COL 2025 - About Me

Kia Orana, my name is Zac Moran and I am a year 7/8 teacher at Pt England school. I have been teaching for 9 years and am very passionate about education.

This year I have been lucky enough to be selected for the COL group in our cluster of schools. Last year my inquiry was based on getting my learners participating and engaging in extended discussion to improve vocabulary and reading comprehension. Last year I was apart of the Reading Practise Intensive with Naomi Rosedale this taught me that extended discussion leads to the improvement of reading comprehension and an increase in vocabulary. This then led me to my inquiry this year.

How might podcasting support the development of my learners' ability to engage in extended, meaningful discussions about a text? 

This year I will be continuing to have extended discussions in my class. For the first few weeks we will be setting up group norms and looking at the ground rules of talk.

Why Podcasting?

In 2007 Dorothy Burt and multiple Pt England teachers started 'Korero Pt England' a platform for our children to share their learning with the world. What an engaging and creative way for our learners to share their work. Last year I had a lot of success with rich conversations, creativity and enagement

Throughout the year I'll be sharing podcast scripts that I have created and trying to get other teachers on board with podcasting in their classrooms.

These podcasts below are from my learners last year, the first one is a podcast based on a text set we were reading that week - Rosa Parks.

The second link is 'Whanau Podcasting', something I'm going to try and do more often this year, hopefully this gives our learners a platform to have conversations with whanau around what they are learning.

Rosa Parks Podcast - Angelina

Whanau Podcast - Nunu

I will be updating my blog regularly with updates on what we are doing in our class. Please leave a comment

Day 9 - Sharing Reading

 Wow, today was our last day together on RPI, we finished with a bang!

What an amazing day of learning. 

We started with hearing that Share aspect of our pedagogy is just as important as learn and create. As you see below, the 3 parts are just as important to one another. Our learners having an authentic audiecnce gives them more drive to complete their tasks to a high standard and post it on their blogs.

As you can see below, we had 342,376 blog posts from our learners this year in the Manaiakalani, the even more impressive part of this is that there us 125,397 comments, which shows that our learners are getting an authentic audience, our learners blog posts are being seen and commented on. This gives them more drive to make their work even better!

Another thing we heard today was about using our learners blogs as a source of formal assessment. All of us teachers right now around Aotearoa are in the same boat when it comes to writing reports, what better resource do we have to make OTJ's than our learners blogs! Use them!

This image below is a massive problem teachers all around the world have.  It can be so difficult getting our children to complete their work and then posting it on their blog. In our team at school we have 'FIOP' (Finish It Off Properly) time, where our students get some quiet time in the classroom to complete their learning tasks from the week and then post them on their blog. I normally cast my 'Turn it in' page on the TV so students can see what they need to complete.

Today we learned about another pillar; Sharing. As you can see, sharing is such an important aspect of our learners journey through education, if there isn't an authentic audience for our children, they might have no drive to complete their work.

We then learned about feedback. The 3 different types of feedback can be broken up into:

- Reminder

- Scaffold

- Example

When giving feedback you should base it on one of these prompts depending on the needs of your learner.

Here I have done an example of Reminder Descriptive Feedback.

Here I have done an example of Scaffolding Descriptive Feedback. 

We then talked about how we can share with our whanau. We were put into groups, I worked with Hinemoana and we thought to do something about the Hikoi that's happening at the moment, to do some learning about it in the classroom, write a script with some questions on it and go home and ask your whanau questions and if they are unsure of answers, our learners would be able to teach them.

Massive thank you to Pt England School for giving me the opportunity to be a part of the RPI group this year. I have learned so much and gained so much confidence in my reading teaching. I'm already excited for next year and getting my reading programme up and running again! Thank you so much to the Manaiakalani team for always being so positive and uplifting and giving us so many different ideas throughout this program.

Keep watching this space

RPI, we out, for now!

Day 8: Homework

 It's been a while since I posted! 

I have my final RPI session in a few days, which i'm excited about.  During my groups final session I was catching some sun in the islands of Croatia. I'm back now, and ready to get stuck back in.

First thing, I have been doing podcasting all year, I decided to do a podcast as my create task. My top reading group 12-14 readers are reading the novel, Wonder. We did an update on the book in our podcasting. Check it out here!

I completed the readers profile survey with my learners again and was quite suprised with the results!

A lot of my learners started the year not being very confident in their own reading ability, if you look below this has rapidly changed!

This is another graph showing that my learners are enjoying reading more at school.

Thanks for reading, please leave me a comment! Will be back with Day 9 of my RPI soon!

RPI Day 8 - Create in Reading!

Ever since I started at Pt England school I have been challenged by Dorothy Burt to be creative and get our learners creating. This is something I have enjoyed doing since I started my teaching career, and I enjoy learning about new ways we can get our learners creating!

One thing that was really interesting to hear about was the create task can be before, during or after reading. I normally will get my learners doing their create task after reading with their follow up task. I could be doing create tasks when we discuss the predictions we have of the text.  If the story is about something you are able to do outside of your classroom you could stop and do it during the reading lesson.

