Stocktake so far

For our CoL PLG we have been asked to have think about our inquiry so far and to stocktake what we have done and where we are going. I have gone through each of the key parts of my inquiry so far and have taken a stocktake on what I have done and what I need to do in order to progress on CoL inquiry. Check this out below.

Tools and evidence

I have used a range of different tools in the classroom and have gathered a lot of evidence about my students to be able to really understand the needs of this group of students. When we have our parent interviews later on this term I will have conversations with whānu to ensure that I have some whānau voice in my intervention. 

Some of the tools that I have used are 

• Running records data from last year. 
• Running records from start of term 2 to gauge where the students are at and what areas of their reading needed work. 
• PAT data - I have looked into the PAT data of my students fro reading and have pulled out some key information that I will be able to compare with at the end of the year. 
• I have also taken anecdotal notes of my students while they are reading to be able to understand where each of my learners are at and what their individual work ons are. 

I will also be using our mid year running record data to see if my students have made any progress with their reading as well as look at the key areas that we need to work on. I have been having conversations with my students about reading and I would really like to complete some student voice surveys to compare from now and at the end of the year. 

Strengths and development

As we have been having guided reading sessions I have been taking notes of what my students are really good at and what their strengths are in reading. Most of my students are very good at being able to use clues from the text to answer literal questions well and in detail. My students also have really great decoding skills and are able to self correct if what they are reading doesn't;'t make sense. I will be able to use these strengths to help with the areas of development that these students need to work on.

Resources 

I have had some really rich conversations with colleagues around what I think I am seeing with this students and have been given some really great advice and next steps that I can work on with these students. This has also lead to research and reading that I have been recommended and looked at which given some very sound theories.

Measures

As I have stated above I will use a range of data for pre and post to compare students learning these include:

• Running record data 
• PAT data
• Teacher notes from guided reading sessions
• Student voice surveys

There may be some other key things that I look at in time as I have been looking into using the "Key into inference" tool that I could also use as a way to measure progress.

Opportunties

I have tried a few other little bits and pieces with this in the classroom as I know inferencing is something that needs a lot of practice and guidance. So it will be interesting to see if some of these little things have had an impact as well. I will continue to collect this data in guided reading sessions as well as recoding students completing their follow up activities to see if there are continued rich and extended discussions.

I am really excited to think about the changes that I will implement and see where my students can grow from there, watch this space!

 

Academic Reading

For our CoL inquiry we have been asked to look at academic research and readings to help us understand our inquiry focus in more detail as well as see what other studies and research that have been done that could strengthen our inquiries. I have completed some readings over the last couple of weeks and here are some of my thoughts and takeaways from each of the readings and research. I have also had some amazing conversations with my colleagues around what I should look into and how to strengthen my inquiry and my learners progress. 

1. Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition
Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012)

Words are a mean of communicating and thinking about the content of a specific discipline. "Lack of academic vocabulary knowledge has consistency been identified as an obstacle to student success." This research article provides a set of recommendations to improve the practice in the area of academic language. It is interesting to note that there is a significant difference between the academic language and typical conversations and it is important that students have access and the opportunity to be exposed to academic language. Academic language tends to have longer words due to the prefixes and suffixes of the words. This article outlines the six characteristics of academic language and they are:

•  Latin and Greek vocabulary
• Morphologically complex words
• Nouns, adjectives and prepositions
• Grammatical metaphor, including nominalizations 
• Informational density 
• Abstractness

These six characteristics are not seperate facts rather that are all functionally related. I found a two really interesting quotes from this research. "Just because people who read more can read better doesn't mean that if you read more this will make you read better."
AND
"The correlation between the amount of reading and reading ability does not imply a causal relationship."Both of these lines really resinated with me in the fact that so often in relation to the problem we just say children need to read more and they will get better. This is something that is important with reading of course, however this has also shown me how important exposure to topic specific vocabulary is as well as deliberate acts of teaching that can help the students unpack what they are reading. Just because they can read it does not mean that they can unpack what they are reading and think about all of this abstract ideas with text.

This reading has really shown me that we do need to use words as tools and be able to expose our learners to this specific language and explain what it means in order to help them succeed. This research paper gave some great insight into guiding questions for teachers and the role of the teacher to insure that students have access to academic vocabulary. There are some key parts of this that I will use in my guided reading sessions that I will document as evidence to see that there is a change in my students achievement.  

2. Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade
Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J.

This article provided a large number of recommendations to help with reading comprehension. The five recommendations were outlined in detail with how each of these areas could be improved.  The five recommendations were as follows:

• Teach students how to use reading comprehension strategies.
• Teach students to identify and use the text's organisational structure to comprehend, learn and remember content.
• Guide students through focused, high-quality discussion on the meaning of text. 
• Select texts purposefully to support comprehension development. 
• Establish an engaging and motivating connect in which to teach reading comprehension.

This article outlined a range of different strategies that could be used in the classroom to extend learners and focus on improving reading comprehension in all areas. There was lots to unpack in this article and I will refer to this throughout my inquiry to see if there are some areas that I could strengthen and improve and add some information from the article into my classroom. 

3. Key into inference
Parkin, C., Pool, B., & Parkin, C. (2010).

This was resource that was highly recommended for my learners and is something that I really want to implement into my reading program. Although this is a program I have been able to read the key parts of what key into inference in and how to use this in the classroom. This has also prompted me to look into further readings that have provided research for this which I will try and get access to and then share what I found from the readings in another post later on. 

4. The Reading Book
Cameron, S., & Dempsey, L. (2019).

This was one of the first books that was recommended to me to check out in relation to reading and what I can do to change the way I look at inferring or how I could focus more on my students who need help with inferring. This book gave a great breakdown of guided reading and how to facilitate independent reading with activities as well as how to have share reading with the class that can lead into some of the key overall topics that we look into each week. From this I was then able to find another book of Sheena Cameron's which was the one I have outlined below. 

5. Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies: A Practical Classroom Guide
Cameron, S. (2009) 

I have read through Sheena Cameron's teaching reading comprehension strategies and have found some really insightful information. This guide has been really great to see the reading comprehension strategies being broken down into key areas. There is a part to this that focuses just on inferring which is an area of interest for me this year with my CoL inquiry. This section of the book explains what inferencing is as well as gives some great inferencing follow up tasks that I will be able to use in the classroom to support this part of reading. 

As I continue on with my inquiry I know that there will be more academic readings that I will want to look into and come across and will update these readings on my blog as they come. This is just a starting point for what I will use for my intervention and build on some incredible work that has already been done. 

References:

Cameron, S. (2009). Teaching reading comprehension strategies. North Shore: Pearson.

Cameron, S., & Dempsey, L. (2019). The Reading Book.

Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012). Words as tools: Learning academic vocabulary as language acquisition. Reading research quarterly, 47(1), 91-108.

Parkin, C., Pool, B., & Parkin, C. (2010). Key Into Inference: Guide & answers. Triune Initiatives Limited.

Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J. (2010). Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade: IES Practice Guide. NCEE 2010-4038. What Works Clearinghouse.

Running Record Data

For the past few weeks I have been completing running records with my target learners to see where the gaps are in their knowledge and understanding. From these running records I have found that my target group of students are able to answer literal questions really well. I have also noticed that some of this group of students tend to make up answers that they think are correct sometimes without even referring back to the text to make sure they understand the question or see if they can find the answer. I have found this very interesting during my guided reading sessions with these students and trying to have them refer back to the text even when it could be an inferential question. A key thing that I have learnt from this is that the students need to go back to the basics of referring back to the text when answering questions and have them point to where they go this information. 

Another thing that I have seen from these running records are three areas that need to be work on and they are 

• Inferring questions
• Applied knowledge from own experiences and understanding of situations. 
• Vocabulary

The last two years I have changed my reading and writing program in order to help students with their understanding of vocabulary which I will continue to work on with this group of students as well as the rest of the class. From reflecting on this I think that topic specific vocabulary needs to be in the forefront of all of my literacy lessons. With continuing to have an overall topic focus each week I think this will be something that can be managed in the setting up of the topic and understanding this in more detail. The data shown below show what I have noted from these running records and how this has linked to my inquiry question and focus. 

