Stocktake so far

For our CoL PLG we have been asked to have think about our inquiry so far and to stocktake what we have done and where we are going. I have gone through each of the key parts of my inquiry so far and have taken a stocktake on what I have done and what I need to do in order to progress on CoL inquiry. Check this out below.

Tools and evidence

I have used a range of different tools in the classroom and have gathered a lot of evidence about my students to be able to really understand the needs of this group of students. When we have our parent interviews later on this term I will have conversations with whānu to ensure that I have some whānau voice in my intervention. 

Some of the tools that I have used are 

• Running records data from last year. 
• Running records from start of term 2 to gauge where the students are at and what areas of their reading needed work. 
• PAT data - I have looked into the PAT data of my students fro reading and have pulled out some key information that I will be able to compare with at the end of the year. 
• I have also taken anecdotal notes of my students while they are reading to be able to understand where each of my learners are at and what their individual work ons are. 

I will also be using our mid year running record data to see if my students have made any progress with their reading as well as look at the key areas that we need to work on. I have been having conversations with my students about reading and I would really like to complete some student voice surveys to compare from now and at the end of the year. 

Strengths and development

As we have been having guided reading sessions I have been taking notes of what my students are really good at and what their strengths are in reading. Most of my students are very good at being able to use clues from the text to answer literal questions well and in detail. My students also have really great decoding skills and are able to self correct if what they are reading doesn't;'t make sense. I will be able to use these strengths to help with the areas of development that these students need to work on.

Resources 

I have had some really rich conversations with colleagues around what I think I am seeing with this students and have been given some really great advice and next steps that I can work on with these students. This has also lead to research and reading that I have been recommended and looked at which given some very sound theories.

Measures

As I have stated above I will use a range of data for pre and post to compare students learning these include:

• Running record data 
• PAT data
• Teacher notes from guided reading sessions
• Student voice surveys

There may be some other key things that I look at in time as I have been looking into using the "Key into inference" tool that I could also use as a way to measure progress.

Opportunties

I have tried a few other little bits and pieces with this in the classroom as I know inferencing is something that needs a lot of practice and guidance. So it will be interesting to see if some of these little things have had an impact as well. I will continue to collect this data in guided reading sessions as well as recoding students completing their follow up activities to see if there are continued rich and extended discussions.

I am really excited to think about the changes that I will implement and see where my students can grow from there, watch this space!

 

Academic Reading

For our CoL inquiry we have been asked to look at academic research and readings to help us understand our inquiry focus in more detail as well as see what other studies and research that have been done that could strengthen our inquiries. I have completed some readings over the last couple of weeks and here are some of my thoughts and takeaways from each of the readings and research. I have also had some amazing conversations with my colleagues around what I should look into and how to strengthen my inquiry and my learners progress. 

1. Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition
Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012)

Words are a mean of communicating and thinking about the content of a specific discipline. "Lack of academic vocabulary knowledge has consistency been identified as an obstacle to student success." This research article provides a set of recommendations to improve the practice in the area of academic language. It is interesting to note that there is a significant difference between the academic language and typical conversations and it is important that students have access and the opportunity to be exposed to academic language. Academic language tends to have longer words due to the prefixes and suffixes of the words. This article outlines the six characteristics of academic language and they are:

•  Latin and Greek vocabulary
• Morphologically complex words
• Nouns, adjectives and prepositions
• Grammatical metaphor, including nominalizations 
• Informational density 
• Abstractness

These six characteristics are not seperate facts rather that are all functionally related. I found a two really interesting quotes from this research. "Just because people who read more can read better doesn't mean that if you read more this will make you read better."
AND
"The correlation between the amount of reading and reading ability does not imply a causal relationship."Both of these lines really resinated with me in the fact that so often in relation to the problem we just say children need to read more and they will get better. This is something that is important with reading of course, however this has also shown me how important exposure to topic specific vocabulary is as well as deliberate acts of teaching that can help the students unpack what they are reading. Just because they can read it does not mean that they can unpack what they are reading and think about all of this abstract ideas with text.

This reading has really shown me that we do need to use words as tools and be able to expose our learners to this specific language and explain what it means in order to help them succeed. This research paper gave some great insight into guiding questions for teachers and the role of the teacher to insure that students have access to academic vocabulary. There are some key parts of this that I will use in my guided reading sessions that I will document as evidence to see that there is a change in my students achievement.  

2. Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade
Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J.

