Inquiry Update - Week 5, Term 3

Inquiry Focus: To improve oral language skills and critical thinking skills.

Four weeks have gone by in Term 3, and it feels like the Extension group have covered a lot of ground. Yet I also feel like not enough has been achieved.

This term all classes have a movie due for the upcoming Manaiakalani Film Festival. Both Extension groups have now planned their movie. Filming will hopefully begin sometime this week for the Year 5&6 group. The Year 7&8 group will be busy for the next couple of weeks planning, scripting and filming their movies for 'The Outlook for Someday' movie competition about 'Sustainability'.

Last week the Year 7&8 Extension group were lucky enough to attend our third trip to KPMG (Manaiakalani Sponsors) on Thursday. This included a visit to Sustainable Coastlines which is an organisation committed to raising awareness about the impact of pollution on our oceans, rivers and lakes.

It's been a busy term so far, and there is still more to look forward to later in the term.

My Inquiry in 2019

This year the core learning area that I am inquiring into is Reading. Language acquisition is the lens that I intend to use. My main goal is to focus on exploring the use of a range of strategies to extend reading and critical thinking skills. I am also interested in finding out more about how elements of gamification can help to improve student learning and engagement.

I'd like to find out more about how gamification can help students to learn more about challenging topics (social, historical, political) e.g. the Treaty of Waitangi. I'm interested in using online games to boost learning and engagement. I'd also like for the students to create their own digital games to help others.

I will continue to use Paideia seminars, blogging, student DLO’s and presentations as a way to assess learning, language acquisition and critical thinking skills

Year 5&6 Extension: Term 1 focus on Eels and Maramataka

So far we have had a visit from Dave Cooper an eel expert. We have visited the eel tank and have started animations based on Maramataka (Maori Lunar Calendar) and eels. The students have also been introduced to the Paideia method (Socratic discussions).

Year 7&8 Extension: Term 1 focus on Gamification and the Treaty of Waitangi

So far we have explored some of the issues surrounding the signing of the Treaty. The students will be using the technology design process to design a prototype of an educational game (digital or non-digital) based on the Treaty of Waitangi.

Inquiry Focus 2017 - Term 1 Findings

Today during our staff meeting we broke off into our collaborative groups to share our findings so far for our inquiry focus. This is a summary of my inquiry findings this term.

Year 5 & 6 Extension: Focus on deep dialogic discussions (Paideia method)
Year 7 & 8 Extension: Focus on coding using Scratch

SPARK MIT 2017

I have the privilege of being a member of the SPARK MIT group in 2017. My initial proposed inquiry was: How to improve problem solving and critical thinking skills through use of coding and robotics?’

Today we met for the first time as a group at SPARK Headquarters in Auckland City. We also met with Lynne Le Gros (SPARK Foundation) and her team. Our first task was to identify and share what our problem was regarding our inquiries. Then we brainstormed lots of different hypotheses for why the problem was occurring and shared these with the group.

After quite a bit of thinking and discussion around our inquiries I have decided to alter my inquiry proposal to: ‘How to improve critical thinking skills through the use of code and deep dialogic discussions?’

After looking at some of the recent PAT and STAR data from the Year 7 & 8 Extension group, I have found that the majority of our extension students are not achieving above the national norm in literacy. Most are achieving at the national standard (between stanines 4 - 6), but these are our brightest students in their cohort who should be striving to achieve well above the national mean.

The following is a list of hypotheses:

• The majority of our extension students are not achieving above the norm in literacy (PATs and STAR) because they need to develop critical thinking skills
• Students need to be encouraged/pushed to grapple with harder concepts to extend their thinking
• Need to be exposed to a range of texts - multi-modal/wider and deeper
• Need to learn to question/argue/challenge/build on thinking and expressing of ideas
• Need to close the gap in knowledge and experience between students who know how to code and those who don’t
• Must make sure that learning is visible, and that students have access to resources and exemplars
• Students need to be taught how to use thinking tools more effectively e.g. SOLO
• Students need to know what next level looks like - expectations
• Students need more support from home to extend learning at home
• Students need to have access to their own data - to reflect, set next learning goals
• More student ownership/empowerment of learning is needed
• We need to find ways to raise the ceiling in student achievement at school

I am looking forward to another year with the SPARK MIT group.

SPARK MIT Presentation 2016 and Inquiry Findings

Inquiry Findings 2016 from SchoolTV on Vimeo.

This movie is about my SPARK MIT inquiry this year. It was based on the question: How to use film to improve writing achievements for students? I presented my inquiry at this years Manaiakalani Hui, ULearn (Rotorua) and at one of our staff meetings.

The movie also shares some results from the easTTle writing data. It was great to see that many students made shifts well above the expected national shift in writing.

Inquiry Term 3 - What am I doing differently?

Today we worked in groups to talk about our inquiry so far. It was a really useful activity to help redirect and refocus our thinking around our inquiry.

The questions that were used as starting points for our discussions are highlighted below:

If somebody from your group came into your classroom tomorrow what would they see you (not your students) doing differently from a term ago?

• Getting students to work in groups to create writing resources.
• Mid year testing - writing samples
• Weekly plan for the whole term - trying to use this as a guideline to plan ahead for the term.

Why are you doing this?

• Thought about letting students create resources, because last term they used film/movies to help inspire their writing.
• Marking writing test data to group students according to needs. Then teach strategies according to needs.
• Check to see if there has been any shift in their writing.

What has happened as a result?

