Causal Chain

In order to identify the causal chain I need to look at the direct acts of teaching that I am going to change in order help vocabulary with my learners that will in turn help with reading comprehension and therefore overall reading progress. 

Changes in my teaching:

• Weekly spelling related to what the students are learning. What I have been doing is gifting a range of spelling words each week that are related to the part of space or earth we are looking at that week. Students are then exposed to that throughout the week in class and I am working on sending these home too in order for students to learn these in more depth. 
• This then allows the students access to more complex vocabulary 
• They can then make connections with these words in their class work and texts related to that this week.
• Expands vocabulary for this topic and works on applied knowledge of the learner.
• Which overall will hopefully lead to greater comprehension strategies which will then help with reading age and ability. 
  
  
  
• Read-Aloud's. This is sometimes a picture book related to the topic that we are learning about or a journal article again related to the topic. I sometimes do this as an introduction to the topic or along the week.
• This then allows the students access to more complex vocabulary 
• Expands vocabulary for this topic and works on applied knowledge of the learner.
• Which overall will hopefully lead to greater comprehension strategies which will then help with reading age and ability.
  
  
• Guided reading sessions focusing on vocabulary development. Focusing on reading in vocabulary in order to make sense or meaning of the words in the context that they are read. 
• This then allows the students access to more complex vocabulary.
• They can then make connections with these words in their class work and texts related to that this week. 
• Expands vocabulary for this topic and works on applied knowledge of the learner.
• Which overall will hopefully lead to greater comprehension strategies which will then help with reading age and ability. 

Some other things that I have been trying to use as an intervention with vocabulary building is having a word wall in my classroom. My students are also currently enjoying the new J. K. Rowling novel. I have really only started pushing some of these ideas towards the end of this term so will continue to make sure these are part of our everyday class instruction and see if this intervention will indeed create a causal chain. 

Relevant Parts of Current Teaching

What parts of my own teaching am I going to look at changing and adapting?

• Guided reading: I would like to critically analyse what I am doing in my guided reading sessions that are successful and what I need to work on as a teacher. Thankfully this year I am also doing ClassOn Air which has allowed me to record and review some of my guided reading sessions.
  
  One thing that I would like to record and analyse would be teacher talk vs student talk. For this I will audio record one of my guided reading sessions and work out how much time I spend talking and then compare this to how much my learners are talking.  I think this will give a good understanding of the changes I would need to make. I would also like to view this recording in order to see the behaviours of my learners and what they are finding with their reading and area that I can work on. In order to have baseline data on this I will complete this without any changes to my current practice then review and complete the necessary changes. 
  
  
• Vocabulary: This is something that I have incorporated more in my teaching this term. With looking explicitly at the vocabulary I use and how this can be read into the text for meaning. This is an area that does need development. From my research last month I have tried to incorporate this more into my teaching. We are reading more as a class and my students are loving it. 
  
  
• Giving learners ownership of their own reading: This is something that I would like to work on more next term. Giving my students the opportunity to access the school library every few weeks and allowing them to choose that they would like to read in order to have reading milage. This will become part of a daily silent reading routine in our class next term. 

Overall I am going to look at taking some anecdotal notes of my teaching from observations I make through recording audio and visual. Time permitting I will also source an outside observation from someone in my team or from another team to see what they pick up from my teaching too.