PTC 08

Collective Teacher Efficacy

Sonya Van Schaijik Ako, PTC 06, PTC 08 , ,

The power of connections is vital for collaboration. When a group of teachers come together to work together  magic happens. When they come together for their students, and learning is the focus, then we have collective teacher efficacy.

Teacher Efficacy

So what exactly does teacher efficacy mean? Hattie says it is the way you think about your role as a leader or a teacher that defines the way you work and the impact you will have.

So as a teacher how do we measure our impact?

Keep our eyes on the game

When working with our school I like to make visible our school’s ethnicity data. I have been tracking ours for seven years and am amazed at how much movement I have seen in the seven years since I have been at Newmarket. We have a fabulous makeup of an amazing group of students who are predominantly Asian. Recently I have seen another surge of new migrants, when I have finalised our application for ESOL funding. I have begun with this because the makeup of our school affects our data. At the same time I stress the importance of watching the data. The aim long term is not to get caught up in the six month gains or the short term achievements that we can sometimes become excited over. I have faith that our bilingual learners will exceed our expectations when they get to secondary school because I have faith in our teachers and in my school.

The importance of data to help drive learning

My first query is, ‘Do our children want to come to school?‘ So by focussing on attendance data I look at our children who have attendance gaps and determine why this happens. We have an amazing person who watches the trends carefully and catches up with families if there is a drop in attendance.

We can also measure academic data and decide on the impact we expect to see. We have a range of assessment tools that give us this information and we are getting better at analysing them to target where our teaching gaps are and the effect we are having. We have a robust student management system that is able to aggregate the data and our teachers are developing in their skills to access and analyse the information.

When measuring our impact I believe that understanding what a year’s progress looks like is more important than measuring where our learners sit against national standards.  I also believe that it takes six to seven years to measure the learning journey to see that progress. I state this because of my training in bilingual education and am influenced by the work of Thomas and Collier who have also conducted longitudinal studies on language learners progress and have researched that it takes six to eight years to see the impact of bilingual education. We are not a bilingual school but we do celebrate the languages that our children bring with them.

Every teacher needs to be tracking the children’s progress, but we really need to move faster as there is a sense of urgency for our bilingual children who are catching up. For them I expect to see greater than a years progress.We can track this by analysing reading graphs initially. When I look at reading data I love seeing something like this (Fig 1)and bearing in mind that orange to turquoise plateau when inferencing becomes even more important rather than at the text understanding. These graphs were borrowed from our student management system ‘EDGE’ and was part of what I shared with our Board of Trustees recently. Against National Standards this student is well below. Using the data I can share accelerated progress.

Fig 1

sample1

When I look at our writing data using asTTle as one tool, I check the scores because they tell me more about student’s progress than the curriculum levels. I align them to the reading and see where everything sits. I look for something like this (Fig 2). This is a three year reading graph and writing data. Remember many of our children are migrant and often come with literacy in their first language. The reading always shifts first and the writing can lag behind. Note the highlighted number, and I am seeing less of the inflated score that can happen at the end of the year. From my own learning I see a correlation between the scores and the colour wheel. This is not yet proven, but I am seeing a trend. For example a 1B writing score shifting into the 1000s usually happens from green level in reading. 

Fig 2

sample2 sample1a

I also scrutinise historic data and identify drops. I look for the classic year 3-4 drop when Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALPs) becomes much more important than Basic Interpersonal Communication (BICs) for assessing progress. (Cummins). I am excited to say that after several years of across school moderation, we are no longer seeing that drop at year 3 & 4 so I believe we have nailed that. One key question here is ‘How long have the children been sitting at or above before we know that this data is stable?’ Check out your own school data at the Education Counts site.  If your school data is stable then there should not be that year 7 drop that also happens when children go to intermediate. I can also see from our historic graph the last time when our year 2 data was still too high. The graph shows the last of the trending drop happening in year 3. (Refer 2013, Year 2.)

NSD

Oral Language

As teachers we do tend to focus on reading and writing because these can be measured. However  take into account Paul Nations research into academic vocabulary and unpack what is required to achieve at this level of learning and remember how long it takes to learn a language. This can be broken down further using Academic Word List (AWL) devices by Averil Coxhead.

