This year I am part of our school SAF (Student Achievement Function) team. In our meetings we have been going through our student achievement data for the past years and have identified the writing achievement of our students is not accelerating but rather declining for some year levels and stable for others.
We have shared this data with our teaching staff and we have all agreed that writing will be the area of focus for our teaching inquiries this year.
After much reflection and going through notes from our writing intervention with a facilitator from Infinity, I have decided to focus on the authenticity of writing tasks. I believe when students have a purpose for their writing and receive feedback, they will be motivated to write and produce good quality and meaningful writing.
This focus also links in with our class push to be better at blogging and trying to reach audiences around the world with our work. We have signed up for the Tuhi Mai, Tuhi atu programme and are eager to collaborate with our buddy teams from the Toki Pounamu cluster.
Therefore, my inquiry question for my 2020 inquiry is:
Will providing authentic tasks where students have an authentic audience to read and give feedback about their writing, motivate my students to write and accelerate their achievement in writing?
I have yet to confirm my inquiry group for this year as we are completing our assessments this week. The majority of my focus group will be Maori boys as we identified there is a great need to cater for the learning of our Maori boys in their learning in all curriculum areas.
Next steps:
- Identify inquiry group
- Collect student voice about writing
- Collect past achievement data from past three-five years
- Identify trends in student writing progress
- Collect whanau voice about how we can collaborate to support the student
- Share inquiry with my inquiry group
- Collaborate on group norms
Hi Amy,
ReplyDeleteI'm really looking forward to following your inquiry this year. I have participated in Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu before and my class really enjoyed it, so I'd love to see its impact on your inquiry. I also like how you will be looking at your past data and teaching to inform your inquiry, I think that is something that can be easily overlooked.
Hi Amy,
ReplyDeleteVery glad that you have a specific idea (authentic tasks) that you want to test this year. I was wondering could you give us some more details about your student achievement data for the past years? What the data looks like? Especially writing achievement.
Also, you said that “after much reflection and going through notes from our writing intervention with a facilitator from Infinity, I have decided to focus on the authenticity of writing tasks.” Could you tell us more about the story about the facilitator from Infinity? What was your reflection from this? Thank you.
Allen