The focus of student learning for my inquiry work this year was continuing with the literacy work that I was doing last year. This seemed to be an important thing to continue as the actual intervention was only done in a small amount of time last year.
I identified this as my focus as there is a continuous need for literacy skills in both DVC and Visual Art as both subjects have to do a lot of research reading and writing based on this.
To build a picture of my students’ learning I used the usual PAT and asTTle test results and for the seniors, their previous years NCEA results. I also did student voice about how they thought about literacy.
Last year when this was my inquiry focus, I worked closely with Marc and focused mainly on information transfer. It was important that I continued to do this again this year and it has been built into the planning of the project work on both of my class sites now.
What has been new this year, to build on my literacy skills that I can use with my students, is scanning and predicting. With the help of Marc again this year, we have done a lot of work looking at the reading that students have to do to learn about different artists in Visual Art.
It became clear as I was looking for texts online that we could use, that the language used in art texts is really hard in terms of structure and the language and words used. When Marc and I were planning on a reading session with the students, a lot of time had to be included with vocabulary work and visual links to aid understanding of what they were reading.
I have a lot of students in my two Year 11 classes who are English as a Second Language students so I have been doing a lot of reading about supporting English language learners. As part of that, I sent a Google form around our staff at Tamaki asking about their experiences as people whose first language is not English. This came about through me watching a colleague talking to her family members at school. They were sliding smoothly between their native language and English while talking and it was fascinating to watch. This introduced me to the concept of code switching and I have done some reading about that subject thanks to Janee.
The easiest things for me to change were how I approach literacy as we are blessed with a lot of in house help with this at Tamaki who are always willing to help with the subject specific problems that come up. This means you never feel left in the dark about where to go and how to move forward.
Moving forward, as a result of realising how hard the online texts are to understand, I have started a website of my own which I am starting to use. I want to write on this website specifically for the students’ needs at the time. For example, the only thing on it at the moment is information about different materials as this is what my Year 11 DVC students needed at the end of term 3 when I started this. It will be a big job so it will only be added to in a just in time manner till I build up more of a library there.
Some learnings that would be relevant to other teachers are inquiry is not always a short task that is over then you move on. I always seem to choose something that never ends! For example, I have never stopped using the SOLO work that I did a few years ago.
The last post on my blog is 5 examples of writing from my Year 11 Visual Art students. This was the last standard they computed this year if you want to go and check out their writing.
