Teacher as Inquirer

My Inquiry Focus for this year is based on the School Entry Assessment Data. Below I have analysed the data and have noticed the lack of skills that will be required to achieve and make shift in learning across all curriculum areas. It is evident that there is a lack of basic alphabet, word and phonemic knowledge.

I have thus decided to use this information to help form my inquiry question:

If explicit strategies are explored and taught for phonics and oral language, will accelerated shift occur in other learning areas?

My initial thoughts are that if I use phonics and alphabet knowledge as a basis, could I get learners to respond to text more?

How can I transfer the social skills learnt through learning through play into thinking and sharing when explicitly teaching?

How can I interweave the gifting of language that occurs at Flying Fives more into phonics, reading and writing? 

Looking at these questions they seem more like seperate inquiry questions. I am willing and eager to track the progress of my changed practice and how they affect and help learners achieve accelerated learning. 

Alignment with the Manaiakalani Achievement Challenge:  

I am also interested in seeing if the focus on oral language helps learners share their thinking and ideas in Writing and Maths.

DFI Session 4

So far this has been the most valuable and time saving session we have had. I have used google sheets for data collection, to create graphs and determine trends in Maths school wide and literacy in the Junior School  Often it has taken me ages to input the same data onto different sheets i.e. NSN numbers, DOB, Ethnicity etc. A lot of time was spent on inputting this data, this time can now be spent on the analysis and discussions around the results.


What I have found invaluable:
* How to add names, nsn numbers etc from 1 sheet to another sheet.
* The beauty of the little blue box on a highlighted cell. You can start writing the days of the week and drag the blue box across cells and the rest of the cells are automatically filled in correctly.
* The down arrows on the named sheet allows you to protect or hide a sheet.




We also looked at various ways this could be used with the learners and as a reflection tool for our own learning. Below I used what I learnt to analyse a students blog posts for 2018.

When creating this graph I used the automatic fill option by pulling down the little blue box. I inserted the graph and customised. I inserted the graph into google draw and wrote my questions/thoughts/ideas around the graph. We laso learnt how to embed the sheet straight into a blog to allow the blog post to be updated immediately when the sheet is updated. This eliminates the need to fix, download and insert the graph again.

Learning /Aha moments

* In the junior school we could should use google sheets to input our data and analyse it using sparkline for each learner. I will definitely be teaching the Jnr team this. 

* WFR data can now be done in less time by filling in the more sheets that require the some of the same data.

Ramblings/ Rumblings

* How can this be used efficiently within the Junior school?

* This is an amazing rich task... what can I do to adapt and change it to meet the needs of my learners and colleagues? 

School Data and WFR

This year I was really interested in hearing about our junior school data and any trends across the cluster from Rebecca Jansen and the WFR team. I wanted to use their musings as a starting point for deeper discussions within our team meetings and to help  teachers understand the importance of analysing the data as a cluster.

Taking this back to our team meetings and having a closer look at our own data gave us the spring board to ensuring we are meeting the needs of our learners, preempting any trends that may surface and sharing our collective ideas. It also gave us the opportunity to show our 2nd year BT and 1st Year BT teachers that they have worthwhile ideas and are seen as a valuable part of our team. 

Rebecca shared that Writing Vocabulary needed addressing and so we discussed how we could show this in our planning and explicitly teach it. Rebecca also noted that we were making good progress but not enough for acceleration. We further discussed effective ways and ideas that could be implemented to help achieve accelerated shift.

Learnings/ AHA moments:

* Making good progress in Writing

* Positive data for junior school and specific points of interest to focus on.

Ramblings/ Rumblings:

* How can play based learning help with accelerated shift in writing?

* How can I transfer the oral language and reading vocabulary into Writing?