coming off 2022 was the way in which my class jumped straight into learning, talking, sharing ideas and pushing themselves to both complete set tasks and extend their thinking. 

With this exciting development I have started to rethink my inquiry focus. In 2022 I was thinking of focusing on reading specifically critical and collaborative literacy. As a look around the room in week 2 of the term I can already see these elements developing from my current practice. As such I wonder whether this focus is needed. 

As I reflect on the conversational groups I see and the details in literacy I am reminded of the stark contrast with mathematics in my room. During maths time children appear to be less collaborative and see maths as less of a discussion and more of an independent activity.  

As such I am beginning to question which approach would be most beneficial to my learners this year. 

In saying this no matter which approach I take I want the goal for learning to be around collaboration and critical thinking and for my inquiry to no longer be a solo endeavour but rather a collaborative quest in which the burden and rewards are shared. 

Creating, Collaborating and Coding

Mathematic can often be seen as a right or wrong type subject. Well there are many ways to solve problems the goal is the find and answer. This often makes it hard to get excited or collaborated. 

One things we have done this year to try and build this collaboration was finding ways to integrate. This lesson was a good example of this. Feel free to check it out. 

See Class Onair Lesson 

 

Term One Data: A first look

As Term 1 approached I was filled with excitement for what my inquiry might be and the benefits it might bring to my teaching and the learning of my students. 

I had seen the positive impact that movement and song had had on learning in the past and during lockdown I again saw the excitement and eagerness of the children to engage in Jump Jam and other physical activities even from home. I began to wonder if this could help to combat the challenge we were having in Mathematics were children were struggling to retain the key facts and ideas needed to solve more challenging problems. 

As you can see I got excited and may gave jump the gun a little bit. 

Coming into term one things were not normal (if normal is even a thing anymore). The omicron wave swept through our community bring down class numbers and meaning constant change. Luckily my team planned together reducing stress but as limiting the amount of data collection I could do for my Inquiry. 

In mid February I collected some data with the learners in front of me. I looked at their Mathswhizz Levels from their placement tests. 

I also asked the 9 learners present at that time to complete a survey about their feels towards maths and how they view their ability. 

Majority of the learners stated that they always or often enjoy solving maths problems. Only one of the 9 children said never and one said sometimes. 

We asked about their use of counting and ability to remember facts. Most said that they count to solve problems with only one learner saying they never did. They had a more positive view on their ability to remember facts with 3 stating always, 2 sometimes, 2 occasionally and 1 never. 

What this shows is from this small sample they are aware that while they enjoy maths there are areas that they struggle with. 

I hope to redo this survey and a parent version in early term 2 when more learners are at school.  

Looking Closely at the measures

 As it comes to the middle of term 2 I have been thinking about what data I have collected on my inquiry group and how this might be repeated at the end of the year to provide a rich profile of change in student learning. 

Through taking this measure I have come to understand the issue and hope that through changed practice that I will see improvement and change across all measure at the end of the year. 

I have already repeated some measures including running records and will be sharing what I have seen in student shift in the coming weeks. 

Collecting Data Picture Vocabulary

During my data collection phase I talked with my CoL colleagues and they suggested that will early data pointing towards a need in vocabulary some data on oral language might help to understand the challenges for students in their learning. 

For this task I asked students to tell me what they noticed in the picture in as much detail as they could. 

What I noticed:

• Children trended to state what the could see with little or no descriptive language. 
• Some descriptive words were used including, swirly, beautiful, colourful, windy. GL used the words old fashioned and asked questions. 
• BJ talked about the thing that attracts internet. This was a good example of missing vocabulary. 
• GA4 described things as big, short, colourful and beautiful. 

What questions do I have:

1. How do I build the vocabulary needed to talk in detail?
2. What vocabulary is most critical to help students read across the curriculum?
3. How can I developed students ability to build vocabulary knowledge independently? 

Student Voice

As part of my data collection, I sat down with 8 students from my target group to gain a better picture of their feelings about reading and what they saw as their strengths and needs. 

Below you will find their responses to a range of questions about reading. 

