Term 1 Recap

Maths Inquiry 2017

This year my focus for my inquiry is around Maths, I will be looking into how assessment and the understanding of the stages of maths can help me to teach and meet the needs of my students.

We will look at add/sub to see where my students are at and work out what they need to achieve to advance to the next level.  There is a big gap in the students learning based around fractions.

Firstly I'll be having discussions with senior members of staff and getting PD around Maths teaching to support my inquiry.  I will be letting the students know what they need to achieve to progress through to the next stage to give them responsibility of their own learning.

I will be working with the maths progressions a lot this year and seeing how I can use this to assist the students learning in my classroom.

Inquiry 2017

“How can I accelerate maths achievement by focusing on Maths knowledge with groups working below national standard?”

The Manaiakalani Community of Learning is working together on this task using the expertise existing in of our community of learning.

In 2017 for my inquiry I have selected the following CoL achievement challenge 

#4. Increase the achievement of Years 1-10 learners, with a focus on Years 7-10,  in reading, writing and maths, as measured against National Standards and agreed targets.

The teaching as inquiry framework I will be using in 2017 has been specifically co-constructed for Manaiakalani schools using our familiar Learn Create Share structure.
The elements in this framework share close similarities with other models New Zealand teachers use.

I will be labelling my posts as I update my inquiry throughout the year to make the content easy to access.

Label Key:

LEvidence	Learn - Gather Evidence	CPlan	Create - Make a plan	SPublish	Share - Publish
LScan	Learn - Scan	CTry	Create - Try new things	SCoteach	Share - Co-teach
LTrend	Learn - Identify Trends	CInnovate	Create - Innovate	SModel	Share - Model
LHypothesise	Learn - Hypothesise	CImplement	Create - Implement	SGuide	Share - Guide
LResearch	Learn - Research	CReflect	Create - Reflect	SFback	Share - Feedback
LReflect	Learn - Reflect			SReflect	Share - Reflect

Editing Writing, what do I do?

I've been thinking all term, how do I teach students to edit their own work effectively without it being a chore?

I tried:

Peer editing
Editing your own work at the end of a session


Both of these types worked but the students weren't engaged at all.

Today we discussed who the audience is for our writing, people all over the world who read our blogs.  Students were asked to peer up and read one story at a time, they needed to check that the stories made sense, and that the reader would be able to understand what they were talking about.

I gave students 3 minutes for each story in their peers, I encouraged them to talk about their story, and different ways they could make it better.  Doing this gave them no time to muck around and they all got straight into it.

This worked well with the boys as they were able to work with a friend and there was a time limit (a challenge).  What more could a boy ask for?

Reflecting on this lesson, next time I do this I would use a rubric for the students to explicitly show what they are focusing on, for eg. Punctuation or Sentence Structure.  I would have this at the top of the writing document that they are working on, then they are able to see exactly what they are focusing on during that session.  I will give them a scoring system to rate their writing out of 4.  When it turns into a competition they always want to be better, which will hopefully make their writing better. They will be able to compete against each other to get a better score which will end in a better piece of writing overall.

Term 4 Inquiry Meeting

One thing that I learned is how to effectively teach punctuation in students writing.  I did this by getting the students to read their story out loud and use extra expression during the speech marks in the text, for most of them this worked and they did really well.  By doing this the kids understood more about the reader who would be reading their pieces of writing that they publish on their blogs.  Being able to get them to be the reader rather than the writer got them to understand they were putting speech marks in the wrong places.  Learning this was awesome for my own practise.

One thing I'm struggling with is how to teach students to use full stops correctly.  I asked my inquiry group and they gave me several ideas, including reading their writing out loud so they can hear when the sentence finishes.  I don't have any specific time for the students to stop and edit their writing, so in my teaching time I will have some specific time at the end of the lesson to focus on editing their writing, or a peers' writing.

Boys' Writing Term 3

Where are we at? Where to now?

After 2 terms of inquiring into Boys' Writing I have become a lot more confident in my practise at teaching writing and the boys are making progress.  I'm still lucky enough to be meeting with this group of boys once a week, but we also spend a lot of time together in the classroom reinforcing what we have learned in our little group.

I also got the boys to present the writing that they had written that day this gives them  a sense of ownership of their writing.  Doing this with them makes it more enjoying for all of them, they look forward to presenting their writing after the lesson.

I now want to observe other teachers teach writing in different year levels, so I can see different ways that other teachers approach writing.  I'm also going to be inquiring into strategies I can use to get students to use different sentence lengths and write effective paragraphs.