Inquiry 2016

Learning Conversations: Teaching as Inquiry

Teacher Inquiry is about knowing the needs of your students and changing your practice in order to meet those needs:  whether it is for achievement, well-being, engagement and/or understanding.

Teacher: Jess Neave

Class:  Room 10

Year Level: Year 2/3

Focus Area: Writing

Purpose of meeting:

• Why: To understand the concept and purpose of teaching as inquiry
• How: To develop a teaching inquiry plan based around a learning need in your classroom
• What: 1. choose an appropriate e-learning tool to enhance the learning 2. Use online resources to support professional learning

Resources:

Teacher Inquiry into e-Learning

Teaching as Inquiry Framework

Teaching as Inquiry Plan:       

Table of Contents: Part 1:  Data and Shifts Part 2: Inquiry Cycle Part 3: Teaching and Learning Helpful Questions

Introduction: .  You will select a group of target students who have a specific learning need.  You will plan for and put in place an intervention (a combination of a new digital technology tool and the teaching strategy to support this tool) and monitor the progress of this group over an extended period of time.  This document is aimed at supporting you to document what you need for a successful inquiry.  Your inquiry must have quantifiable data from which to draw comparisons.  There are 3 parts to the inquiry and they have been mapped out clearly for you below.  

Focusing the Inquiry: My Question

Will using technology motivate and support my students to produce more writing independently?

Part 1:  Data Collection

As part of the learning inquiry:this is how you can measure if the intervention(s) had an impact on the learning.  Data could be: National Standards, PAT, e-asTTle, Gloss or… (Y1-4 only:  Numpa or iKan)

Student Name	Date	Baseline Data (Term 1)	Date	End Point Data	Improvement	Comments
Caley Morris	16.03.16	1P Simple sentences not developed
Indica Reihana	16.03.16	1P Repetitive writing
Jireh Tautau	16.03.16	1P Very simple sentences and not many interesting words
Carla-Rose Perene	16.03.16	1P Simple and repetitive sentences

Part 2: Identifying Learning Need and Intervention

“Effective pedagogy requires that teachers inquire into the impact of their teaching on their students.” NZC p.35

Identify the learning need (April 2016) Who needs support? What are the learning needs? Who are my priority learners?   What is the evidence telling me?	Identify a range of possible interventions. - create an action plan what tools and strategies will help meet their needs? What am I going to do? What are my students going to do.? How will I manage it in my classroom?	Areas requiring further investigation What was the impact? (looking at my evidence/assessments?) what are the next steps for my learners?  me? What could I do to improve the impact on my students?
Target learning group students are Year 3’s writing just below the standard. learning needs- More punctuation used in the right place Writing more complex sentences. Using more sparkly and interesting words in our writing Re-reading sentences to make sure they make sense. Writing more about a topic using detail Chose these students as they were just below the standard. Need to be at level 2B by the end of the year. Goal is to motivate students to write more and be more engaged with their writing.	Apps that engage students and focus on learning sight words letter sounds.(Show me, edu-create, Seesaw) During tumble students will move through activities that engage and reinforce the learning that is being taught. Teacher models how to use “Seesaw” app then get students to begin to feel more comfortable and confident speaking about their learning and their writing. Apps being able to record students voice and their stories then students use this to write their stories. Could use apps before as a warm up/to engage boys to write. Teacher to model apps and give examples.

