Mid Year Reflection

 My focus question for my CoL injury this year is:
"Will implementing ground rules for talk and collaborative activities during guided reading sessions enhance my students' confidence, facilitate meaningful group discussions, and improve their reading comprehension?" 
Through research and attending RPI so far this year I have been able to start implementing a range of different strategies in reading which I will outline in this blog post in more detail.

Ground rules for talk
One of the first things we looked into with RPI was setting up group norms and introducing ground rules for talk. These are the key rules that we have implemented in our guided reading sessions as well as follow up task time for the students.

1. Actively listen and don’t talk when others are talking.
2. Respectfully take part by giving ideas with reasons and evidence 
3. Ask questions to increase understanding
4. Make sure everyone has a chance to take part
5. Stick to the topic
6. Try to look at both sides of the issue. We learn from each other.

We have been using these rules during guided reading sessions and I have been having reading group sitting with each other after reading so that they can continue on these discussions. One thing that I have noticed is that there is a lot of teacher lead discussions during guided reading and this has allowed me to try and lessen this talk and allow the students to have conversations. It is a work in progress at this stage and next term I am looking at creating two smaller groups from my target group so that the students have more opportunities to share and hopefully smaller groups will allow the students to feel more comfortable sharing with each other. 

Would you rather

I have sourced a range of different would you rather prompts that I will start using at the beginning of my guided reading sessions as this will allow the students to have an opportunity to share their own ideas and thoughts around a topic and hopefully this will allow for more extended discussion during and after guided reading from the students. 

Data

It has been a really good time to reflect on my mid year data and to also make sure that I have collected enough baseline data to see if my intervention was successful at the end of the year. 

Next steps

I will continue to implement these changes into my guided reading sessions along with my reading planning. I will also continue to have regular check ins with my students as well as analyse my reflection data to see what areas need continued improvement. I will also continue to implement changes from our RPI sessions next term into my reading program. 

Mid Year Data

We have just completed our mid year running records so this is the perfect time to look at my mid year data and compare this to the start of the year to track progress so far. I have added in one extra student to my data set "Student J" as I would also like to track their progress throughout the year and they will be in the same reading group as my other students. I don't have any 2023 data on this student but I have data from mid year testing that I have added into the data set as well. I have created two different graphs, one looking at reading age and the other looking at reading level. I will explain each of the graphs in detail below. 

This first graph shows the progress of my students looking at reading age. From this data I can see that most of my students have made some progress in reading age. All of the students who have made progress in their reading age has made gains of 6 months progress in reading. This testing has also provided an indication of next steps and what areas that I need to work on with this group of students. 

This next graph shows the progress of my students looking at reading level. I do like to look at this data as well as because some of these reading ages are in a band of two tests and even though students have made 6 months progress they has also made huge gains in reading level. From this graph I can see that some students have made progress of one level and others have made progress of two reading levels within six months of learning. 

Next steps:
From this data and analyzing the running records I can see areas that need to be worked on. One of these key areas is vocabulary and students understanding the words that they are reading in a text. The other key areas that I have noted that need to be worked on is inferring meaning and applied knowledge. These will be the key areas that I will be working on with these students in the next two terms.