Term 3 Professional Inquiry

What are the priorities for my target learners? How are they going in relation to these priorities?

Scanning:  Target students are not able to identify what they need to be able to improve their learning. 

Focusing: I would like my students to focus on setting goals within the writing curriculum to improve their output quality.

Inquiry Question: Will using goal setting strategies with my target writers make them able to choose sensible ‘next’ steps. How will the goal-setting look? What resources will I need to support these students to set SMART goals?

Developing a hunch:  

I will need to

• Unpack Level 3 of the New Zealand writing expectations with my students.
• Provide exemplars of what each of the expectations looks like within level 3. 
• Unpack students writing, and identify which areas they need to improve on.
• Encourage students to order their areas of improvement, starting with areas that will make the most impact on their writing.

What do I need to know/learn in order to effectively respond to these priorities?

• Expectations of Level 3 writing
• Exemplars of level 3 writing
• How to set SMART goals with students
• How to unpack the literacy progressions into kids speak with the students.

Therefore what are my development goals?

Taking action: 

• Find ‘kid-speak’ level 3 learning outcomes.
• Display their goals on pencils.
• Kid speak writing progressions from TKI 
• Find professional readings about improving writing outcomes through goal setting. 
• Setting literacy goals and recording progress

TOD - Christine Davies - High Expectation Teachers

Christine Rubie Davies - Teacher Only Day - Research on high expectation teachers and the effects on students outcomes. 

Mixed-ability grouping - provides students with more motivation to persevere with their learning. When students are in ability groups, they quickly are able to identify where in the hierarchy they are. Provide more opportunities for lower-level students at the same level as everyone else.

How can I change my reading, writing, maths groups to allow for more mixed ability learners?

Useful links to support Mixed ability grouping in maths - TKI  and Youcubed

Motivation

Extrinsic motivation - Tangible rewards significantly and substantially undermine intrinsic motivation… there is indeed reason for teachers to exercise great care when using rewards-based incentive systems.

Non-contingent vs contingent rewards - When students expect a reward for their behaviour, the behaviour is less likely to continue to happen naturally.

Benefits of intrinsic motivation -

• Persistence
• Creativity
• Conceptual Understanding
• Optimal functioning and well-being

Benefits of using student interests

• Strengthen students motivation
• Promotes peer communication
• Reduces disruptive behaviour
• Enhance student-teacher relationships
• Promotes active learning
• Increases responsibility for own learning

Setting Goals

• Need to be realistic, achievable, measurable.
• Goals should be focussed on gaining skills, rather than competing with others. 
• Provide feedback 
• based on the learning intentions
• which becomes the basis for setting goals
• based on progress
• Long term goals need short term goals to work towards and needs to be monitored and reset often. 

Key factors of effective goal setting.

• Motivation
• Attention
• Challenge
• Feedback
• Self-efficacy
• Self-regulation
• The proximal versus the distal nature of the goal
• Self-set versus teacher-assisted goals 

Focus for Term 3 - Accelerating Literacy Learning in Writing.

This term I have identified 6 students that need a boost with their writing development. I have never been part of the ALL programme, but with support from my colleagues, I intend to run a 5-week intensive writing programme for these 6 students.

These students have shown that they struggle to generate and develop their ideas. Over the next couple of weeks, I will be reading a variety of publications and resources to find activities, lessons and ideas I can use next term with this group. I will be sharing all the resources and ideas here and will reflect on how they were used during the term to come.

Today I came across the "success for boys" page on TKI. This was recommended to me by another colleague. The first resource that stood out for me was the story starters. These look great.  Students watch an animated short film and then have to write what they think would happen next.  This would great for students to discuss vocab, creative ideas, etc.

Another resource on the Success for Boys page was the "Game of Awesome". I have used this before in my class, but not to the extent identified on the Teacher Support Material. I like how the students are able to plan out their story using the templates provided. Once students get into this game, the next step could be to create their own cards using the templates provided. This will give the students a purpose for writing.