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.  

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...

This is an inquiry model I used for our 'Successful Communities' inquiry.  My first thoughts?  Would students be able to understand this? And would this model support their inquiry learning? Once we did the learning wall under each 'process' for example 'Getting started' 'Planning info' 'Collecting info' as mentioned in my previous post - students showed understanding of each one, however the questions under each heading were confusing some students.  Their thoughts were - too wordy, it was hard to follow, do I answer all the questions under each heading before moving on? The 'process' had really informative headings which can steer a student's inquiry, however this inquiry 'process' needed to be changed in order for my students to be able to inquiry on their terms and have freedom to move around an 'action' without having a systematical process. This prompted me to think about including the students to cre...

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...

My first point of inquiry lead to a thought provoking reading online www.inquirymind.co.nz and more investigations for me to research about 'What is student inquiry?' Jan-Marie Kellow (ICT facilitator) has a passion for inquiry learning and explains in depth why we as teachers should be teaching this in our classrooms. 

Questions for my inquiry... -What is student inquiry? -How will this improve student achievement? -How might achieve this?

Today we learned about how to put on blog posts via email

Tuesday, 31 May 2016 Literacy : comparing level 3 and 4 of NZC (Listening Reading Viewing) Today in our team meetings we had a discussion about the differences between Level 3 and Level 4 of the NZC (Listening Reading Viewing strand) Our thoughts .. Level 3 - From purposes/audiences to Structure: show developing….developing understanding...Level 4 shows an increasing. Understanding… ·                      Importance of being able to see the difference of developing and increasing. ·                      Examples:  When reading a student at level 3 may refer to images/diagrams to support their reading. Whereas a student level 4  would be referring back to these images/diagrams to increase their understanding of the text eg. Water Bottle Rockets, students wo...

Today Zoey and I met to moderate our e-asTTle writing.  By using the e-asTTle writing marking rubric and e-asTTle writing exemplars, these supported our moderation in making OTJ's together. Collaborating with Zoey. Samples of e-asTTle writing.