Discussion with Colleagues and School Leaders

So far this year, our staff meetings have been focused on setting our inquiry direction for 2025. As a school, we are continuing to prioritise raising achievement in reading and maths, which reflects the needs we have seen across our learners.

After reviewing my 2024 data, spending time observing my students in reading sessions, and having valuable discussions with colleagues and school leaders, I have decided to continue my focus on reading for this year's inquiry. While my focus area remains similar to previous years, I want to refine and deepen my approach based on what I am seeing in my current class. This year, my inquiry will centre on raising reading achievement for students who are currently reading between the ages of 9 and 12.5 years. I will continue to focus on developing critical thinking skills and encouraging extended discussion during reading sessions. Through my observations so far, I have noticed that some students are confident and naturally lead group discussions, while others tend to sit quietly and rely on their peers. I want to find ways to empower all learners to contribute meaningfully to discussions, share their ideas confidently, and strengthen their reading comprehension through richer conversations.

Bringing Every Reader Into the Conversation – My 2025 Inquiry Focus

Last week we had our first CoL PLG for the year and our focus before our next session is the summarise the challenge of student learning. One of the cluster goals this year is 1.5 years progress inside a year, focusing on the big three of reading, writing and maths. As a school we have found the key areas that we want to focus on with those being reading and maths. From looking at my data and my reflections from being part of RPI last year I would like to continue my focus on reading. Being part of the Reading Practice Intensive (RPI), gave me lots of practical strategies and helped shape the way I thought about reading in my classroom. This year, I’m keen to build on that learning and continue to focus my inquiry on reading, digging deeper into what my learners need, and how I can better support them.

At the end of last year when I was looking at the data for 2025 and presenting my ideas for CoL 2025 my thought process of what I wanted to look at for this year was to extend my students who at or just below where they should be for reading and focus on critical thinking and extended discussion. From looking at 2024 data for these students in my class I would like to focus my inquiry on my students who are reading between the ages of 9 and 12.5 years.

I have spend the first few weeks of this term observing my learners in reading and have found that there are two extremes in this group of students. There is a number of students who are confident and really like sharing their thoughts and ideas in guided reading lessons, however there are a large number of students in these groups who rely on these confident ones to share and will just sit back and not take part in these discussions. I have completed a reader profile survey in week 1 and I will share the results of this in another blog post but it was really interesting to see the students thoughts and feelings around reading.

The main challenge that I can see my learners are facing is being able to have conversations and discussions as a group with everyone being able to share their thoughts and ideas. I want to be able to build a space where students love to read and share what they have read with each other. This is the transition from learning to read to reading to learn and this is what I want to empower my learners with this year.

Challenge of student learning

Last week we had our first CoL PLG for the year and our focus before our next session is the summarise the challenge of student learning. One of the cluster goals this year is 1.5 years progress inside a year, focusing on the big three of reading, writing and maths. As a school we have found the key areas that we want to focus on with those bing reading and maths. From looking at my students learning and being part of the reading practice intensive (RPI) this year I have decided that my inquiry focus will be on reading. 

At the end of last year when I was looking at the data for 2024 and presenting my ideas for CoL 2024 I thought was to extend my students who at or just below where they should be for reading and focus on critical thinking and extended discussion. However when looking at the data for my team as a whole and what the data was showing I have seen a trend in the data with many of our learners reading between the ages of 7 and 8.5 years. It is always hard to try and frame what you are going to do until the learners are in front of you. 

I have spend the first few weeks of this term observing my learners in reading and have found that many of these learners don't want to share during reading sessions and need to be prompted to answer questions and share thoughts and ideas about what they have read. As part of RPI we completed a reader profile survey which gave me more of an insight to what these learners were thinking and how they were feeling about reading. 

The main challenge that my learners are facing in reading is the confidence to participate in reading sessions as well as reading between the ages of 7 and 8.5 years which is below where they should be at in year 5 and 6. So from looking at all of these aspects my inquiry focus is going to be around lifting confidence in reading as well as accelerating students reading progress. 

Looking at 2022 data

 2022 Focus

This year my inquiry focus continues to look at reading and raising reading achievement. This year I have identified my target group as those students who are reading between the ages of 8-9 years. This group of learners are either currently considered to be at where they should be or just below. I have found looking at previous years data of my own there tends to be a group of students who finish year 5 and are still reading at this level when moving to year 6 and they almost seem "stuck" (for lack of a better word) at these levels. This year I would like to try and find out why this is and what I can do as a teacher to help my learners make this shift before falling behind as they go up the school. 

Hunches

I have been thinking about this for a little while now and with some discussion with some of my other colleagues these are some of the hunches that I have so far that I will need to look into:

• Students are having to pass 2 reading tests (levels) in order to make it to the next year bracket in reading. I have noticed that some of my students may pass one of the levels but stay reading at the same age and then seem to get stuck getting to that next level. 
• The questions to pass are increased at this level of text, applied knowing and inferencing becomes a big part of being able to pass the text. They now need to pass at least 6 of the 8 questions rather than 4 of the 6 questions in previous texts. 
• Vocabulary and inferencing are areas that need work. Looking at the test data and what areas the students are needing work on these are gaps and struggles with inferencing and understanding what the vocabulary means in different contexts. 

I will look into these hunches in more detail throughout the term. This target group so far has been obtained from just looking at the data from last year, I will reassess and look at this data once I have the students in front of my in the classroom and see what areas are needing the most attention. So watch this space!