What was interesting about this data was: 

• 7/8 students mentioned that they found words challenging with most making references to not knowing what they meant. 
• All students shared positive view and attitudes towards reading. 
• Most of the children talked about positive home reading experiences happening weekly with 2 making connections to special texts relating to their families. 
• One student asked that I read to them more often, another stated she wanted me to explaining the words and text ideas in detail to them. Others mentioned helping them with word knowledge and breaking up words to understand them. 

What trends to I notice:

1. Children have a positive attitude towards reading. 
2. Children are aware that they have a challenge around vocabulary. 

What questions does this raise fro my inquiry: 

• How can I use the childrens' positive attitudes to build vocabulary? 

Preliminary findings

Begin to collect evidence and data  and come to the next session ready to share your preliminary findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge i.e. using your baseline student data and evidence. 

Before reading this post I suggest you look back at a pervious post I wrote about the Catalytic Issue as I look back at progress in reading made by my target learners in their reading journey so far at Pt England School. 

As a start to understand my data I looked closely at PAT and STAR data. What I noticed was across my target learners their was very little variation when it came to over all achievement. Children in my target group had a star scale score of between 32-59 points, giving them a Stanine score of 1 or 2 against the end of year norm. 

Star Test Data

From looking closer at this Star Test data it was clear that students struggled with vocabulary which asks children to identify a synonym for a give word. Children in my target group all got less than 4/10 questions correct in this area. This poses a question around students wider word knowledge which, I now want to collect more data about. 

PAT Reading Comprehension Test Data

The PAT reading test showed similar but different result from the star with students in my target group scoring a scale score of between 2.6 and 18.1 with stanines ranging fro 2-4 with most children scoring a stanine 3. What I noticed when diving deeper into these score was that students did not have one text type they scored well on it tended to be one question for each text they got correct. From this I wonder if the vocabulary in a range of text types played a role in their comprehension? I also wonder what exposure they have had to a variety of text types. 

Running records

After doing a running record on each child in the group I found that many moved up a level more more during term 1. With one student moving up a year in term 1. From looking closely at the running records it was clear that the main error in decoding which they struggled was the topic specific language. Errors were not made on sight words or those easily decoded but tended to be on words that needed context to fully understand. For many of this group they still understood the text and were able to answer literal comprehension questions some struggled with the inferential questions. 

While there is still more data to analyse and doors to look behind the door that stands out for me from this findings is a need for vocabulary to be front and centre of my inquiry and perhaps exposure of a wider range of texts within a shared context. 

I am still working on building a more qualitative picture through the collection of student voice and more anecdotal data.  

Why this challenge?

Describe how and why you have selected this challenge of student learning. Locate your inquiry in the context of patterns of student learning in Manaiakalani overall. 

It is never easy selecting only one challenge when I am thinking about inquiry. I always find myself asking what will have the most impact for my learners, my teaching and support other teachers. 

It became very clear at our sense-making presentation at the beginning of the year that there is a lot of work to be done around drawing on what we already do well in writing and capitalising on this in reading. It is also clear that my class fit the the pattern of reading data from Manaiakalani as a whole and our school data. They have not been making accelerated progress but are making small steps in the right direction. 

We chose to look at the critical thinking and creative responses as we saw from the data shared by Rebecca that while we as teacher feel this is an area we do well in it is really not at this stage. We theorised that if we put more responsibility on learners to think and create they will think more in depth about the texts they read. 

 

Teaching as Inquiry: What is the challenge?

Summarise the challenge of student learning you plan to focus on in this inquiry. Be as clear and specific as you can about the evidence you have about this to date.

This year I am working alongside side Angela Moala to collaboratively inquiry into the questions, How will using a variety of high interest texts and providing open tasks impact students critical thinking? 

This inquiry focuses on the achievement challenge Lift the achievement in Reading for all students, with a particular focus on boys and Māori students (both genders) years 1-13. 

I chose to continue working on this challenge as it is clear that we are not making enough shift 1.5 years or more for all learners in reading. While students seem to have developed a voice in their writing process and this has empowered them to become writers and story tellers who write often and make significant shift in their writing ability these skills are yet to transfer to reading. So from a general stand point I know we as a team of teacher still have a lot of work to do to really get children moving in this area. 

