2021 Teaching as Inquiry Evaluation

As an educator, every year comes with its challenges which we reflect on at the end of the teaching year. However, this year, there are so many more aspects of teaching and learning to reflect on. The Covid lockdown of 2021 has definitely been a challenging part of this year's journey. 

With many weeks of online learning and with not all of my students attending the meets, I felt as if I was battling a losing battle. When I reflected about learning from home during the lockdown, five of the seven students in my target group were consistent participants in our online meets every day.  They were the attending the meets, participating in our online learning and sharing their learning with me and also on their blogs. That is one of my successes for this year. 

The Project Based Learning programme enabled students to be more independent with their learning. This worked well with learning from home. The students were able to choose which activities they would work on. They were able to work at their own pace but all students had the same deadline for submitting their work. Throughout the year, most of the students gained the confidence to independently plan their work, seek help from their peers and teachers and also reflect on what they needed to do to improve their work. 

Looking at the data for the projects this year, there are definitely many successes to be celebrated. The projects were marked according to the marking criteria for each project. The students were awarded points from 1-3 depending on the quality of their tasks.  Looking at the last project which was NZ People and Places, most of the students were achieving Excellence and Merit for the tasks which they submitted. By the last projects, the students were confident in attempting and completing their tasks. Two of the students in the group did not submit their tasks due to their lack of attendance of our meets during the lockdown. I think it is also important to highlight that the Dux award for Glenbrae School this year went to one of the students in my target group and the Top Academic Student award also went to another student in my target group. Great achievements for these students due to their perseverance and effort right throughout the year. 

It is also important to reflect on the students who did not make significant gains in their learning. For example student KP. Throughout the year, this student did not get an achieved for his projects. I am questioning what more could I have done to support this student? Success for this student was his confidence to participate in learning discussions and not take an observer's role. His marks does not reflect the improvements he made during the year. 

Was self efficacy a worthwhile focus for my TAI this year? Yes! Definitely. When you have a student look you in the eye and say "Miss, I can't do this, I am dumb". That is heartbreaking to hear these words coming from a student. This was said to me in Term 1 and it really sent me on a reflective journey to question how this student has come to this conclusion about themselves. I also questioned the role of teachers in building the confidence of their students as learners and also how we can also be destructive in the efforts of students to be confident learners. Definitely a conversation I wanted to have with my teaching colleagues this year but did not have the chance to. 

Building self efficacy in my target learners, worked differently for each student. This is reflective of the complex needs we have to cater for in our teaching practice. I had seven students in my target group and they were all at different levels in terms of their self efficacy and abilities. The variety in learning abilities enabled the peer modelling to work well. The students identified their own "favourite" peer to ask for peer modelling and would always refer to these peers for help when they needed. I also noticed an increase in visiting the blogs of others as part of the peer modelling. Thus emphasising the different strategies the students were using to have their peers model work to them. 

That is a question which I have been reflecting on. We often would like to think we are doing all the right things to tick the boxes in terms of supporting our ākonga. At times in our reflections we can be one sided and say we are doing all the right things however, we might need to dig deeper and critically analyse our own practice and actions and how they impact our learners. Student, voice would also be very valuable to answer this question. The students, have always in their student voice given me valuable insights about my teaching practice. Most importantly, as educators, we need to be open to challenging our beliefs, thinking, professional judgements and be open to making changes. 

Planning for the year ahead

With the students now starting to enjoy their summer break, we as a team are reflecting on the learning from 2021 and planning for the academic year of 2022. We as the senior school teaching team have reflected on our teaching practice individually and as a team have have made a list of non negotiables which we are implementing and strengthening for the upcoming year. 

Being in the planning meetings was a great opportunity for me to share my experiences as a Manaiakalani CoL teacher. I shared templates for our team to use in their planning and teaching, resources from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre as well as other Manaiakalani Resources which our team can use in their planning. I strongly encouraged our teachers to use the integrated literacy approach as well as the T Shaped literacy. I have also encouraged our team to analyse the blogs of their students and take notes on the type of create activities the students were blogging because that is a reflection of our own teaching practice. We have set a goal to have the students blog SISOMO blog posts where they are able to discuss their learning through recordings and using more interactive presentations. 

I strongly emphasised the importance of exposing students to different texts to add to their knowledge and also challenge what they already know. We also discussed the value of dialogic discussions. That is another goal our team identified for our learning and teaching for 2022. We have been trying to implement having dialogic discussions in our classes for many years but there is still work needed to be done for this to be effectively happening in our classes. 

As I participated our planning meeting, I could not help but feel excited for the changes we will be making in our teaching next year. I look forward to seeing the teachers in our team implement what we have planned in their teaching practice and most of all, I look forward to our tamariki accelerating their learning through their learning experiences.