As you can see from this data my target students are able to decode the text really well and are reading with a 97% + accuracy level. However they are struggling when it comes to answering questions about what they have read. Most of these students are able to use the text to answer literal questions, but when it comes to inferential, applied knowledge and vocabulary questions that students are unable to answer these correctly. From observations during these running records I noticed that the students would often freeze up when being asked these questions and take a very long time to answer as they were trying to think up an answer as it was a test I could not guide them to look at the text again, however this is something that I will work on when we go back to reading groups. 

Completing running records on these students has been extremely insightful as it has shown me the areas in which the students need to work on and how I can best help these learners in being able to make progress in their reading. I will be testing these students again during term 2 for our school reports so will be interesting to compare data and to test and see if the changes that I am thinking of implementing will make a difference. This will be a very good time to test and see what is working and what I need to change and work on.  

PLG 2

During our CoL PLG today we were asked to work in groups to unpack a text shared with us before the meeting. The article was called "Building Creative Thinking in the Classroom" Emma Gregory, Mariale Hardiman, Julia Yarmolinskaya, Luke Rinne and Charles Limb. We were then asked to read this and find quotes about the following things. 

• find interesting 
• agree or disagree with
• didn’t know
• believe has important practice implications 

Here is a list of quotes that I found from reading this article:

• Page 44: "In the context of education, perhaps the most valuable question to ask is whether or not creativity is fixed."
• Page 44: "Moreover, despite appreciating the value of facilitating creativity, few teachers feel that they are sufficiently trained to support students’ creative potential."
• Page 47: "Content knowledge within a domain has been argued to be the foundation for creative thinking and innovation (e.g.,Weisberg, 2006). According to this view, creative thinking cannot occur unless one has first mastered a body of content knowledge."
• Page 47: "The authors concluded that raising animals at home led children to have a better understanding of a situation, allowing children to construct mental models of the animals.

There were many great points to this article that really made you think as you were reading. The above quotes were just some of the ones that stood out to me. During our CoL PLG we were then tasked with completing "the last word" where we had to share one of our quotes, the people in our group had to locate this quote and give a quick opinion on this and finally we would have the last word to share our final thoughts. I really enjoyed this task as there were key areas pointed out in the text that I might have otherwise looked over and not really thought about in depth. I feel that we had a greater understanding of the text and also how to pick out key ideas as we were reading along. 

During our PLG we also discussed maths and what could be done to help make a shift and change in maths. The key question being what are the three things you think will make the biggest difference in maths? We had a great discussion about this and what we think will help with maths. One key thing I took away from this was the need for vocabulary in maths which is something I am also seeing in reading. So this was just a thought to ponder over. 

Profiling

During my guided reading sessions for the last few weeks I have been making observations about my learners and trying to paint a picture of what the gaps are in the learning especially when it comes to reading. As I outlined in my previous post I was interested in two particular groups of learners 

1. Students reading between the ages of 7 and 8 years. 
2. Students reading between 8.5 and 9.5 years. 

What I have notices with my students who are reading between the ages of 7 and 8 years the decoding is a major part of what is holding my learners back. With this I can see that reading mileage is really important for this group. In 2019 I created a site which was specifically targeted at students reading between these levels. So in reflection what I have decided to do with this group is focus back on this site and adding the students from this year to create resources and read aloud videos for others to enhance that reading milage. 

My students who are reading between 8.5 and 9.5 years make up a large number of my students and have a range of different strategies and areas that need work. Due to having camp I have had less time than I would like to complete running records on these students so this is a priority for the rest of the term to try and see if I can pinpoint some key areas that need to be worked on for this group of students. So far I have had a look at PAT and Star data for this group of students and will analyse this in more detail over the coming weeks and try to break it down and find trends in the data. 

I am still  a bit of a work in progress so far with this inquiry, I have tried to focus most of my profiling from what I can see in front of me with my guided reading sessions. I will take a deeper dive into this for the rest of the term and see if there are any other key things I need to add to my wonderings before I had a solid hypothesis around what I think is going on. 

Class OnAir Hui

Today we had our first Class OnAir hui at school. This was a great chance to connect with everyone doing Class OnAir this year as well as look at examples of lessons and have some PD on reading and what we can show in our episodes going forwards. 

The reading PD with Georgie was really helpful not only with what they are looking for in our episodes but also with my CoL inquiry for this year. The linking of reading and writing is really key and it gave me some really great insight and ideas onto how I could do this in the classroom. It gave us the chance to be the students for a little while and be challenged to come up with phases and ideas that we ask students to do regularly. 