• So far a bit of chaos with sticking to plan e.g. some changes have altered earlier plans i.e. I now want the group to work on Film Festival movie sooner rather than later.
• Writing data so far (from Year 5 & 6 Extension group) shows that some have improved, some have stayed the same, and one has made a huge improvement in writing (Q: is this because the student has better oral language skills which has now transferred to his writing? Support from home? More practice? Why aren’t others making the same rate of improvement?)
• Will be meeting with a writing expert (Juanita) soon for more ideas on how to plan how to teach effective writing strategies and work out ways to maximise learning opportunities for the Extension students.
• Thought about how to present data at upcoming Manaiakalani Hui and ULearn conference.  

More Descriptive Writing Tasks

Here is another example of a task where students are asked to practice describing how to 'show' not 'tell' what a setting might look or be like.



In this task students were asked to use their senses to describe an experience (or possible experience). They were asked to practice writing using descriptive language. Some examples are included here.

Character Description Task

Character Description Notes from Lesson:

Character Description Task

It was interesting to note that most students in this group struggled with the task even though they are our extension students. I thought that it would be quick and easy but it wasn’t. Brainstorming some ideas around what the picture or footage was about was quite easy. Coming up with a couple of succinct sentences that could ‘show’ and not ‘tell’ me what the character might be about was a lot harder. It took a bit of time to explain, model and help craft their writing. Eventually they all completed the task with some help and hopefully they will be quicker when working on the ‘Setting Description’ task.

Next step:

Show before and after attempts (by students) when crafting to see evidence of the difference that careful crafting makes to a piece of writing.

SPARK MIT PLG #2 - Part 2

Inquiry: How to use film to extend writing achievement for our Extension students?

Dorothy shared with us a handy definition of an innovation in a digital context:

"An intervention that would not have been possible prior to the move to digital learning environments”

1. What innovations are you using to address the problem you identified?

Innovation: using online movie clips (e.g. from sites such as Youtube, The Literacy Shed) to improve writing skills. Students will write their own narratives and create movies based on their narratives. Create short movies as resources to show students how to improve their narrative writing skills.

Term 2 Goal: Combining topic based school wide theme (Art) with inquiry e.g. providing opportunities to improve writing.

Year 5 & 6 Extension:

Art theme will be based on Polynesian Warriors. The focus is on traditional/cultural tattoo designs and what they mean (Art Exhibition at end of term). Students will work on narratives about their warrior. At the moment just focussing on ideas for plot, structure of narrative, character and setting descriptions. Lots of group discussion and sharing of ideas. I have been trying to provide opportunities to develop narrative writing skills by using online resources.

Year 7 & 8 Extension:

Art theme is based on the work of author and illustrator Colin Thompson. Students will write a narrative that will inspire their artwork in the style of Colin Thompson. The focus will be on perspective and how to create the illusion of depth. At the moment we are still developing our ideas about characters and the setting.

End of last term I selected very short Youtube clips of a setting (forest and old cottage), problem (being chased by a bear), resolution/emotions (being reunited with family). We used the clips to think about what we could see, hear, feel about the clips. Lots of discussion about this. Brainstormed ideas.

Spent time collecting resources - Link

Students are expected to keep a writing log (links to their blog posts) and post regular book reviews. Reading and writing go hand in hand and reading mileage will aid writing.

1. What is going well?

This term I have a clearer idea about what I want to achieve. I know where most of the students are at in terms of their writing. I’ve analysed their writing samples and identified individual as well as group strengths and weaknesses. I’ve collected resources and ideas that might help to motivate students to improve their writing skills.

2. What are some of the challenges?

Managing and organising my time so that I keep up with what I want the students to learn and achieve. Lack of time is always an issue. Interruptions in the school programme mean less time with students less time working on their tasks.

I would love to focus purely on improving writing during Extension, but I also need to be mindful of school wide needs e.g. Art Exhibition at end of term. No other choice but to compromise, but the digital learning environment means that students can access resources and information anytime, anyplace and anywhere.

Next steps:

Ideas to manage inquiry:

How to have an effect (make an impact) as time is split between art and writing. Only 2 opportunities to write.

Use an MIT day to complete artwork?? Create resources?

Homework - set each week - mini writing task so when students get to class - work with scaffolding a group. Focus on aspects/elements of writing eg punctuation.

How to combine inquiry with Art focus?

This term our school wide focus is on Art ('as i see it'). I decided that the easiest way to focus on my MIT inquiry (how to raise student achievement in writing) was to combine Art with storytelling (narrative).

This is the plan for the Year 5 & 6 Extension students this term:




Here is the plan for the Year 7 & 8 Extension students:

Findings in Term 1

SPARK MIT Inquiry 2016

Today the 2016 SPARK MIT (Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher) Group met at SPARK Headquarters in Auckland city. We were each given the chance to introduce ourselves and share our inquiry ideas. Quite a few of us have decided to focus on improving student outcomes in writing. However, it was interesting to note that we had different problems that we needed to specifically identify (regarding our group of learners) and share with the group. It was actually a little harder than we thought to actually verbalise what the root of the problem was. This is what I narrowed down to be the problem for the Extension group:

Problem: Only a small number of Pt England Learners are progressing beyond the mean in writing even when they are classified as our more able or 'Extension Children'. 

Hypothesis: These learners appear to be unclear about what is expected of them and do not appear to have clear goals to strive for in order to achieve well above the national standard in writing. 

Evidence: 

Fig 2. (below) is a table of performance in e-asTTle Writing from November 2015 of the Pt England Extension Children.

Year Group	Below Mean	At Mean	Above Mean
Y5	3	1	9
Y6	6		6
Y7	2		8
Y8	1		9

You will note that there are a significant number of learners above the mean but very few of those are actually outside of the ‘box’ that is grouped around the mean of e-asTTle Writing.