CoL Inquiry Thoughts for 2024

What achievement challenge are you considering as an area of focus in 2024 and why? Include in your WHY both evidence and your own passion/expertise

Achievement Challenge 3 - Lift the achievement in reading for all students.

This was my inquiry focus for this year. I did a lot of learning, research and trialling before working with my inquiry group on the intervention. We focussed on a very particular piece of research to support, which was materials research. This meant that the actual intervention time was quite short. I would like to start next year using what I have learned this year straight away. I can then use this time to work with Marc more to learn more reading support methods. He has talked often this year about skimming and predicting. I want to know from him if this is something we can do with the research we have to do about artists and design eras.

I will be able to try. any new learning next year in two different curriculum areas - Design and Visual Communication and Visual Art.

In both areas, the students need to do a lot of reading about designers, artists and design eras. Their knowledge of these things is then used in their own work so a solid understanding is needed.


What learnings from the 2017 - 2023 CoL teacher inquiries have informed or inspired your thinking.

While listening to Robyn Anderson talk about how she gifts words to her students and they have to use these words in contexts throughout the session, it got me thinking about the very specialised, subject specific words that the students come across in all their subjects at secondary school. I must be quite overwhelming at times when they are coming in to secondary school behind where they should be in terms of words that they know then to have all these really specialised words used in lessons all the time. This has got me wondering how I can think about this in DVC. I had started this year to pull out some of the words that were in a specific reading and we looked at them in advance but I see that i need to be much more purposeful in my use of technical jargon. One of the things that the HOD English said to me at the start of the year was to have a focus on subject specific "jargon"


How would your work support Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa?

There is a Manaiakalani wide focus on literacy,  reading and writing so my inquiry focus would fit in well with this. Trying to have a more cross curricular approach will help the students learn how to apply approaches across all of their subjects and not just think that is an "English" thing.

Which elements of the extensive Manaiakalani research findings inform or challenge you as you think about this?

The first thing that my Year 11 and Year 12 students do when they start DVC is a research project. They have to do a lot of reading. They are coming out of the junior school with lower than the national average PAT and asTTle scores so they are not in a position to cope with the demands of NCEA Level 1 then Level 2. The Manaiakalani research shows the increases that the students have made in Manaiakalani schools compared to non Manaiakalani schools but it is still hard for them. when they get to NCEA below where they should be.


How would you like to be supported in 2024 as you undertake this inquiry?

I would like to be able to work collaboratively with other teachers to create reading activities and could benefit more subjects areas. I am thinking this could be within Tamaki College and across different schools.

How would you plan to support your colleagues in your school with their inquiries and/or teaching in the area you are exploring?

This year, the CoL teachers at Tamaki College have been presenting our inquiry every term to the whole staff. During these sessions, we have been trying to get the staff to think about inquiry in a more open and unthreatening way.

All my planning work goes onto a public website and all my inquiry findings go onto a blog.

CoL Inquiry Thoughts for Next Year

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.

Manaiakalani CLuster Create Workshop

 We got together as a whole cluster at Glen Taylor school for our Cluster Create Workshops

Here is the presentation that I presented with Robyn Anderson, where we were playing with the microbits.

Verbal Instructions with Mote

After reading the blog post from Robyn Anderson about how she is trying out a Chrome extension called Mote, I thought that this would be a great tool to use as part of my ongoing inquiry. Mu inquiry is based around making my class site a more supportive user experience for the students and this extension will be great for adding short recorded voice explanations. It is great that you can only record a minute and a half as it means you cant ramble on for too long and you have to think about making it short and to the point.

So far, I have had a go at the presentation I have put together for my next cooking session with my Year 9 group. I have recorded myself reading out the ingredients and the method.

I also like that when you embed this presentation into the class site, the links are a single click to hear the audio. Link to where it is on my class site.

This is going to be really useful in terms of literacy as the students can listen to what new Technology terms sound like and can listen to them as often as they need.

