Teaching Inquiry for 2017

This is a new year and a new beginning for me with it being the start of my teaching career. I am extremely excited starting this journey at Pt England School with an amazing group of year 5 & 6 students.

This year our school wide inquiry focus is based on maths. This inquiry is one that will be extremely helpful to me as maths is one of the areas I personally struggled with in my own education. I want to make sure that my teaching of maths will not give the students the same bad experiences that I had. I also want to make the students think beyond the age old line of maths is not for me and realise that maths learning is something everyone can achieve.

My inquiry focus will be on how to engage my students behaviourally and cognitively during my maths lessons. This will include whole class teaching, group teaching sessions and independent learning. I have chosen my focus group based on last years GLOSS testing and also the current PAT's that they have completed. Each of the students are around a similar level from these test results and will be one of my maths groups for the year.

The first steps of my inquiry will be to observe these students during lessons and note down the amount of time that each student is on task. On task behaviour would be completing MathsWhizz or ExtraMaths, focusing in class lessons/group lessons and also when they are working independently actually completing their work.

I want to make sure that the independent tasks that they are completing are cognitively stimulating and giving them the support that they need in their learning. The ways in which I will assess their learning this term will be completing GLOSS testing for this year, asking the students what they are needing and wanting to help them learn and also observing behaviours that I want to see in maths and those that I don't want to see. This will give me the opportunity to see how the students learn and what strategies I can improve on or implement to make their learning more effective.

I am very excited to see how this will shaped my teaching and the learning of my students. I look forward to seeing where this inquiry will take me, I look forward to sharing my progress with you.