Hunches

Before out next CoL meeting we have been asked to think about some of the hunches that we might have about our inquiry to share with our other colleagues and see if they can offer some insight into our inquiry as well. I will break down each of these below. 

Hunch One: If I encourage my students to share their ideas during guided reading sessions, then they will gain confidence in their reading and be able to answer questions related to what they have read. 

I have been finding that confidence is a huge area that needs to be worked on with my target group, they often need to be prompted to share ideas with each other. If they are not prompted they will just sit there and stare at each other until I do that thing that all teachers do and jump is to save the awkward silence and try and phrase the question a different way. 

Hunch Two: If I focus on extending discussions with my group using strategies such as ground rules for talk they will be able to manage themselves to have group discussions. 

We have been using ground rules for talk as part of RPI so I think I want to try and focus on using this with this group. I would like to start it off by maybe using conversation starters that aren't even based on reading to see if this will help the groups share with each other. 

Hunch Three: An emphasis on using images and specific generic tasks to show what inferring and other reading comprehension skills will enhance my students ability to understand more complex parts of the text and answer questions that require inferring and referring back to the text.

One thing I noticed from the data is that this group often forget to refer back to the text to find clues and answer questions, so this is something that I am going to focus a lot on to ensure that they are using the text. I have really enjoyed looking and exploring task boards through RPI so have been looking at ways to use generic tasks to help learners with these skills, we have skill builders each RPI session which allows up to look at amazing resources that we can use in the classroom. I also think taking it back to just inferring thing from images will also be helpful this could be part of our warm up when we are doing guided reading.

Hunch Four: An emphasis on understanding how to have basic conversations as well as teaching social skills and norms will enhance my students ability to share during reading sessions. 

I added an extra one because the more I have been thinking about it and reflecting the more I keep coming back to that basic conversational skill. I think this is something that needs to be explored and could come back to the confidence part of this group of students. 

These are my hunches so far, I am looking forward to discussing these at our next CoL meeting and to have some feedback and ideas from my colleagues.