Causal Chain

One thing that I have been working on when looking at my inquiry is creating a casual chain. Below I have shared my casual chain where I have looked at my inquiry focus question in detail and have thought about how I can show changes in my students achievement. My focus question is 

How can I help my students reading between the ages of 9 and 10 years make accelerated progress?

Some key things that I have been looking at is 

• Comprehension strategies specially applied knowledge and inferring. 
• Extended discussion and how I can help my students to be able to do this independently. 
• Vocabulary that is specific and academic that the students are being exposed to. 

In some of my previous posts I have talked about why I have chosen to look at these areas as well as what I might try differently in the classroom to have accelerated shift in reading. I have outlined these in a lot more detail in my casual chain below. 

Reflection and next steps

Over the holidays I have been looking at my reading data and reassessing my reading groups to see where to next and what I can do to continue to see acceleration in reading. I have decided to add in an extra group of students to my data set and have also decided to continue to monitor my students who are reading above their chronological age and year level at school. A big question I have been asking myself is how to continue to assist these students who are now where they should be at thinking about going into year 6 but also how can I continue to push these students to think more critically and developing their reading. 

I have also had a look at the group of students who did not make any progress from our end of year data to the mid year data. I have also looked at some of my learners who have made progress to this level and have created a reading group that is a lot smaller than some of my groups but they are all at the same level needing to work on the same skills.I am hoping that by having this group a little bit smaller it will help the students grow their confidence as they will be needing to share and not relying on others in the group. For this I am going to take some anecdotal notes as I am reading with this group. I would also like to record some of the sessions to look back on and see what I could do differently. 

My next steps for my inquiry are to continue to use the strategies that I have added into my program so far this year. I want to focus a lot more this term on using key into inference as well as using this alongside the other inferring activities that I have been using with my students. In relation to my students who are excelling in reading I want to move to working on extended discussion and critical thinking so will look at introducing some sort of reciprocal reading with these groups. I am really looking forward to seeing what this term has in store! I am ready to hit the ground running this term and continue to work on creating shift with my students reading between the ages of 9 and 10 years.