What achievement challenge are you considering as an area of focus in 2023 and why? Include in your WHY both evidence and your own passion/expertise
Achievement Challenge 3 - Lift the achievement in reading for all students.
The projects that my senior students have to do involve a lot of literacy work. They don't realize this when they sign up for DVC as they think it is all about drawing. They have to write a lot of analysis of their own work and read a lot to do the required research. To be able to apply what they have learned in their reading to their own designs is where this falls down as we have not been reading for understanding.
As a department, we have started working with Marc Milford, our school literacy specialist, on reading strategies. I had started trying them out a couple of times in my Y9 class, to get them to read the recipe for the following lesson’s practical session. I would put the resources together on the class site and send it out to them to access before the lesson and they would come to the practical session not knowing what they were going to do as they had not read it. Since working with Marc, we have been using the single session on a Friday afternoon to do the reading exercise to prepare for the following week. I have been taking the method from the recipe and breaking it down into an information transfer table as Marc showed us. I have also tried this with my senior classes with one of the materials research activities that they had to do. I combined it with the work on SOLO taxonomy that I have been doing for a long time.
Blog post about Year 9 reading information transfer
Blog post about Year 11 and Y13 reading information transfer using SOLO
What learnings from the 2017 - 2022 CoL teacher inquiries have informed or inspired your thinking.
Robyn Anderson’s Reading for Enjoyment this year was great. It took the emphasis off the reading and put the focus onto enjoying what they were doing.
It got me thinking that if I made the focus of the reading activities a more supported one, then they would get more out of it as it will be fulfilling a purpose and helping their project. I have been guilty of thinking I was being helpful by giving them links of where to do the research and readings but not supporting them in getting the most out of what was there.
How would your work support Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa?
There is a Manaiakalani wide focus on literacy and especially reading at the moment so I think that it will fit in well, with a slightly different emphasis on reading for research purposes.
Which elements of the extensive Manaiakalani research findings inform or challenge you as you think about this?
The fact that the students are coming out of Year 10 with a lower than average PAT reading score than the mean / norm for the country does not set them up well for attempting everything that NCEA throws at them. My students coming into Y11 next year will be below where they need to be in terms of their reading ability and understanding so everything that I give them to do in regards to research will be extra demanding for them. The first thing that my Y11 students do is a research standard where there is a lot of reading of information found about a chosen designer. I give them links to read through but this research has made me realize that is not enough support. They will need me to structure how they are reading this information so their understanding of what they are reading grows.
How would you like to be supported in 2023 as you undertake this inquiry?
I always get a huge amount when I visit the classrooms of other teachers in Tamaki College and the classrooms of other schools in the CoL. Watching how literacy elements are approached by specialist teachers, both in the TC English department and intermediate schools. I have visited Robyn Anderson in the past when she was specifically doing literacy elements with her class.
Here are all the blog posts that involve Robyn's class.
The support that I would like would be the ability to visit a wider range of schools and age groups as they go about reading activities.
How would you plan to support your colleagues in your school with THEIR inquiries and/or teaching in the area you are exploring?
All of my inquiry work always goes onto my blog so it is available for anyone to read and access all my resources. We are doing literacy / reading work within the department so my experiments and findings will be shared weekly in the department meetings. Sharing to all staff via emails of blog posts and presentations will be done throughout the year.
Acknowledging that while literacy is not the main focus of the subject it is an integral part of reaching those higher achievement levels. We all need to work together to help the students to realise that literacy / reading / writing is in every aspect of school / work / life.