We also chose this focus as a way of responding to the though provoking presentation Rebecca Jesson's in which she encouraged us to think about the practices we had used to gain success in writing and how these could become part of your reading program. 

The main reason however is the reading levels of the learners in my class. This year in my year 4 class currently 26 out of 28 learners are reading below their chronological age. 

This paints a picture of need in reading in my class. 

Student Voice- What we say about reading and the teaching of reading.

 

Present findings from this inquiry about your teaching. Ensure qualitative data includes rich descriptions of your teaching and quantitative data is clearly presented. (WFQ 9)

I conducted a survey for two reasons. One I wanted to gain some student voice on how they felt about reading and their own strengths and areas of need. I also wanted to see what they had to say about my teaching strengths and needs.

It was interesting to see what they had to say. Here is a link to the survey. 

Questions

1.I like reading..

Scale of 1-5 Not at all - it is my favourite

2.What I find hard in reading is...

3.How many books do you read in a day?

4. How often do your teachers listen to you read?

5. I get to talk about my book

Scale of 1-5 Never-Always

6. My teacher helps me practice new words

7. I can ask questions about my book....

Here is what each of the 8 student here on the day of the survey said. 4 children were alway and I will add their data on as soon as possible and 1 child has left the school and therefore is no longer in my target group. 

Summary of results:

Question One: This question asked about attitude toward reading. Mostly they had very positive attitudes toward reading with many saying it was their favourite thing to do. This did not surprise me as even though they struggled they always try so hard and get read every opportunity they have.

One children put 1, I ask why he said "It is hard."

Question Two: All children stated they found new words hard. Many said accurate reading without stopping. Interestingly using the pictures was challenging for some as was talking about the book. Most felt they understood the stories well.  

Children said they read 1-3 books a day. I feel this could be increased more to get more mileage. Perhaps a question about where they read might help paint a picture of how to increase this. Children all said they read to their teacher 3-5 or more times a week. This means I am getting the group coverage that I need.

Most children felt they got to talk about the book a lot however I cam concerned that there is not equity in this. One child feels like she never gets a turn to talk and this worries me. Asking questions is something they feel they get to do less, however this is much more regular than I expected based on my observation and teacher notes. 

This graph is the most interesting to me as it shows wide inconsistency between kids. It does not suggest if this word work is new sight words or topic specific words. Perhaps adding a question about practicing small words I know would help to understand this better. 

From this I am sure I need to work on this area in my teaching more. 

Self study- Reading site review

Present findings from this inquiry about your teaching. Ensure qualitative data includes rich descriptions of your teaching and quantitative data is clearly presented. (WFQ 9)

In this reflection on my teaching I looked at 2 books for each of my three reading groups that make up my target learners for this inquiry. The group in made up of children reading below Green (Level 12, reading age 6 years). I looked at the word count for each book. Main sight words, main topic specific words and made a judgment on overall change. As they are all levelled texts challenge is some what obvious but this gave me a better picture of my text selection early in the year. 

Rowing (Red, reading age 5.3 years)

Books 1, I like worms (Sunshine classics)

Word count: 86

Sight words: I, like, for, and, in, my, a 

Sample of topic specific words: worms, lunch, tea, skinny, soup, pizza. 

Book 2: Kitty Cat (PM)

Word count: 57

Sight word: here, is, a, look, at, comes, the. 

Sample of topic specific words Kitty cat, hungry, butterfly, Lizard, Fat?, 

Word family at, cat, fat

Teacher notes stated "Students were excited to read." "They need a lot of prompting to fix errors." "They were not looking at beginning words of sight words and were guessing, until prompted." "They struggled with I like worms due to the increased difficulty of the vocab."

Rugby (Yellow, reading age 5.6 years)

Book 1 Mothers day (PM)

Word count: 118

Sight words: Look, at, my, said, will, where, are, the, they, here, like, in, is, I, am, and, up, a, for, he, day, dad, mum, 

Sample of topic specific words: Mother, card, Emma, pens, forgot, breakfast, tray. 

