Supporting my colleagues with their Teaching as Inquiry

In my role as a CoL Across School teacher, I have been working with my colleagues on supporting them with their practice in the classroom using digital tools and also their Teaching as Inquiry. 

In the professional discussions I have been having with my colleagues, I have realised that teachers are at different levels of understanding when it comes to Teaching as Inquiry. We have the experienced teachers who have been inquiring into their practice for some years and have received a lot of professional development in how to carry out a Teaching as Inquiry into their practice, then we have our PRT teachers who are starting with their Teaching as Inquiry. 

I believe as teachers, we are always inquiring into our practice because of the nature of our work. We plan, teach, reflect, change, implement and the cycles goes on. However, there are more practices we can implement into our practice when we are conducting a Teaching as Inquiry. 

Teaching as Inquiry is a journey that we as teachers travel to learn and reflect on how we can utilise our role as teachers to accelerate the learning of our tamariki. If we know something works, do we still need to inquire into this? Or are we taking a safe route in our practice by repeating something we are doing in our teaching practice which we know works for learning? 

My advise is do not be afraid to go into the unknown. Identify the challenge you want to address in the learning of your tamariki and inquire into how you can improve and change this challenge. 

I created this slide presentation to help my colleagues with planning and actioning their Teaching as Inquiry. I am adding more details as I work through this year with hope, come end of this year, this slide presentation will be ready to be utilised by my colleagues from Term 1, 2022 when I am on maternity leave. (Yes, I am going on maternity leave beginning of Term 1, 2022).

If you have time to go through the slides, I welcome your feedback in improving the slide presentation. 

Guiding questions about self efficacy

In the planning of my self efficacy intervention for my students. I have been having a lot of conversations with my buddy teacher who is a long time colleague of mine. We have been discussing what we have been observing with the progress of our students in their project work and more importantly their self belief and perseverance when they come across a task which they find challenging.

At times, as teachers we might say the students are not working hard enough. However, as reflective practitioners, we have to think of what is underneath what we see. In a way thinking about the iceberg image. We only see the tip of the iceberg but beneath the surface, there are more we need to consider, in this case the challenges our students are experiencing. 

I have been doing some readings on the resources available on The Education Hub, I came across guiding questions teachers needs to ask themselves on how they are building the self efficacy of students. My experiences in conducting teaching as inquiries has taught me that inquiring into your practice is not just about looking at what the students are doing and how you can change that. It is also a deep reflection of yourself as an educator, mentor, teacher to your students. 

Below are the questions with my responses:

How often do all students in your class experience success with their learning?

When I first read this question, I thought of course my students experience success with their learning every week. However, I re-read the question and saw it referred to ALL of the students. I would like to think that all my students experience success in their learning on several occasions a week. How would I measure this though? Without qualitative or quantitative data, how can I be sure the students are experiencing success? This is a really interesting question which is highlighting the importance of noticing when students are experiencing success and also celebrating success. I know my students experience success, whether it be solving a problem in DMIC, completing all their blog commenting for the week, completing a task they have been working on for their project or for some...There are so many ways to experience success but what this question made me realise is the lack of noticing when success is experienced in my class and acknowledging and celebrating success. 

How do you scaffold learning into smaller tasks, so that students experience smaller successes more regularly? 

With Project Based Learning, I realised after the first project that the tasks we complex for a lot of students. The students struggled to manage the tasks because it required a lot of planning and self management. In the second and third project we planned, we looked at breaking down each task on the submission form so the students understood what the task required them to complete. Now, as the students work through their tasks, they have the submission form open on their devices so they are able to check if the requirements of each task is met in their work. 

My buddy teacher and I have also been discussing working with students who are struggling with completing their projects on breaking down the tasks to manageable sections for them to complete. 

This question is emphasising the importance of scaffolding students to experience success by working on smaller tasks and experiencing success. In my intervention, this is an aspect of I am incorporating into my self efficacy intervention. Students experiencing success regularly and working through manageable tasks which will enable them to experience success and build their self efficacy.

How do you communicate your aspirations for your students, and let your students know that you think they can succeed in their learning?

I have always been a teacher who communicates my aspirations for my students. I strongly believe in building a positive relationship with my students and this starts from the very first day of Term 1 every year. When a student is feeling down, I always take the time to unpack how they are feeling and the factors which contributed to their emotions. Often I find the students are able to articulate how they are feeling towards the situation but often neglect to consider how they contributed to situations. It does take a lot of time to build the trust of students but I always find that once the students have my trust and I have theirs, collaboration, teaching, learning, sharing...is more effective. 

With learning, I always emphasise to my students that success is a matter of perseverance and resilience. Failing is a part of learning. I do not hide my failures from my students. I often embrace my mistakes and share these with them and we collaborate together to solve challenges we have in class with learning. 

These guiding questions have been a good reflective experience for me to think about what I am currently doing in my practice and what I still need to work on. Following on from this post, I will complete the rest of the iceberg with my target group where they will unpack what is under the iceberg for them. 

My inquiry plan

Inquiry focus on Writing

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. 

Inquiry design

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.

Teaching as Inquiry focus 2019

I have been very fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Jannie van Hees not only with my class but also in professional discussions. During our learning conversations I shared my goals for my inquiry which focusses on:

- improving reading comprehension

- encouraging my students to enjoy reading

- my students gaining more understanding of the world around them through non fiction texts and current events

- my students being a ripple effect to encourage reading in their homes

Jannie also shared the value of students understanding vocabulary and in particular cluster of words in texts. I had never thought of this. Upon reflecting on what Jannie shared with me about vocabulary, I now understand the value of students having a good understanding of vocabulary and how they are presented in texts. 

Below is my inquiry focus for this year. There are so many aspects I want to cover this year with my inquiry. I am eager to see the effect this inquiry will have on my students. I also really hope it will accelerate the progress of my students in reading as well as ignite or strengthen their passion for reading.

Will daily deep diving into quality, ‘cutting edge’ texts, accompanied by ’rich’ text conversations in which all participate, and with deliberate attention to words that co-occur to carry meaning, improve students’ reading comprehension and encourage their love of reading.