PLG 2

During our CoL PLG today we were asked to work in groups to unpack a text shared with us before the meeting. The article was called "Building Creative Thinking in the Classroom" Emma Gregory, Mariale Hardiman, Julia Yarmolinskaya, Luke Rinne and Charles Limb. We were then asked to read this and find quotes about the following things. 

• find interesting 
• agree or disagree with
• didn’t know
• believe has important practice implications 

Here is a list of quotes that I found from reading this article:

• Page 44: "In the context of education, perhaps the most valuable question to ask is whether or not creativity is fixed."
• Page 44: "Moreover, despite appreciating the value of facilitating creativity, few teachers feel that they are sufficiently trained to support students’ creative potential."
• Page 47: "Content knowledge within a domain has been argued to be the foundation for creative thinking and innovation (e.g.,Weisberg, 2006). According to this view, creative thinking cannot occur unless one has first mastered a body of content knowledge."
• Page 47: "The authors concluded that raising animals at home led children to have a better understanding of a situation, allowing children to construct mental models of the animals.

There were many great points to this article that really made you think as you were reading. The above quotes were just some of the ones that stood out to me. During our CoL PLG we were then tasked with completing "the last word" where we had to share one of our quotes, the people in our group had to locate this quote and give a quick opinion on this and finally we would have the last word to share our final thoughts. I really enjoyed this task as there were key areas pointed out in the text that I might have otherwise looked over and not really thought about in depth. I feel that we had a greater understanding of the text and also how to pick out key ideas as we were reading along. 

During our PLG we also discussed maths and what could be done to help make a shift and change in maths. The key question being what are the three things you think will make the biggest difference in maths? We had a great discussion about this and what we think will help with maths. One key thing I took away from this was the need for vocabulary in maths which is something I am also seeing in reading. So this was just a thought to ponder over. 

Profiling

During my guided reading sessions for the last few weeks I have been making observations about my learners and trying to paint a picture of what the gaps are in the learning especially when it comes to reading. As I outlined in my previous post I was interested in two particular groups of learners 

1. Students reading between the ages of 7 and 8 years. 
2. Students reading between 8.5 and 9.5 years. 

What I have notices with my students who are reading between the ages of 7 and 8 years the decoding is a major part of what is holding my learners back. With this I can see that reading mileage is really important for this group. In 2019 I created a site which was specifically targeted at students reading between these levels. So in reflection what I have decided to do with this group is focus back on this site and adding the students from this year to create resources and read aloud videos for others to enhance that reading milage. 

My students who are reading between 8.5 and 9.5 years make up a large number of my students and have a range of different strategies and areas that need work. Due to having camp I have had less time than I would like to complete running records on these students so this is a priority for the rest of the term to try and see if I can pinpoint some key areas that need to be worked on for this group of students. So far I have had a look at PAT and Star data for this group of students and will analyse this in more detail over the coming weeks and try to break it down and find trends in the data. 

I am still  a bit of a work in progress so far with this inquiry, I have tried to focus most of my profiling from what I can see in front of me with my guided reading sessions. I will take a deeper dive into this for the rest of the term and see if there are any other key things I need to add to my wonderings before I had a solid hypothesis around what I think is going on. 

Class OnAir Hui

Today we had our first Class OnAir hui at school. This was a great chance to connect with everyone doing Class OnAir this year as well as look at examples of lessons and have some PD on reading and what we can show in our episodes going forwards. 

The reading PD with Georgie was really helpful not only with what they are looking for in our episodes but also with my CoL inquiry for this year. The linking of reading and writing is really key and it gave me some really great insight and ideas onto how I could do this in the classroom. It gave us the chance to be the students for a little while and be challenged to come up with phases and ideas that we ask students to do regularly. 

Last year I tried to incorporate reading and writing a little bit more but in reflection with was with a narrow lens. From todays session I can see how I can link reading and writing in many more whys that I am already doing. I know it may seem obvious but in the business of everything going on it is sometimes easy to make these subjects seperate and just focus on some of the key things that need to be worked on rather than the bigger picture and showing the students examples even while we are reading. 

I really got a lot out of todays session and this has left me thinking about some other things that I would like to try and implement in the classroom thinking ahead to term 2. Looking at some examples of Class OnAir episodes was also extremely helpful. Again I was just so focused on my own episodes and trying to get these finished that it is so easy to miss out on other gems that my colleagues have created. So this was a great opportunity to watch others teaching, see some great examples of lessons and teaching as well as technical things that I could use and incorporate in my own Class OnAir episodes. 

I think that having days like today not only help to keep us on track and show us where we need to go but it also makes me feel refreshed with some new ideas and excited for where I can go next with my Class OnAir episodes as well as my CoL inquiry.