Inquiry 2023 - May - Oct 2023 - Before and After Reading Sample

 My inquiry this year has been about reading for understanding during the research part of the Year 11 DVC project. 

As part of this process, I had the students do a baseline test before I tried any interventions with them. The blog post about this is here.

I have done a range of reading activities with my students since then. a summary of these is here on this blog post.

When we did the post "test" sample this week, I reminded the students of the things that we had done to support their reading this year and gave them this list as a print out to work through. They then did exactly the same activity that they completed in May.

Reading Tips

• Read through once without thinking about the questions
• Highlight words you don't know and find the definitions
• Highlight in different colours
• Appearance of the material
• Cost of the material
• How durable the material is
• What the material is used for in other designs and products
• Any reference to sustainability and the environment

I have put their work onto the presentation with their previous work from may so a direct comparison was made. Any missing on this presentation just means that they were not there in may or were not there this week. I have also included the reading they were given so it is obvious if they used any of the techniques we had tried or they had used any of the given tips. If this is not included, then they had not made any marks on theirs.

Link to presentation here

It is pleasing to see that in some of the student work here, there is more detail included in their answers and they have linked to their own designs in what they were reading. It is not in all of them but I can definitely see an improvement in places and it is a good starting point for us this year.

This process has given me more confidence in supporting reading with my students and so I will be able to put things in place much earlier in the year next year.

Inquiry 2023 - Reflections and Tweaks

 

• Explain the reflections and tweaks you have made along the way and the reasons why you made these changes. Share your evidence for these decisions.

• What methods have you used to collect information about the tweaks?

• How have you been systematic in that collection?

• What does the information tell you?

• What are you going to do with the information in terms of understanding what needed ‘tweaking’ and why?

The main methods that I have used this year to guide the changes that I have made to made inquiry is student voice. I have asked them verbally, during the course of conversation within the lesson as they are working and  noted down what they were saying. An example of this is on this blog post here, where we had tried two different methods and. I was asking them what they thought of them.

Examples of student voice and how I used it.

"I preferred this week when everyone was working together. It gave me a clear view of the

work and defining the meanings of the words we don’t know." - I kept in time where the whole class is working on words that they pull out of the reading - we find the words and meanings together.

"I liked talking about it together instead of doing the slide but I also wanted to read the

reading myself." - I made sure there was time where we read as a whole class and time where they could go through it in their own time.  Not rushing this was key as there were students who liked one, the other and both so plenty of time to fir it all in was needed.

I have also asked them to fill in a Google form so that I could graph and compare their answers. Blog post here.

Key to asking them for their opinion on what I was trying, was me being open with them at the start of the process. I had made it clear to them what I was trying for my inquiry this year and why. I wanted them to be clear about how I was trying to improve what I was doing with my teaching to make gains for them.

Before I tried any of the intervention with my Year 11 inquiry group, I was working with our literacy specialist and trying things out with my Year 9 food tech class. This was great as it gave me chance to set up a structured piece of reading, get it checked by Mr Milford and then try it out on the Year 9 class. I could then see what worked and what didn't work in terms of the clarity of my planning and I could make changes and use what worked with my Year 11 group. It also gave me more confidence when it came to working with my senior class as this is my first year for focussing in on reading. Blog post - Reading for Planning (Y9).

Main ideas that came from trialling :-

• Having my students match words that are in the reading before they start the main reading activity.
• Using images of what is in the content of the reading
• Pulling the text apart - chunking it - to make each section easier to focus on
• Targeting the questions to each reading section and making them totally relevant to the work that the students are researching for.