Last year I tried to incorporate reading and writing a little bit more but in reflection with was with a narrow lens. From todays session I can see how I can link reading and writing in many more whys that I am already doing. I know it may seem obvious but in the business of everything going on it is sometimes easy to make these subjects seperate and just focus on some of the key things that need to be worked on rather than the bigger picture and showing the students examples even while we are reading. 

I really got a lot out of todays session and this has left me thinking about some other things that I would like to try and implement in the classroom thinking ahead to term 2. Looking at some examples of Class OnAir episodes was also extremely helpful. Again I was just so focused on my own episodes and trying to get these finished that it is so easy to miss out on other gems that my colleagues have created. So this was a great opportunity to watch others teaching, see some great examples of lessons and teaching as well as technical things that I could use and incorporate in my own Class OnAir episodes. 

I think that having days like today not only help to keep us on track and show us where we need to go but it also makes me feel refreshed with some new ideas and excited for where I can go next with my Class OnAir episodes as well as my CoL inquiry. 

Where to in 2023?

Last year as I interviewed for CoL 2023 and "dreaming" about this year my inquiry focus was to continue to look at reading but this year look at extending my students who are reading at the ages of 9-10 years. I decided upon this from looking at my data in front of me as I had not seen these students in action with reading so to speak. Now that I have come into this year and observed my students and their reading I have come up with some wonderings that I think could shape my inquiry for this year which I will outline in my blog post below.

9-10 year readers

As I have read with this group I have found that they are able to comprehend literal questions directly related to what they are reading. I have also front that with some teacher prompting they are able to start to answer inferential questions. The reason that I wanted to focus on this group of students is because they are currently "at" where they should be for their age. They are reading at their current chronological age. Looking at data from previous year and the data of the year 6's as the progress into year 7 I can see that many of these students then get almost "stuck" for lack of a better word at this reading age and don't progress into that next reading age bracket. So my question around this would be, what can I do to help extend this readers to continue on with reading success.

7-7.5 year readers

I have a number of students who are reading at this age level in my class this year. After reading with them over the last few weeks I can see that they are able to answer the questions really well they are understanding what they are reading, however it is the decoding that is still stopping them from being able to read the text and new words that they come across. I have not had a group of students reading at this level in my class for a few years now so it has been an interesting look into how they are reading and what I can do to help them get to where they need to be as 9 and 10 year old students. My question around this would be how to accelerate these readers so they are at the same reading age as their chronological age. 

Thoughts and Ideas:

As I have been thinking about these two different groups of students and what way my inquiry might lean towards I have been reminded of the end goal of extending those readers and making sure that they are able to access level 4 curriculum reading when they reach year 7 and 8. This has made me think about inquiring into how I can extend those learners further to ensure that as they reach year 6 next year they are at or above their reading age and thinking more critically. Then in a round about way the implementation I have for this group could be applied to the other group of learners and how I can extend them once they have grasped the concept of decoding. The group of students reading between the ages of 7-8 years has made me think about my MIT inquiry I did in 2019 which looked at these students and created a tool that would be perfect for this group this group to utilise. As you can see from this post my thoughts are still all over the place at this stage but I have started to think about which direction I would like to go in. I have spoken to Danni Stone (CoL across schools teacher from Pt England) and I am hoping to have her come into the classroom and observe a reading lesson with some of my students and see if that can spark a more direct inquiry direction, so watch this space!

Where to next?

In the next few weeks I would like to complete running records on both groups that I am thinking about in order to establish the gaps and work ons for these students. As well as seeing how the summer holidays have impacted their reading and

testing. I am also still very much interesting in students reading enjoyment so will be conducting some surveys around this. Overall I just want to establish where my students are at then hopefully have a clearer direction for my inquiry. 

Reflection

In reflection it has been a very interesting few weeks back at school, by now I would have normally established solid routines with my class and my reading sessions would be in full swing however this is not the case. But I have to keep reminding myself we would normally be in week 4 and would have had at least one full week of learning at school. This year we haven't had the most normal start unfortunately with the flooding and then the cyclone that has come through, so we are taking each day at a time and trying to figure out this direction of my inquiry that most importantly with benefit my learners.