Wednesday 20 May 2020

Self Study- Observations of my past reading teaching

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)


This post shows the what I noticed about my teaching through observing a video. I looked back at the Class Onair lesson and noted what I saw in the first 5 minutes of direct instruction using the questions I had planned when identifying the areas to best help me identify my strength and gaps, see this blog post. 

Sadly I did not have an opportunity to get another teacher to observe at this stage of my inquiry due to Covid 19 measure and time restrictions. I hope to video more and get support for an outside observer to help me unpack this more in term 3. 


This video shows part reading lesson with my target group in early 2020. It is looking at a non fiction text and I wanted to look back a note how often I used the key strategies I hypotheses would cause change in reading achievement and reflect on these. 

How often do I provide specific vocabulary instruction? 
I got children to use the pictures to help them understand vocabulary. We used the the content page to look at words we did not know. During the lesson most of the focus was on topic specific vocabulary. I pulled out two words with the whole group to look closely at. Before reading students identified children 6 topic specific words. 

What does this vocabulary instruction look like? 
The instruction look like writing on specific words on the table. We broke them apart and some sight words were mentioned. It also used visuals like the pictured to get children to state words they would encounter in the book before they had to decode them. 

Does it relate to a sight word or topic specific word? 
Material is a topic specific word. We did look at the word 'mat' which is a word family sight word but missed the opportunity to look at how it connected word families. 
Funnel- Again this is a topic specific word. They used syllables to work it out and the sight word fun. 

How often do the children talk about the book? 
At the beginning of the lesson I used lots of why questions to get the children talking. They did not ask questions. Children had lots of opportunity to explain they words. However one child took control of this most the time. They did not take turns speaking and I did not step in to help them with this. 

Is this retell, connecting to their experience or asking a question?
The discussion centred round the words in the story. Child were not encouraged to ask questions or retell the story. This in part was due to the nature of the text. We did talk about what the book said. 

Strength:
From this video I can see that I have a strength in introducing and supporting children with topic specific words and finding small words in bigger words. I am also good at asking why question and open questions like "What do you notice about..." I noticed that I got the children to explain the content page, but not really what a funnel was and that was a missed opportunity. I am good at listen to the children and catching moments to ask them to check for errors or help them understand words. 

Areas to work on:
There was no support in this lesson for sight word knowledge building, which I see as a real gap. I know that this group know a lot of sight words but they definitely still have gaps or they would be moving much faster. I did not give the children opportunities to ask questions and most of the the discussion was student to teacher not student to student. How can I get this more and skill be their to support them? 


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