Part 3: Ongoing Reflection

Teaching and Learning: What did I do? How did I change my teaching and learning program? What evidence do I have?	Reflections/Observations/Evidence and Notes from Critical Friend Meetings also related professional readings In addition to your written reflections, your evidence could include links to: Observational data using teacher notes, Student voice, Teacher voice, Still images, Video, Screenshots, mid-inquiry SWOT analysis, links to RTC, Reflective journal, student work samples, focus group, questionnaire/survey and actual quantitative data
Week 1	Discussion with group about what they enjoy with writing and what they find hard. Was a good discussion about what is hard and looking at what we can do to help them get their ideas down faster.
Week 2	Initial writing see what group can write down unassisted. Looking at texts showed that they don’t write that much and it is not always very specific and detailed.
Week 3	Listening to blend and letter sounds writing down the sounds they hear in words. We practised writing down the sounds that we could hear in words and trying to get these down fast. We talked about how it didn’t matter if the word wasn’t but it was better to attempt it than sit and not write anything. We found out from looking at this that we needed to practise basic spelling conventions and learn all of the blend sounds off by heart.
Week 4	Working on reading their stories to seesaw then listening back and discussing what it sounds like if it sounds right is there anything more i could add to it etc.
Week 5	Students learning to say their stories to an ipad and the ipad writes down their words for them. This was tricky as Ipad does not pick up certain words as they are not speaking clear enough. Reflection upon this though was that the ipads often would not pick up what the students were saying so the students will need to learn how to speak slowly and more clearly of each word otherwise the words will not be spelt correctly. Next time: Work on speaking clearly into the ipads and just reading sight words and checking to make sure that the sight words are spelt correctly.
Week 6	This week the group completed a brainstorm looking at their stories and we decided together what we need to work on to improve our writing. We decided as a group that we needed to write more complex sentences using different words to start them. We also looked at words we could change into sparkly words to make our writing more interesting. We looked at punctuation and the different language features we have learnt and whether we could use them in our writing. This week we decided to focus on sparkly words and we used the Ipads to speak words to that we wanted to use and then copied these from the Ipads. This was great as the group could use many different words in their writing and not worry about the spelling as the Ipads would spell them correctly for them. They really enjoyed this and said that they found it fun to speak the words and see them spelt correctly on the Ipads. They discussed that it saved time as the words were spelt correctly and they didn’t have to try figure them out. Link of student using Ipad to spell sparkly words http://jessleighn.blogspot.co.nz/2016/08/inquiry-lesson-video-of-using-ipads-to.html
Week 7	This week we practised using seesaw and were reading our stories to make sure that they sounded right and we sat with a buddy and gave each other feedback. Students worked well at this task and listened to their writing being played back on seesaw. They listened and brainstormed on a whiteboard about all the aspects that they did well, they checked the self assessment strip and gave feedback to their buddies about what they did well and what they could do next. The next day the students re-crafted their stories and looked at the feedback from the day before. Reflection: this week was great with these lessons and listening to the students looking at what they had done well against the self checking strip. The only thing was that the students feedback to the students was mostly “good writing” “it looks good” etc so it wasn’t very specific. So next time we do this we need to look at what kind of feedback should we be giving and relate it back to the self checking strip.
Week 8
Week 9
Week 10

Story Hui Map

Guiding Questions to support your inquiry and ongoing reflection:

To help frame your inquiry

To help you reflect on the inquiry

Having looked at your school priorities, let’s talk about what you’d really like to do this year for your inquiry – what are the possibilities? (Take the ideas wide and out into the vision - extend thinking). • What is it that you want to achieve for your students? (Focus back in on learning).   engagement- getting them to ___________ • What are some of the ways we could do try this? (including e-tools, processes and pedagogies). • Which of these ideas shall we try? • How can we frame this idea as an inquiry question or inquiry area? (Capture the inquiry) • How can we implement this idea in a manageable way? (Fine it down – this is very important). • What resources will we need? Equipment & time. • What is our plan of action and timeframe for the inquiry? (Key success factor) • Who will collect the data and where will it be kept? • What are our reflection points/dates and who will be included? (Key success factors) • Are there permissions needed for photography and video ?

How is the inquiry going? what is going well? what have you learnt from this process (thus far)? what are your next steps? what would a successful inquiry look like to you? OR how will you know this was successful? how has your work towards integrating eL tools and processes contributed to: empowering the learner?  yourself? engaging the learner? enhancing education-supporting the learning experience? extending opportunities to provide support for all students? enhancing management, planning and reporting? enhancing the ability to evaluate and monitor student learning? nurturing a love of learning and responsibility for autonomous learning? making eL a natural/integral part of classroom learning?