Naomi and Kiri gave us a poem and asked us to pick a verse and to find an image to describe it in Google Draw or using AI. I decided to use craiyon.com.  I found this site really helpful, if you use specific vocabulary in your description the ai generator gives you a great image of what you're asking for. This is a great activity to do with your learners as they need to make sure they have specific vocabulary or the image won't come out as they want it.

We have to always remember that our learners have so much creativity flowing through them at all times.  This was a great article showing that we need to keep giving our learners creative opportunities to shine.  This session was really inspiring for me as I feel like I give my learners opportunities to create, however, it's about thinking outside the box and throughout the lesson of all the different opportunities and the range of create activities we can use. 

Below is a create task we were asked to complete to create a book trailer of a book of our choice, hope you enjoy and what to read the book!

RPI Day 7 - Critical Thinking

Today I was lucky enough to have a 1 on 1 session with Naomi as I've just finished my 5 week travels across Europe!

 

I found this day really interesting as Critical Thinking is one of the most important aspects for kids to comprehend and analyse a text and make their own opinions based of what they're reading.  

Naomi spoke in depth about making sure we think more deeply about the text.  For this to happen, we as teachers need to plan and think about ways that are going to get our learners thinking deeper about the text. When we spoke about this, one thing I thought about a lot was creating my provocations for our extended discussions, making sure that my learners could have deep conversations about the theme/idea from the text.

This is an example of how we can get our children thinking critically when doing their follow up activities. This was an activity that Naomi asked us to create for our learners to use in their follow up which will get our learners thinking more critically about the text.

I really enjoyed this session, we were able to have really good discussion about how to get our learners critically thinking with the teacher and during their follow up, I was so grateful that we were given a huge resource to help us make this happen!

Thanks heaps for today Naomi!

Update on our Extended Discussion - Our extended discussion in our classroom is happening and going well.  After multiple talks with my team leader (Rob Wiseman) I noticed that I wasn't being explicit enough with the expectations before our discussions.  I'm making sure before every lesson we go back to the ground rules for talk and make sure that I'm always referring back to these, I also talk about what our goal was that we had for this lesson, based around the ground rules for talk, this has been great as it reminds our children to focus on a certain aspect in the discussion.

RPI Day Six - Vocabulary

This was my favourite day so far. (Don't know if I'm allowed to say this lol).

The foundation of reading starts with having a rich vocabulary.

Firstly, we were given a maintenance check to see when/how we are teaching vocabulary in our classrooms, I only was able to say I did 2/5 of these vocabulary routines in my classroom. We spoke about getting our learners reading for enjoyment, this is something I have implemented in my classroom, giving students a certain time of the week where they're able to read a text of their choice.

'Vocabulary knowledge accounts for 80% of the variance in reading comprehension, and is the strongest predictor of reading comprehension.'

Teachers all around the world teach vocabulary by getting students to look up the definition and write it down, how can we be more creative and get our learners more engaged in learning new words?

I enjoyed learning about the different Tiers of words. Tier 1 being high frequency words, tier 2 being more difficult words that learners will need to unpack throughout the text and tier 3 being specific topic focussed vocabulary that you wouldn't be able to use outside of this topic.  When planning for reading, we need to find Tier 2 words that our learners are going to be able use in their every day lives.

We were given exemplars of vocabulary tasks that we can use in our classroom.  After having a go at doing these, we then made our own activities.  This was a rich task and gave me a really good idea of how I wanted to go about doing follow up tasks rich of vocabulary. By doing this learners are able to continue learning the vocabulary we were doing during our guided reading lessons.

I look forward to using this in my reading programme! Another awesome day!

RPI Day 5 - Planning a Reading Programme

As always, another session with lots to think about!

One thing I really took out of the day was the concept of Read like writers and Write like Readers.  This is where we get our students to imitate the writing style of an author they have read.  I'm interested to see how my students will go with this.

One thing that Kiri raised to us was about what are our children doing when they aren't with us.  This made me think long and hard if all my activities that I have for my learners are worth while.  She spoke about having a 50/50 split responsibility being put on my learners and myself as a teacher, I thought this was a great idea and I will re-incorporate the 'Mahi Tracker' with my children as of next week.

One thing that was interesting is planning for 1 on 1 conferencing, I often find that I just think this will happen and it often gets forgotten about, however, if I plan for this explicitly I know it will happen.  The thing I will struggle with is where does that time come from?

This image is great, goes to show exactly what learning is and how it should be done.  I'm looking forward to showing my learners this, so they know they need to be in the Pit for them to learn. It's okay not to know things.

What opportunities am I giving my learners to have ownership over their learning?

I like the thought of Mixed Ability grouping, I have been doing this for Poetry, teaching this whole class then choosing mixed ability groups to work with, this has been great so far as we are all learning about language features as their is very little prior knowledge in our classroom.

Goals moving forward: Have my mahi tracker working, focus on beginnings of stories, continue my poetry, do my podcast rotations with my reading groups.

What are people's thoughts on doing  a novel study with the whole class? (Reading ages 9-12.5) Mixed ability grouping??