Observation on Donna Barry 15.11.16

Observation of Donna Barry

15.11.16

Writing lesson

Focus- how does she engage students and structure lesson.

WALT- write a story

We will: use some fast words in our story.

Teacher; where are our fast words?

Gets student to point at some fast words. T can use our alphabet cards. T asks what fast words can you think of.  T writes up fast words.

Good praise from teacher.

What do I do when I first start writing a story?

Think about a story. And I want to use some fast words. T what do I have to do when ive thought about my story.

Plan

So we need to draw a picture.

Is there some fast words in my story.

“Here is my scary butterfly”

Gets students to point at the fast words that have been used. T gets class to read story with her. And each word she gets the students to point at the words she is using. Lots of positive praise to the students. T gets students to read the story with her and she gets the students to write the fast words on the board. Very involved.

T gets students to sound out scary with her.

“Looking eyes, listening ears”

T reads story with class again and asks if she has used some fast words in her story.

Ticks the fast words that have been used.

Eye spy glasses on and find your books.

Feedback: Quick short lesson that was engaging and most students were all looking and listening. There was lots of praise and I liked the way that you kept reflecting back to the learning intention and making sure that they knew what to do.

Great lesson Donna J

Ahipara reflective practice

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DR0OSd0sjYkXbKDalXajQx9NeeWYNpUVekv0RTCej4M/edit#slide=id.g12b5f0fcda_0_0

Rebecca came to discuss reflective practice with the staff. Upon reflection I believe that i need to begin reflecting deeper on my practice and start questioning my thoughts and ideas instead of just looking at surface features.

 I can start to use these as my question starters for reflections and blogs so that they are more reflective and critical. 

What... was my goal? did I do? was I feeling? went well? went poorly?

So What... was important? knowledge can inform me? did I learn about myself?

Now What... can I do to improve my knowledge? can I do to improve my skills? can I do differently?

Story Hui from inquiry- discussion with staff

Story Hui

The Beginning:

What was happening to learning?

How do we know this?

Who else was involved?

• Using technology to motivate progress
• Started with 4 boys that were well below, changed to 4 students 1p-1a who were just below

The Action:

What was the initiative?

What happened? What did this mean?

Share all the details.

• Working out what the group needed
• Enjoyable/hard about writing
• How can we improve writing, looked at exemplars
• List of things to work on made with group
• Introduced ipads and apps- popplet, seesaw
• 10-15mins per day
• Gave students short, set tasks

The Result:

What was the result?

What learning improvement was seen?

What were others’ responses?

• More interested in writing
• See ways to make writing more interesting and detailed
• More independent
• Students gave more specific feedback
• More detailed writing and have move a sub-level
• Students loved working together, learning from each other not just teacher
• Less teacher talk

Questions

How did you go about getting shared expectations/co-construction with students? List of things to work on, kids would choose what they thought they needed to work on from the list.  Jess knew what they needed to learn and led students to see what they needed to work on (a lot of front loading).

Less Teacher Talk-How did this happen? Promote the use of self-checking strips, in the end students wouldn’t need teacher prompting them to use them. This would be transferred from target group lesson to being used with the whole class.

Downfall of ipads for target group? - Other students were getting jealous of target group using ipads all the time.

Why the change of groups? Kids weren’t ready for this type of intervention.

Reflection: 

i feel like my inquiry was very adaptive and formative for students.

QLC on Margie

Feedback on Margie's phonics lesson.

Reflection- How effective is assessment in my school?

As a staff meeting looked at these questions and had to decide whether you were a novice, apprentice, practitioner or an expert. I mainly ticked myself as a practitioner saying that I am trying to include this most of the time in my practice. The questions related to whether I was using assessment that involved students to have the opportunity to discuss clarify and reflect on their goals. I feel like I need to work on giving regular feedback and feed forward to help students and teachers reach their goals. I feel like many students in class know their learning outcomes and what they need to work on next and they can visibly see their learning progressions.

