Baseline Data

I have been thinking about my baseline data and how I will measure progress in my inquiry this year. I have decided that the best way to see if my implementation will lead to change will be to base this on my beginning of the year reading data, student confidence in reading, student enjoyment and engagement as well as my well being data that I collected at the beginning of the year. I will outline this data is greater detail in the post below.

In order to have baseline data I needed to select my target students. Below are my target students showing beginning of the year reading age with a comparison of their actual age. I do have three other students that are on the cusp of this group as well who are reading at level 25 that I will include in the data as well. 

As you can see from this data set my target students are just below where they need to be for their age. Looking at this data at the beginning of the year was why I chose this as my inquiry focus. They are only just below where they need to be at the moment but if they stay at these levels they will fall further behind when they enter year 6. 

My hunches again are around vocabulary and seeing how this can have an impact as well as comprehension specifically looking at inferring. I will add graphs to this data at a later date when I am looking at comparisons for now this is the raw data from the start of the year which I will use as a baseline for my end of year data. 

What is my hypothesis?

As I have been reflecting over the holidays and during my planning for learning for term 2 I have been thinking about some of the reasons as to why my learners are still reading between 7.5 and 8.5 years in year 5. I have some hunches as to why this might be which has given me a clearer idea of my hypothesis. Below I will discuss some of the key hunches/hypothesis that I have been contemplating. 

Confidence
Students confidence in reading is something that immediately stood out with these learners. I have wondered if this has to do with mask wearing and being able to hear and understand the children but this term with masks off the lack of confidence is still evident in reading. It it the confidence of being able to share their reading with others as well as answering questions. What I have noticed is many of my students will answer a question but they are not confident in their answers. They will answer the questions but will show a real hesitation in sharing the answers along with hesitation that they might be wrong.

Missing School
A big part of term 1 was lots of absences across these learners due to being sick or isolating. I think that this has had a large impact on my students as trying to come back to norms and routines after an extended period of time can be a challenge. Not only with student wellbeing but also the social aspect as well. I find that many of my students in my target group will either be away for the beginning of the week and our first reading or will be away at the end of the week and miss the follow up text that goes along with the topic. So this also could be a reason for these students reading at this age. 

Inferencing gaps
When I has interviewing for my CoL position last year one of the key things that I discussed as my hunch was the gaps in being able to inference. I have noticed with my target group that they are able to use the text to answer literal comprehension questions but struggle to read between the lines and answer questions that are not directly stated in the text. This is an area that I will focus on with this target group moving forward. 

Learning to read change to reading to learn
The biggest change with this group of learners is moving from learning to read to using reading to learn. The questions they are needing to answer are focused more on applied knowledge, inferring and vocabulary related questions. 

These are some of the wonderings I have had throughout looking at my inquiry so far and are some areas that I will continue to look into along with looking at further readings related to some of these hypothesis. 

Clearer Direction

We had our first face to face PLG for the year last week. It was really nice to connect with people in person! I really enjoyed our PLG as we were able to break off into groups and discuss our inquiries and what we have been working on or thinking about. There were some really great discussions and ideas that were given by others in the group which has given me a clearer direction with my inquiry. 

This year I have been focusing on having my students write more frequently with having picture prompts each day. This has however still be relatively seperate from my reading program. After some great discussions and suggestions from other CoL teachers and leaders I have started to consider making reading and writing intertwined rather than being two separate subjects.

What will this look like?

At the moment for reading I have an overall topic each week where the students have the opportunity to find our facts and research a topic in detail. I then try and best as I can to link the journal articles to this topic for the week. The topic is generally related to our term topic as a school focusing on key aspects of the topic each week. Doing this allows the students to have more exposure to key vocabulary and ideas from each topic. What I would like to try and do for the rest of the term is incorporate this overall reading focus into our writing as well. 

From this week I have changed the spelling words from being completely subject specific to words that are related to the topic but also found in our journal articles as well. I have gone from 3 to 4 writing groups and these are connected to my reading groups. So having the same groups for reading and writing. This means that in my literacy rotations I can see these groups for guided reading or writing throughout the week and also intertwine these lessons. 

The overall task for writing each week I will try and make it relate to the overall topic. For example at the moment I am looking at compass bearing and directions so will have the writing task related to writing out instructions. I will then continue on with a writing prompt each week which will again relate to the overall topic and give the student the opportunity to use the new vocabulary they have been exposed to from reading and spelling into their writing. I am hoping that this will overall lead to a more in depth understanding of a topic. 

This is where I am at with my inquiry this stage. It has been very valuable discussing my inquiry with other CoL teachers and leaders to get a clearer understanding of all my thoughts as well as a clearer direction of my next steps.