My focus for my inquiry this year is on Writing. As mentioned in my previous post, Writing has been identified as an area of concern for our school. This was concluded after our senior management team analysed our data from last year and the previous year. We as a staff also analysed the data and agreed that Writing will be our focus area for our Teaching as Inquiry this year.
My inquiry design has many aspects which I have been thinking for quite some time. As I listened to my fellow COL teachers present at the 2019 Burst and Bubbles evening, I decided my inquiry this year will have a lot of focus on the Creating and Sharing aspect of the Manaiakalani pedagogy. I feel the Learn part was covered quite well but the Create and Sharing needed more focus.
Another aspect for my inquiry design I have reflected upon was the integration of Reading and Writing. As a teacher I often hear the words integrated curriculum and I have been thinking about how well am I integrating curriculum areas? What specific learning activities am I designing to ensure the students are working across the curriculum and integrating their learning skills?
I will put a lot of focus on planning learning activities where the students are learning content and sharing their learning by creating DLOs (digital learning objects) to teach their peers and their blog audiences about what they are learning. During the lockdown this year, I feel my students and I have gained so much more confidence in using digital tools to share our learning. I am also in the Manaiakalani Digital Fluency programme and this is empowering me to help my learners in using digital technologies for their learning.
This year, I have changed my groupings from having separate Reading and Writing groups to having Literacy groups. If I am to integrate Reading and Writing, then I feel the students staying in the same group for literacy will enable the students to work through their integrated activities. For example, reading materials which are linked to the writing genre we are focussing on as a group.
I have been doing some readings online and I came across this from an educational facility in Australia called Arrendell Education.
Research has found that when children read extensively they become better writers. Reading a variety of genres helps children learn text structures and language that they can then transfer to their own writing. In addition, reading provides young people with prior knowledge that they can use in their stories. One of the primary reasons that we read is to learn. Especially while we are still in school, a major portion of what we know comes from the texts we read. Since writing is the act of transmitting knowledge in print, we must have information to share before we can write it. Therefore reading plays a major role in writing.
Retrieved from https://www.arrendell.com.au/importance-integrating-reading-writing-learning-process/
The WFRC (Woolf Fisher Research Centre) will be a vital source of information and support for my inquiry. The practices in the image below are actions I worked on implementing last year in my inquiry. This year I will continue to focus on these practices with a more robust inquiry plan.
I am quite eager to see the effects of integrating Reading and Writing in my classroom practice. Some might question if I have not been integrating Reading and Writing earlier. The answer is yes to some degree but the students were in one Writing group then they would be in another group for Reading with a different set of peers working on other tasks. Integration will look like reading together, discussing together and creating together.
There is also the focus on specific skills in writing. Below are the key characteristics of the writing standard for Year 8 students. For the Year 7 students, it is very similar the only difference being the level of control the Year 8 students need to have on their writing. My planning will ensure the standards are incorporated into activities.
My inquiry question is: Will an integrated literacy programme with a focus on Learn, Create, Share accelerate the writing achievement of my target learners?
I have made this Google Drawing to map out my inquiry design. I know there will be changes along the way as I work my way through my inquiry. I am also eager to receive some feedback or ideas from my blog viewers.
I will finish this blog post off with a quote I heard during one of our DFI sessions. It will be the essence of my teaching inquiry this year.
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