Teacher Only Day- Assessment for Learning

19.08.16

Ian Stevens- Evaluations Associates

Visible, Progressions, Student voice, Clarity

Student voice- students being able to tell them where they are at and what they need to learn to move to the next step. Student voice gives lots of information.

Learning intentions and success criteria- looking at the bigger intention and then working on small parts at a time to help progress. 

The 7 principles of learning
these need to be present and teachers should understand them and incorporate them in the classroom. 
1. Learners at the centre
classrooms and schools have learning front and centre the most important. 
2. the social nature of learning
group work
3. emotions are integral to learning
4.recognising individual differences
5. stretching all students
6. assessment of learning
7. building horizontal connections

Discussion about PaCT- the progress and consistency tool

NZC- New Zealand Curriculum
National Standards     PaCT progressions
Literacy learning progressions, number frameworks, reading colour wheel 
Place value progressions, Mile stones

As we go down the ladder the documents compliment each other they have different levels but they all align in some way. 

Teacher believes that it is their job to provide work for students. Are you getting learning value for the time you spend marking? Gather student voice

Self generating activities-place value 
Getting students to start at a number writing this on the board and getting them to write all the way to the bottom and add numbers going down the page. 
-10 more
-100 more
-10,000 more
-10 less 
-101 less etc

One activity that the students generate. Can have different groups doing different problems. Freeing you up so that you can walk around and explain ideas and be the professional you need to be. 

Draw 3 circles bottom 2 circles add to the top number. Activity could be getting the students to make up some basic facts problems. Change the problem for the students to make it harder. Make the numbers bigger etc. 

Using self generating activities that students can do. Not changing worksheets for a week. Using the same worksheet for 5 days in a row so that students can do it easy. 

Dice game- 
-start with 2 dice roll them then multiply them together. Write down the answers
-multiplication
- adding to make 10
-doubles
-triples
-roll 2 make one tens and one ones.
-can you make the biggest and smallest numbers
-1 more, 1 less, 10 more

LESS IS MORE!!! what is more important? For less able students break it down for them and make it easier so that they can accelerate. 

Using the self generating activities as warm ups every day so that they can move faster and have more knowledge of basic facts and place value. 

Start with support- move to a little support-then no support- under pressure
At that point it is known and solid. 
3 ways to move them practice, practice, practice!!!!!


Using counters to help see what stage the student is at to help make OTJ's 


Reading The Learning to learn principle:
Key Ideas:
With learning to learn students take ownership of their own learning and play a greater role in classroom decision making. Learning to learn is about managing self and self regulation. When students can direct their own learning and know how they learn best they can also navigate choices better. Learning to learn allows students to talk about their learning and what is going well, what they are finding difficult and what they can do to support their own learning. Setting students up for success, and letting them make mistakes to learn from and get back up with ways to improve and move forward. I really enjoyed this reading as I could relate to it and I can see that I would like to give my students more opportunities to self regulate their learning and be able to talk about what they are learning and why. Discussing different aspects of their learning and being able to nurture trusting relationships so that students feel safe to talk about their learning and sharing their outcomes and needs with others. 

Apps-math

Number find- finding numbers by clicking on numbers.

place value- hundreds, tens, ones

multi touch maths

bricks for kids

basic facts

maths bingo

quick math

multiplier

hungry fish

Inquiry lesson video of using Ipads to spell sparkly words

Student used the Ipads to say words and record her. The Ipad would spell out the words so that she could write them correctly without worrying about the spelling.

Keriana Observation 7/6/16

Writing Tumble

Focus- to see how teacher uses a writing tumble and seeing groups

15mins per each activity

Spelling group has a spelling worksheet to work on.

Crafts table- making cards

Free writing

Pobble tasks- there are task cards that are in a box students work through so there are different pegs- Mon, Tues, Wed, Thursday

Teacher has an alarm to signal the change of activity.

Teacher has an Ideas picture on board for what they could write about for their free writing or publishing.

Pobble tasks group change over to teacher.