Book 2 The little car (PM)

Word count: 123

Key sight words: Back, come, his it, will

Other sight words: said, look, my, and, the, can, go, here, is, little, where, for, big, not, see, in, went, away. 

Sample of topic specific words: Rachel, Sam, car, green, leaves, garage. 

Teacher notes stated "Group have come back with more confidence and are attempting more words." "Need prompting to go back and fix mistakes." "One child really struggling with topic specific words, said bucket for bowl, need word on noticing middle letters." "Did not know the word was in Mother's day." "Need to word on word family ay, ake."

Surfing (Blue, reading age 5.9)

Book 1: Open your mouth (Sunshine)

word count 185

Sight word:your, the, big, said, to, little, I'm, going, you, a, an, little, and, some, is, it, or, no, come. 

Sample of topic specific words: cat, kitten, hen chick, puppy, dog, surprise, eyes, mouth, open, close, give. 

Book 2: The missing socks (Ready to reads)

Words count: 205

Sight word: was, for, his, and, but, were, the, on, dad, I can't, my, are, they, no, said, she, in, the, ask, have, you, look, looked, mum, saw, taken, ran, out, through, across, into. 

Sample of topic specific words: socks, Jack, Noodle, pounced, rugby, boots, bedroom, pulled, lounge. 

Teacher notes stated,  " they are struggling when they make errors to notice that it does not make sense." "Keep working on sight words and noticing as this is a real need."

Overall from this analysis what I have noticed are three main this:

1: There is a real difference between PM, Sunshine and Ready to reads at the same level, PMs have high sight words with limited topic specific, Sunshine have more equal sight word to topic specific and ready to read step up in complexity significantly. 

2: I am not very good at reflecting on specific word errors, sound errors and comp issues. My reflections are very general and lack the detail needed to really dive into changes and issues.

3: Sight words, sight words, sight words, this is a big issue for all group but I don't spend enough time on it. I also need to be more careful in my text selection to make sure this are covered. 

I also have a question for my self about text length. if 205 words is all they are exposed to is that enough? If I am not exposed to a year 3 text can I become a year 3 reader? or year 4 text and year 4 reader? What is the right level of challenge, independent and shared text for these kids and how often should they read them? 

Use the baseline data for a picture of student learning

Explain how some of the data you have used to build a profile of the students’ learning will be used as baseline data at the end of the year. (WFQ 6)

Comparing data is an important part of teaching as inquiry as it allows us to see student progress and hopefully acceleration. Here is a link to the post my initial data. I am planning to use each piece of data in the following ways:

Reading Level:

I will look at the reading progress in the running records, these will be collected at least 3 times during the year. This will show changes in reading ability, decoding skills and comprehension. I will look specifically at the vocabulary in the books to see difference in known vocabulary and words attempted. 

Star Data: 

I will look at the overall star data and see if progress has been made in this test. I will also look at specific sections to see what improvements have been made in the areas of vocabulary. 

Student voice survey:

After the lockdown I will conduct a student voice survey to get student feeling about their own reading ability, confidence in reading and what they feel would help them. I will conduct this again at the end of the year to see what has changed and if this matched their formative and summative data. 

Teacher notes:

I will continue to take snapshots of my own notes taken during reading lesson and see if these match the the data I am collecting. 

As an additional interest of my own. I would like to take a reading book and look at the common vocabulary between the reading book and a piece of student independent writing. While I have not done a baseline sample of this I hope to do this after the Covid-19 Lockdown. 

By comparing all this data I hope to have a rich picture of students reading, focusing in on their vocabulary knowledge and confidence. 

Student Challenge

5. Share your findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge. Make sure it is clear what evidence from your inquiry supports each finding. (WFQ 5)

At the beginning of the year we as a school discussed a need for accelerated shift in reading and maths across our school. This linked to the data we received from the researchers and our own school data. As a staff we talked about the challenges our learners face in vocabulary. This is an area we have not yet found the answers too. 

My Target group is made up of three are year 3 and the remaining 9 are year 4s. On the right is a graph of my whole class running record data, from this it is clear their is a huge ability difference between these children. 

