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.  

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...

Minute by minute 'Formative Assessments' These are some examples I used with my students from 'Learning in the fast lane' by S. Pepper Rollins.  According to Pepper Rollins (2014) it's to administer frequent ungraded assessments for formative purposes that focus on helping students learn rather than measure what they already learned (or didn't learn).  I agree with this statement as with these rich formative assessments students are able to identify their next learning steps, teachers can provide good feedback and feedforward to steer their students in the right direction, and students feel more confident to perform an activity or task knowing what they've achieved so far and what they still need to achieve.   I did the 'stick it dot' formative assessment for speech writing and this gave me a clear indication to take a workshop of 'WALT expand our ideas.'  From the workshop this gave the students more confidence and a clearer underst...

Reflection is such a vital part of being a teacher to know what went well in a lesson(s) and what could be improved for next time. Upon teaching my students the 'Inquiry Process' and building a learning wall to support their own inquiry learning, it came to my attention that students were still getting very confused about this whole thing about  INQUIRY.    Although the students helped create the learning wall based around an issue within our Manukorihi community, some students were still confused how to use the 'Inquiry Process' for their own inquiry investigations. According to J.Kellow 2012, the inquiry process and models are a guide however inquiry should never go through a step by step process.  I agree as the process we used was too controlled and rigid like J.Kellow 2012 suggested - where it lead the inquiry rather than the students themselves leading the inquiry.   From this, I decided to start again about INQUIRY . ...

Taking ideas from the 'Learning in the fast lane' I decided to do more in depth teaching and learning within our 'Speech Unit.'   Firstly by taking my small target writing/reading group, I knew it was important to expose them to our 'Class Topic Headings' and splash ideas with sticky notes of what were some good speech topics.  Eg: 'Community and Social Issues' we looked at certain things in our community of Waitara that pose as problems for us - straight away they were able to share lots of ideas such as 'Unemployment is it a problem?' 'Facebook, is it dangerous and what should we do to protect ourselves?' 'How can we look after our beach environment?'   The next day I exposed the eight topic headings to the class.  I divided the class evenly int eight groups - 3/4  per group and they went around to share their ideas under each heading.  As I observed my group, it was great to see them all taking part and being more aware of e...

According to Pepper Rollins (2014) Acceleration provides a fresh academic start for students every week and creates opportunities for struggling students to learn alongside their more successful peers.  I strongly agree as the maths activity I did with my stage 5 early additive group gave them more confidence to share their thinking and discuss their ideas with their peers when solving problems related to multiplication and division.       There was a need of my Stage 5 students to understand what the actual symbols of multiplication and division meant.  I decided to do an acceleration 'Sorting' activity exposing the students to maths language that also mean the same as the words 'multiplication and division.' This created a lot of engagement as not only was it a fun hands on activity, the students had lots of opportunity to discuss and share their thinking of where to place the 'words' given.  They also provided examples to su...