Group observation-  T what did we focus on last lesson- Describing feelings, character- look like, wearing, what type of character are they.

Group has already written about a character

Teacher gets student to read story about their character.

Students are working on making their writing better. So they are in the re-crafting stage.

Teacher looks at student’s books and works through giving feedback on their work and asking how they could make it better.

Students that are finished their writing from the day before can choose another piece of writing to finish working on.

Students were all asked what they were doing and could all easily explain what they were doing and why.

Alarm goes off then groups change over.

Teacher calls next group down.

Reflection

I find there isn’t enough time to see each student in the groups

All students were fully engaged and on task.  Really impressed was such a cool way of doing writing,

If I was to do a writing tumble I would make sure that day 1 students would work on writing either with teacher or independently then for day 2 they would bring their writing down and re craft it together.

Writing reflection

Today in class we were sitting down on the mat brainstorming about Harold as we were going to start our AsTtle writing. All of a sudden there was lightening and thunder and the weather turned very crazy very fast. The children were totally distracted with lights flickering and hail. In the beginning I was trying to get the children back on task to our brainstorm but then quickly decided that this was not going to work as the children were totally distracted and I wouldn't get a very good sample from them while the weather was like this. So we decided to write about the weather as a recount what happened, what did we see, feel hear. And the writing was amazing. The children were using some awesome punctuation and onomatopoeia in their writing and it was very authentic. I felt that this was a good decision and the children really enjoyed writing about what they had just experienced as it was recent and exciting. It was even better to get some great pieces of writing!! :) Proud teacher moment

Staff Meeting reading- Raising Student achievement

Raising student achievement through targeted actions

Main ideas from the reading were:
Reading was about setting targets and taking actions that raise student achievement. Conditions and practices in successful schools show:
- an explicit commitment to equity and excellence
- the effective targeting of progression
- leadership at multiple levels
- capability building for school improvement.
Teachers shared targets with students, whanau and parents.
They were correctly advised against having targets that mixed these students with those who were already successful meaning not to mix students together and have the same outcomes for students at different levels. Goals and targets set an optimum level of challenge for teachers and students, by being low enough to seem achievable but high enough to make a real difference.
Overall the reading was interesting and shared different aspects about target groups and what areas teachers can focus on to become more successful.

Observation 23/5/16

Observation- Jess to observe Donna (Maths lesson)

19/5/2016

Purpose- Looking at how Donna uses encouragement and questioning to make the lesson student driven.

T has problem for students- she recaps what we do if we know the answer. Show our thumbs

“Roscoes cat had 5 kittens then his other cat had 3 kittens. How many kittens did Roscoes cats have altogether?”

T gets students to try to work it out using their counters.

T writes down all the students answers. 9, 6, 7

T writes equation in modeling book

5+3=

Wati how did you work it out? You have 5 in one group and how many in the next 3? How many have you got all together? Students states 8. T asks if he wants to change his answer from 9 to 8 but he replies no and keeps 9.

This was interesting that the student stuck with the original answer 9 even after they found the right answer 8.

T lets get 5 in a group then we get 3

Now what are we going to do?

Students say count them all

T gives good questioning- giving students lots of time to add up the groups of counters and writing down every answer right and wrong.

What have we been learning to do? Students reply counting from the biggest number.

T has new problem.

T puts 1 counter on top of a paper that has 5 counters underneath.

She writes problem

5+1=

T uses lots of good prompting, and states to them that we are now going to try and figure out this very hard problem.

Roscoes cat had 5 kittens then 3 more.

5+3= all students said 8

5+4= students show their thumbs all said 9

T models counting on to check if they got it right, T puts 10 under the paper then 2 on top

10+2=

T gives each students the chance to share their answer first so that she is getting an idea who is getting it right.

Feedback:

Awesome lesson, was very energetic and teacher made maths very fun.

Was good to see a quick lesson that kept the students engaged and progressing.

Well done Donna loved this lesson and how you progressed through the different problems.