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

Parent Interviews

At the end of Term 2, we had our annual parent interviews.  This year we had to think of another way that we were going to run our interviews as we had 54 students with two teachers. This would have only given our whanau and students 7 minutes each to talk to both teachers. We decided this was not long enough for students to be able to share their own learning - student agency.

To trail a new system, we had four students within a half hour block along with their whanau.  We had an introduction korero sharing how we work within our learning spaces and what our expectations are for the students.

The students were set-up around the room with their books, portfolios, chromebook and a STEAM kit each.  All students actively discussed their learning with their parents, sharing what they have been learning, what the enjoyed and what they found challenging.  As teachers, we roamed around the room and sat with the parents for short sessions to answer any questions and concerns.

Deb and I felt that this worked really well in the sense that it was less intimidating for students and parents. This gave students ownership of their own learning with less of a focus on the teacher.  We are currently surveying our parents to find out what their thoughts were on the process and any suggestions that they would like to make.

Digital Fluency Intensive #1

Digital Fluency Intensive

My learning for the day included:

• creating a collaborative doc, where students each add their learning, before sending it to another person to add more.
• add-ons like change font, easy accents, read write, icons by nouns (for picture stories)
• Creating posters using google docs
• Sharing and saving google docs for ease of access
• Use "convert' files in settings to convert handwritten sheets (taken as a picture) in a word document that can be edited.