From my teaching notes in term 1 I said:

"This group struggled with beginning sounds. They were not thinking about the meaning of words. They also struggled with the words 'shouted' and 'he'. We worked on beginning sounds finding words that start with k, f and s and writing them on the table."

These two boys "use each other a lot listening to each other ideas and not trying without support. I need to do more work with them on attempting and self checking."

"This group weren't attempting challenging words. We looked at how to break them into parts and they also did not know some of the animals." 

Over all these comments and the data point to struggles with vocabulary, letter knowledge and confidence to try and perhaps a fear of failing. I want to explore this more in a student voice survey.

The star data paints a similar picture for me. It raises the question, why are there such big gap between learners and what can be done to address the gaps in the area of vocabulary and confidence. 

I think based on the data that there is a significant need for more vocabulary exploration, amount of vocabulary children are exposed to and building of confidence as reader and more generally. Children need to be able to take risks and learn from failure and that is a huge area of develop in see. 

Preliminary findings

Begin to collect evidence and data  and come to the next session ready to share your preliminary findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge. (WFRC #4)

Before the Covid-19 Lockdown, I began to look closely at and collect data to identify and explore my student challenges. However due to the Covid-19 lockdown I was not able to collect all the data I intended to as stated in my previous blog post. 

When looking at my class I noticed that their is huge disparity between learners in my space. I have a large group of children reading at or above year 3 level. I also have a group of learners who are still struggling at a year 1 level. Sadly a number of these children are the year 4s in my class making them almost 3 years behind their current age. When looking at their reading I looked at running record data, star data and my own notes and reflections on student learning. Intended to do a survey however many of these learners and not online currently. 

My target group have reading levels range from 1-13 this means they are all working at a year 1 level. This is well below the expected level and the level of the peers in my class. 

The star data paints a similar picture for me. Student in my target group are scoring a scale score of between 35 and 55 while others in my class score as high as a 75 or even 95.   

What has shifted and why.

I have been asking myself a lot this term what has been the impact of my teaching? Have I really made a difference for these learners and how do I know?

This lead me to think back about the shifts I have been monitoring this year and the interventions I have put in place for my learners. 

Below is a presentation that shows writing samples from one learner over 3 time points. It looks at what shift was made in terms of number of words, working out unknown words, content and punctuation. If you look through the presentation you will see that this learner has made a great deal of shift in these areas. 

I included this example as the main way I monitor writing shift is through conferencing with the learners and looking closely at their writing looks. 

Below is the reading shift for my class from term 4 2018 to term 3. The blue shows the starting point by number of students at each PM reading level and the red the number of students at each level in term 3.  You can see we have had a large number of students shift however shifts have not been as significant as I would have liked. 

This data shows level and age shift of my target learners. Many of whom have moved a number of levels but this has not meant a large shift in reading age. 

During this reflection I have found that the interventions I have put in place have been beneficial for the learners however they have not been constant enough. This is due to time spent out of class with my CoL Across School Role and the changes that have happened in my space with year with changing co-teachers. 

Term 2 Inquiry Update

In Term 1 I collected and collated the achievement data for reading at writing for a sample of learners working at 1B and reading below green (reading age 6). I wanted to look at how the connection between reading and writing teaching could impact on progress for these learners. See this blog post for more details.

At the end of term 2 I tested the learners using PM running records and compared this to the data collected in term 1. What I found was that the data was very mixed however the girls have made more progress than the boys. However only 3 learners had made expected to significant shift 0.5-1 year.


You can see the raw data here.

What I also found was the learners may have not shifted in age level but had made shifts in their reading level. Two learners sadly went down in their levels and I have not yet been able to account for this.



I have also been looking at their writing and seen from written samples both in their writing books and created digitally that the volume of writing has increased.

In teachers reflective notes from myself and my co-teacher there are a number of notes that relate to learners increased focus and willingness to attempt new unknown words.

As a result of these findings it is clear that more changes need to be made. I am wondering if increased content gifting and reading to write might be the next steps in my inquiry.