Another idea that I have had is to have buttons to different language versions down the side of items of text, instructions etc to help those class members who would benefit from this information in their own language, spoken by a fluent speaker. This will mean me working closely with other members of staff as I did last year when we translated key texts for them. Blog post 1 Blog post 2

Inquiry Question 1 - An Inquiry Stocktake

Question 1

Use the ‘inquiry stocktake’ doc to reflect on and write about what you aim to learn about inquiry this year.

My main takeouts from doing this activity are :-

• What worked well - using the in-school and in cluster expertise.
• Challenges - finding relevant literature about what I was trying to do
• Additional support - more working together as CoL teachers, giving feedback about what each other is doing

If you want to read the full document, it is listed here below.

An inquiry stocktake

Aspects of inquiry	What worked well	Challenges	Additional support that would be helpful
Identifying valued learning outcomes (VLOs) to focus on	Having subject specific data going back years to see where the gaps are. Getting student voice from previous years. Looking at NZQA exemplars to see where gaps are in what I am preparing for the students.	Aligning want I want to do with the overall goals of the cluster, the school and the department.	Having CoL sessions where we focus on goals and how to approach them.
Profiling students’ learning in those VLOs	Using school data to see where the students are in relation to their achievement so far.  Getting support from “specialists” in order to understand the data coming out of the asTTle and PAT tests.	Not knowing more personal knowledge about students that may be affecting them. (i'm not talking about breaking any privacy here, but just knowing that there are issues that are affecting them would be very helpful)	Health centre, dean and tutor teacher support. Talking to the other teachers of the students.
Generating hypotheses (especially teaching)	Talking to other teachers - especially “experts” in their area. Talking to the students.	Not sure if what you are thinking about is going to make a difference.	More time during CoL PLG to discuss with each other what we are thinking about.
Testing hypotheses (investigating own teaching)	Trying new things and being honest about if they have “worked”	Not being sure if what I am trying is not working just for these students but it might still be a viable idea to try with others.	Have someone else looking over what I have done and giving input on what they think. Is it the idea, the situation, the teaching or the students?
Using research literature and other sources to identify more effective approaches	Reading online and downloaded books and pdf’s.	Finding literature that is relevant - a lot of time is spent searching. Access to academic literature.	A central “bank” that we could all add to so we can see a breadth of reading being done and dip in Access given to academic literature.
Implementing new approaches	The school being very open about trying anything new. I don’t have any worries about changing any part of what I am doing with my teaching.	Worrying about wasting valuable NCEA time on an “idea” that might not work.	Being able to talk over ideas with someone before trying them.
Monitoring (and tweaking) new approaches	The Causal Chain flow charts were really useful to see cause and effect - to look back on to see what the plan was and where changes to the plan happened along the way.	Ideas for changes to make. Ideas for monitoring what is happening and seeing if there is change that aren’t easily measurable.	Having another set of eyes - to coin a phrase from the class of Robyn anderson - a “critical friend”
Evaluate shifts in own teaching	Honesty. I am not shy about admitting something I am doing is not working.		I want to go back to videoing myself again as I did in Class OnAir as it gave me a really good insight.
Evaluate shifts in student learning	Honesty. I am not shy about admitting something I am doing is not working.	I need to do more student voice without boring the pants off them. Trying to get the truth in student voice. They put what they think you want to hear sometimes.	Ideas in different ways to get student voice would be really helpful so I am not shoving Google Forms at them all the time.
Keep a clear and detailed record of all stages of inquiry	Keeping an ongoing record on my blog, and not just at the prescribed points but during lots of other planning and activities. Getting support from Wolf Fisher (Aaron) about how to collect evidence that was not numerical data.	Getting honest feedback as I go from other teachers as to what they think is working or not. Getting any feedback at all sometimes is an issue.	Feedback from other CoL teachers on our blogs, as they are going through the same process as me and understand the challenges and what we are trying to do.

STEAM Project with Y7 and Y8 - Week 2

Today for the STEAM session, Robyn supplied the students with long dried pasta, tape, marshmallows, card and 3 paper cups.
Their challenge was to build the tallest tower.

After a quick review of what they learned last week about triangulation, the students got into their groups and made a start.

I gave them a "top tips" session ..