This article provided a large number of recommendations to help with reading comprehension. The five recommendations were outlined in detail with how each of these areas could be improved.  The five recommendations were as follows:

• Teach students how to use reading comprehension strategies.
• Teach students to identify and use the text's organisational structure to comprehend, learn and remember content.
• Guide students through focused, high-quality discussion on the meaning of text. 
• Select texts purposefully to support comprehension development. 
• Establish an engaging and motivating connect in which to teach reading comprehension.

This article outlined a range of different strategies that could be used in the classroom to extend learners and focus on improving reading comprehension in all areas. There was lots to unpack in this article and I will refer to this throughout my inquiry to see if there are some areas that I could strengthen and improve and add some information from the article into my classroom. 

3. Key into inference
Parkin, C., Pool, B., & Parkin, C. (2010).

This was resource that was highly recommended for my learners and is something that I really want to implement into my reading program. Although this is a program I have been able to read the key parts of what key into inference in and how to use this in the classroom. This has also prompted me to look into further readings that have provided research for this which I will try and get access to and then share what I found from the readings in another post later on. 

4. The Reading Book
Cameron, S., & Dempsey, L. (2019).

This was one of the first books that was recommended to me to check out in relation to reading and what I can do to change the way I look at inferring or how I could focus more on my students who need help with inferring. This book gave a great breakdown of guided reading and how to facilitate independent reading with activities as well as how to have share reading with the class that can lead into some of the key overall topics that we look into each week. From this I was then able to find another book of Sheena Cameron's which was the one I have outlined below. 

5. Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies: A Practical Classroom Guide
Cameron, S. (2009) 

I have read through Sheena Cameron's teaching reading comprehension strategies and have found some really insightful information. This guide has been really great to see the reading comprehension strategies being broken down into key areas. There is a part to this that focuses just on inferring which is an area of interest for me this year with my CoL inquiry. This section of the book explains what inferencing is as well as gives some great inferencing follow up tasks that I will be able to use in the classroom to support this part of reading. 

As I continue on with my inquiry I know that there will be more academic readings that I will want to look into and come across and will update these readings on my blog as they come. This is just a starting point for what I will use for my intervention and build on some incredible work that has already been done. 

References:

Cameron, S. (2009). Teaching reading comprehension strategies. North Shore: Pearson.

Cameron, S., & Dempsey, L. (2019). The Reading Book.

Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012). Words as tools: Learning academic vocabulary as language acquisition. Reading research quarterly, 47(1), 91-108.

Parkin, C., Pool, B., & Parkin, C. (2010). Key Into Inference: Guide & answers. Triune Initiatives Limited.

Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J. (2010). Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade: IES Practice Guide. NCEE 2010-4038. What Works Clearinghouse.

Running Record Data

For the past few weeks I have been completing running records with my target learners to see where the gaps are in their knowledge and understanding. From these running records I have found that my target group of students are able to answer literal questions really well. I have also noticed that some of this group of students tend to make up answers that they think are correct sometimes without even referring back to the text to make sure they understand the question or see if they can find the answer. I have found this very interesting during my guided reading sessions with these students and trying to have them refer back to the text even when it could be an inferential question. A key thing that I have learnt from this is that the students need to go back to the basics of referring back to the text when answering questions and have them point to where they go this information. 

Another thing that I have seen from these running records are three areas that need to be work on and they are 

• Inferring questions
• Applied knowledge from own experiences and understanding of situations. 
• Vocabulary

The last two years I have changed my reading and writing program in order to help students with their understanding of vocabulary which I will continue to work on with this group of students as well as the rest of the class. From reflecting on this I think that topic specific vocabulary needs to be in the forefront of all of my literacy lessons. With continuing to have an overall topic focus each week I think this will be something that can be managed in the setting up of the topic and understanding this in more detail. The data shown below show what I have noted from these running records and how this has linked to my inquiry question and focus. 

As you can see from this data my target students are able to decode the text really well and are reading with a 97% + accuracy level. However they are struggling when it comes to answering questions about what they have read. Most of these students are able to use the text to answer literal questions, but when it comes to inferential, applied knowledge and vocabulary questions that students are unable to answer these correctly. From observations during these running records I noticed that the students would often freeze up when being asked these questions and take a very long time to answer as they were trying to think up an answer as it was a test I could not guide them to look at the text again, however this is something that I will work on when we go back to reading groups. 

Completing running records on these students has been extremely insightful as it has shown me the areas in which the students need to work on and how I can best help these learners in being able to make progress in their reading. I will be testing these students again during term 2 for our school reports so will be interesting to compare data and to test and see if the changes that I am thinking of implementing will make a difference. This will be a very good time to test and see what is working and what I need to change and work on.