Restating the Question - 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. A causal chain is when a cause leads to an effect and that effect becomes the cause of another effect A leads to B. B leads to C. C leads to D. During the process of my inquiry these year there have been several events that have occurred that have lead to changes in my focus as well as my own practice. Below I have completed my casual chain of events that have led to changes and improvements to my inquiry. This also outlines the roles that I as a teacher play in these changes as well as what is expected from the students and the changes in their roles. 

My focus question for 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?" 

Some key things that I have been looking at is 

• Facilitating ground rules for talk so that students are able to share thoughts and ideas about the text with each other and think more critically about what they are reading. 
• Being able to have critical discussions around what students are reading. Thinking about author's purpose. Through this I hope to build extended discussions with my students so they can do this independently. 
• Improving understanding of comprehension through inferring, applied knowledge and understanding vocabulary.

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 above. Through these implementations and changes I have been able to solidify my inquiry focus and my next steps in order to see if these implementations are successful. I hope that the changes that I have made throughout this inquiry will continue to show results in academic achievement as well as student overall wellbeing and enjoyment for reading.

Restating the Question

At this point of my inquiry it is important to restate my question for this year to see that I am on track and what I can do further with my inquiry. My question for this year is:

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

I have been looking at this question and thinking about how this has shaped and changed throughout the course of the year. From my mid year data I did have some success with the things that we have been doing in literacy and have been able to add further students to my target group. This has meant that my overall group sample is now quite a large one which will hopefully allow some great data to see at the end of the year. 

As things go it always makes sense to implement these changes with all of the students in the class to see that if it works for not just one group but how it can be seen in the classroom. I think I have been using lots of these tools with a large number of students so I think it is really important to look back at was my initial question was and to make sure I am on track with that part of my inquiry. I think as teachers we sometimes get really excited about what we are changing and try and save the whole world at the same time so it has been good for me to be able to take notice of the initial question and reground myself in this stage of my inquiry. 

Throughout the year I have completed research and observed learning and behaviour around reading. I have looked into running record and PAT data to see what areas need special focus. From this I have found three key areas that I am focusing on this year. 

1. Comprehension strategies: inferencing and applied knowledge.
2. Critical discussions around what students are reading. Thinking about author's purpose.
3. Improving understanding of vocabulary through inferring meaning of these words using clues from the text.

These are the three key areas that I have been focusing on and have identified with my causal chain. I think it has been really important to stop and take stock of what I have been doing so far this year in order to keep my focus on what I started this year looking at. Like I said above we can tend to get a bit carried away when we are excited about something but this restating and looking at what I have been working on has given a new focus and appreciation for what I have done so far and where I am going to go from here. 

Restating my question

Creating and looking at my casual chain in my last post was really helpful to see what I changes I can make through intervention. This also gave me a clear understanding of my expectations as a teacher and what I need to achieve. This also gave me clearer direction for my students and the expectations that I have set out. This will also help with the success criteria for my students so they also understand what is expected from them during learning. 

It has now come to the time where I need to restate my inquiry question and think about my next steps, where I am going with my inquiry as well as highlighting interventions that I will use. Firstly here is my restated inquiry question:

How to enhance well being and enjoyment and accelerate reading achievement for those students reading between the ages of 8 and 9 years.

Initially I was just going to look at accelerating reading achievement but reflecting on the changes and things that have happened in previous years and this year has highlighted the importance to wellbeing as well as student enjoyment which will in turn have an affect on achievement. 

My next steps are:

• Continue to joining reading and writing with an overall focus for both for the week so that the students are exposed to key vocabulary throughout the week and know how to use these words in different contexts. 
• Take my students to the library as much a possible to expose them to different types of text and work on choosing books for enjoyment rather than just reading because they have to. 
• Assess student wellbeing through our mitey framework lessons as well as completing the survey I completed at the beginning of the year to see how students feel coming to school. 
• Continue to have spelling words directly related to the text to expose students to these words. 
• Continue class read alouds related to the topic that we are learning about for the week again to continue to build vocabulary development.
• Incorporate art, dance and drama into my reading sessions so that students can learn about these in different ways. 

I have some key things that I want to implement into my literacy program and by restating my inquiry question again I have clarity over what I am trying to achieve and the direction that I want this to take.

Restating my inquiry question

We are now at the beginning of term 3 which means that we are halfway through the year. In our CoL meeting this week we have been asked to think about our inquiry question and make sure that we have not lost sight of the main goal that we set out at the beginning of this inquiry. We have been asked to restate our questions. This is something that I have been thinking a lot about in my planning for learning this term as well as looking at my data collected at the end of last term from running records and annotations from guided reading sessions. My questions still remains however I am still continuing to look at those other students of mine who are currently sitting at where they need to be for reading. These students are almost a extra target group of mine to focus on to make sure that even though they are where they need to be now they are still getting that push to the next bracket to make sure they wont begin the year next year below where they need to be. 

Inquiry Question: How can I change my teaching to support my students who are reading between the ages of 8 - 9 years in order to make the shift required in reading. 

My hypothesis is around vocabulary being an important aspect of reading acceleration for not only my target group of learners but also all of my learners in the classroom. 

Updated data

This is the data that I have collected from our mid year reports and running record data that was completed at the end of term 2. The first graph shows reading ages from the PM running records from Feb 2021 and then again in June 2021. You can see there is a slight increase for some of the target learners with some still sitting at the same reading age. I have also looked at the PM reading level data from Feb 2021 and June 2021 which can be seen below. 

Again this data show that there are some improvements in reading levels from the beginning of the year to now and there are some that have still stayed the same. 

Where to next?
From looking at this data and the running record notes that I have taken there are some areas that need further development and learning. I did notice that some of my students were more equiped in the running records to answer the vocabulary questions and are trying hard to read in new vocabulary. This is something that we will continue to work on during this term. Along with other aspects of comprehension. The majority of my students passed the reading and decoding part of the text but it was the comprehension that showed there were some gaps in the learning which is what we will focus on this term.