We talked about which one was the most stable and why, and the fact that they can include the triangle as an overall shape not just an add on to another shape.

I did a little bit of help as they went along, by building some structures myself to show them some different ways of thinking about the problem.

At the end of the session Robyn went over with them what had gone really well - 

The team work, the discussions and talk in the teams, the trying of new things, the willingness to fail.

We also talked about what they could consider for next week's challenge, which was looking at and thinking about the usefulness of all the materials they are supplied with.

I gave them two new words to think about before next week - tie and strut.

Art with Year 7 and 8

Earlier in the year I had been doing media experiments with my Senior students to try and encourage them to use a range of media instead of just colouring pencils all the time.  I had put these up on the wall and they were seen by one of my Intermediate classes. They asked of they could do something like that too. Their class teacher, Mrs Robyn anderson was happy about this as she wanted to do more art work with them.  She wrote a great blog post about it here.



After we had done that it got me thinking about an art project that I had done with Year 7 students when I taught Art in England. 
I put together an example and discussed it with Robyn. It was a mixture of colour blending with oil pastels (which they has already had experience of in the previous Art activity) and looking at really simple cubism. She was keen so after the students had completed their technology project we did this activity at the end of the rotation.
They then went back and taught the rest of their class how to do it.
When I visited their class today their art work was on the classroom wall and it looked fabulous.







I have included photographs of them here.

STEAM Project with Y7 and Y8 - Week 1

Before the last school holidays, Robyn Anderson from Panmure Bridge School talked to me about an exciting STEAM project she was planning with her Year 7 and 8 class and asked if I wanted to be involved. I see her students every Friday for their Technology lessons at Tamaki College so I was very keen to have some more fun with them.
The project Robyn wanted to do was catapults so we say and brainstormed some ideas together and decided on a plan for the term. I am going to go through to Panmure Bridge School every Monday afternoon as I don't have my own classes then and we will work on the project for the rest of term 3.

After our brainstorming session, Robyn put a great planning doc together and we started on practical investigations this week. Last week they did research.

Here is some of the planning doc showing what they are doing this week and what research they did last week in preparation for the project.


Wk 1
LI: To make connections to the history and design features of catapults

History of the catapult
What is a catapult?
What are the different types of catapults?
Find an image and attribute
Use the summary scaffold to write a short summary that explains each design
Compare and contrast using SOLO map 

Wk 2
LI: Practical build challenge to introduce triangulation

Challenge 1:
Use cardboard/split pins to replicate meccano to construct a square
Use the iPads to photograph the process
Apply pressure. What did you notice?
Construct a square with an additional piece of card diagonally across the middle
Apply pressure. What did you notice?
Define triangulation
Where have you seen triangles used in construction locally? In the world?

Create a DLO to explain your learning - must include images of process

Robyn started the lesson asking them, questions about the catapult research they did last week to remind them. She then took them through the practical methods they were going to use to make their card structures today. The students were working in project groups.



I then took the group and we did experiments to do with triangulation. They built their shapes out or card and split pins and tested what happened to the shapes when you apply a force.
We then had a challenge and the groups had to work out what was the minimum number of extra pieces it would take to strengthen the shapes I drew on the board. The conversations in each group were great to listen to as they were working these out.  Lots of problem solving and explaining to each other.
We talked about where they saw triangles being used for design and strength happening in everyday life. They worked together on this in their groups and produced diagrams together.

It was a great start to the project and I had a lot of fun.
I can't wait for next week!

Inquiry Group - Number Crunching

My inquiry group this year been my Year 11 NCEA Level 1 Design and Visual Communication class.  I have already done an overall analysis of their results this year, link to blog post here, so I thought that I would do an analysis of the level of excellence grades. I think this will show if my work on literacy with them this year has had any effect as it is the level of analysis writing that gets them the higher grades.

This table shows the percentage of excellence grades achieved for each standard for this year and the previous 5 years.  I decided to show percentage as the comparison as I get a widely different number of students every year and this year was the largest class that I have had in a long while (13 students).

