Today our CoL teachers had another online PLG. We had to share in small groups what we have been doing in our inquiries.
These are the questions Aaron asked us to discuss in our groups.
1. Evidence about the monitoring of your implementation - how you are collecting data and information with your changed practices?
2. What is happening for students? How are you systematically tracking progress?
3. What are you doing differently?
I shared that for each genre we write, I have created folders for students to put a copy of their completed writing in. This will help us analyse and view progress as the year progresses.
I am collecting data by collecting how many words the students can write within a certain amount of time. A stocktake of how much they can write in a given amount of time. This activity is helping with their focus, independence to write and self assessment. This stocktake of a word count is done at least once a week. At the end, the students write how much time they were given and how many words they were able to write.
I am also making notes on our discussions about the contribution of the students and their confidence to share their ideas in our writing discussions.
Student blogs also have evidence of student work and their progress. I keep track of how many blog posts my students are making not only in Writing but all curriculum areas.
With regards to question three, there are so many changes I have made to my practice. I am implementing T Shaped Literacy in my practice. I am constantly reading and going over slides from the WFRC to gain more understandings and ideas about implementing T Shaped Literacy. Another step I can take is to look at the sites of other school who are implementing T Shaped Literacy such at Pt England School as Danni shared today.
As mentioned in previous posts, instead of having a Reading group then another Writing group, I have made literacy groups in my class. The students are in the same group for Reading and Writing. This is working effectively. Integrated learning with reading materials, genres, topics and discussions. There is also a lot of group collaboration.
I mentioned today that my inquiry is about accelerating the writing levels of my students by using the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy in my practice and that it was working. After reflecting, I wanted to share in my small group that there is a lot of evidence from research and data collection that the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy does improve student learning but my inquiry is about will how I implement Learn, Create, Share accelerate the writing of my students? This is a good point for discussion I think because, we can attend so many professional development sessions or discussions and not implement what we learn in our classroom practice. Therefore, what I am doing differently this year is planning learning where there is visibility with the learning, creating and sharing. To do this, we are utilising digital technologies in our learning more than ever and I am challenging my students to explore other ways of creating their create activities. For example, instead of just using Google Slides, they can also add a screencastify where their blog viewers can listen to them discussing their learning.
It is always a great learning opportunity to listen to the inquiries of other CoL teachers. Today Anna from St Pius shared her inquiry is around fostering a love of reading with her students. I was very excited and wanted to share that this was also part of my inquiry last year. From the work I did last year with my inquiry, I am still building on with that I did in Reading and integrating Reading and Writing together. I can confidently say that I have seen many of students enjoying reading for enjoyment. I am still reading a class novel to my class daily and also introducing them to other literature I come across which I think they will enjoy. I think it is very important to build on what we are doing in our inquiries and implementing what we know and learn every year.
