Janeen - Effective Teaching Practise

A huge focus this year through our 'EffectiveTeaching Practice' is to develop further our understanding about 'Acceleration' and to apply best practices and strategies for this in our teaching and learning programmes.  The main focus is to accelerate our students in writing. This lead me to my inquiry question 'How can I develop student agency to help accelerate learning?'  Below shows my thinking to further research to get a better understanding of this.   What is student agency?  My thoughts - the student takes greater control, ownership and responsibility of their own learning.  Students lead their own learning by directing their own learning pathway, setting their own goals, and making their own decisions instead of the teacher directing it.  

What is student inquiry? This very question has taken me on a journey of much discovery from readings to understanding more clearly 'What is inquiry?' but furthermore 'Where does the learner fit into this?' And 'How this benefits the learner.' Weaknesses Teaching inquiry this year I've observed students who are below or well below struggle to understand the concept of inquiry.  More importantly the learner has not yet developed the necessary key competencies to be able to inquiry.   There are many actions to teach around inquiry and trying to do all of this at once can overwhelm the learner as they do need plenty of practice to feel confident to do inquiry learning independently. First and foremost it starts with having the confidence to pose questions, and the learners need to be immersed in these.  For example posing questions could be a reading focus for small groups and as a teacher you're giving explicit teaching around this.  Students

As follows is an example of what an inquiry support process could look like to guide students with their learning.  

Here is our own class 'INQUIRY' action model the students are currently using to support them in their learning to inquire. We looked at a variety of inquiry models on the internet.  This helped us to brainstorm our very own actions where we were able to go from one action to another without any systematic order.   After several weeks of using this we evaluated our class inquiry model - such as 'Did we need to add any other actions?'  Or 'Reword actions?'  Or take away actions as they weren't relevant for us as learners.  The students did add another action 'Collect Data' as they felt this was necessary because quite often they did student voice surveys and graphs to help them plan next steps for their inquiry investigation. The students and I also added help idea prompts around each action to give them (students) even more support and direction around planning next steps for their inquires.  For example some 'Reflection' ac