	2018	2017	2016	2015	2014	2013
AS91069	15%	14%	0%	0%	13%	0%
AS91067	15%	14%	0%	0%	13%	0%
AS91066	42%	13%	0%	0%	0%	0%
AS91068	25%	13%	0%	0%	13%	0%

This next table shows the total entries for all the students for all the DVC standards against the number of excellence grades achieved.. This year has the most entries (50) as there was the most students. There was still the same number of standards.

Total Entries	50	30	34	25	32	38
Excellence	12	4	0	0	3	0
	24%	13%	0%	0%	9%	0%

The achievement challenge that I have been focussing on this year has been achievement challenge number 1 :-

Raise Māori student achievement through the development of cultural visibility and responsive practices across the pathway as measured against National Standards and agreed targets for reading Years 1-10 and NCEA years 11-13.

Because of this, I have broken down the achievement of the Māori students in the class.

Maori 2018	15	15	15
4 students	8 (E)	3 (M)	4 (A)
4 standards -1	53%	20%	27%

I am very pleased with the increase in achievement the students have shown and their willingness to go through the process with me this year. They knew I was focussing on literacy with them and why I was doing it.
The breakdown of my inquiry at the start of the process has helped greatly as it gave me a structure to work to and a target to aim at.
The section where I broke down what I needed to learn as the teacher has been a huge learning curve for me this year but I feel it has given me something that I can continue working on.
This whole process for me this year has really highlighted the benefit of using the skills of colleagues round you to great effect.
Thank you to :-

• Robyn Anderson for letting me visit your class room this year
• the Tamaki College English Department for letting me learn something about the asTTle marking
• Marc for all the awesome literacy work he has done with me and my class this year.

Link to all the literacy labelled posts here.

I can do the happy dance now ....

PS ... don't ask me about the Year 12 and year 13 results as that is a whole other story, but I have proved to myself that it works now so I have something to build on and use.

Reading - The Writing Book

I have just started working through my copy of The Writing Book, by Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey.

I am in one of the first sections of the book where they are breaking down a modelled approach to writing. They are balancing the level of teacher support and structure to the level of independent student writing.

It is split into what the teacher does, what the teacher does with the whole class and smaller groups then what the students do by themselves.

Modelled writing

They are keen that you plan what you are going to say here, which I don't think will match with how I do things. I am more of a "wing it at the time", kind of presenter on the day ( but I am organised with what I present about !! ). What I liked though, was the planning to make sure you are covering the criteria of the specific task.

Also, they are wanting you to let the students know what the criteria are that the piece of writing is aimed towards.

My questions on my pink sticky note - when we I do the product analysis activities all together with my Year 11 class, should I have one completed (about a different product) to show them before we start so they know what we are aiming for. I do this when I an doing drawing activities - I always do the activity first and have these examples that I have done to show them before we start. Why did I think it would be any different for writing?



Shared Writing

I was pleased when I read through this section as it seems to fit quite nicely in what we do when we sit round the front desk and do product analysis all together.
I started doing this last year as an experiment and am continuing with it this year 

What I need to include more of when we are doing this is the actual structure of how to write the sentences. Do one example and instead of just allowing them to shout out the words and disjointed parts, get them to say exactly what we are going to write in a more structured way. It will take longer but it will be worth it.

I need to look more into "think, pair, share" to see if I can use it to any advantage.






Guided Writing

My thoughts here, when I am focussing on my Year 11 group, is "chunking" up the analysis and helping small groups / tables of students with each chunk. I can do this while they are working on their drawings. We can look at more analysis examples in smaller groups, talking about them together.
These chunks are based on the SOLO levels that we follow when working all together on the analysis.

• Identify and label
• Describe and list
• Explain and analyse
• Evaluate

Independent Writing

This is what i want them to do when they apply what we have been doing all together on their own design work. Now i am thinking that the exercise time might be extended into them having more products to analyse like this but on their own as practice.

I liked what I read about "peer check" as this is what I saw happening in Robyn anderson's classroom when I went to visit last term. Blog post here.


Just reading this small section at the start of this book has given me loads to think about and do so I will definitely be spending time working my way through this book.