Students need to be acquiring 2000 new words per year to make a years progress. When this is broken down further, that is approximately 40 new words per week that should be actively taught. Breaking it down further, this is 10 words per day because we take into account holidays.  I recommend seriously looking at Jane Van der Zeydens book Essential Oral Language Toolkit. I love Jane’s work because it is research based and from a recent classroom teacher’s perspective. Jane also understands the sense of urgency for our English Language Learners.

Goal Setting

Recently I had a discussion with a colleague about the importance of goal setting. But not from a teacher perspective as was her understanding but from the learner’s perspective. I asked why the children were not setting their own goals looking at their own data. I shared with her John Hattie’s effect size on goal setting and suggested using the ‘Three Bear’s’ analogy also used by John. ‘Not too hard, not too soft but just right.’ The following was taken from one of our previous student projects. SOLO Taxonomy framework helped me unpack my understanding of goal setting but that is another blog post. 

NPS3 bears

Sharing data

As a school we have worked hard to have a shared understanding of data. We have looked at all our data in teams and set goals. We have shared our impact with each other and recently in teams we shared our impact with our Board of Trustees. We are gaining an understanding about the sense of urgency and about looking for a minimum impact of a years progress for a years learning. We are developing in our understanding about what the learning progression looks like at each year level as we moderate across the school. 

Update: https://lpf.education.govt.nz/ The Learning progression framework has just become public. Do register to increase understanding for the work we do.

Where to next?

Well I have recently joined our Auckland Central Community of Schools as an in school teacher but with a focus on building the across school community. Those of you who follow my work will understand my excitement at this new development.  I can hardly believe my enthusiasm because I have the chance to see longitudinal data being shared across our 11 schools. I have the chance to work with over 70 educators as we come together to make a difference to 7,963 children and their families. I have a chance to see if what we begin at primary school feeds through to our intermediate and then our secondary school. I can check to see how we are doing against the Thomas and Collier chart. We are all on the same journey and that is giving our best to our children. I have a chance to see and be part of a collective teacher group and the chance to see teacher efficacy in action across several schools.

Understanding my impact

Sonya Van Schaijik PTC 08, PTC 12 , ,

Inferencing Bitmoji

I oversee our English Language Learners progress at Newmarket School.

I monitor their progress against National Standards carefully. At the year 5 and 6 level I have a particular interest in seeing how they are achieving. If the children have been with us since they were 5, I know we should see a greater alignment with children in their cohort. However if children have come to us after they are five years old, then what I do is highlight where they are and watch that progress too against the time they have been in a New Zealand school.

Yes as a school we do report students progress using ELL reports to their parents using the English Language Literacy progressions. However we still gather data on them against National Standards to watch their progress against mainstream children.

Together with my principal I have set my inquiry goal. A a school we are focussing on writing. I have adjusted my goal and removed the writing focus because I did a lot of that last year and I know that from previous inquiries, as the year progresses this goal will become firmer. I also have reflected and believe that other language inputs and outputs are just as important such as speaking and listening and reading and have an effect of writing.

By the end of September I will have trialled three visible learning  interventions for ELL and then through data analysis ascertain the effect size of the interventions so that the most effective strategies can be applied to accelerate the progress of  targeted ELL students.  

Discuss Strategy not content

In my two major intervention groups for this term, I chose year five and six children for a targeted reading intervention. Even within this group I had some adjustments. Three weeks into the session I noticed two students moving very fast with comprehension. The evidence was from observation of them discussing the text with their peers and the way they could quickly move through the three levels of comprehension and justify their responses. Therefore I swapped them out and brought in two other students from the class itself that were at the same level and also needed the same strategies.

So overall I had 8 children. I wrote about them before and the targeted three level guide strategy I would implement.

Evaluate the effect of my teaching on my student’s learning and achievement.

This week after all reading testing was completed I checked the data. Out of my original eight students, yes I achieved my initial goal of seeing them all move up one reading level this term. I had two students continue with that accelerated progress and move up several levels. So much so that they can now be ‘probed.’ I look forward to catching up with their reading asTTle data when they are completed entered. Reading asTTle  will be the second piece of evidence to confirm my findings. From my data I can see the children who need to be on my target list because they are not making the accelerated progress I do expect at this level. Two of them have had every kind of intervention thrown in. Sometimes I do wonder if we interfere too much with natural learning. They have had reading recovery at 6 years old. ( I believe this is too soon for our ELL students and wish we could defer this until they are seven years old.) They have had steps intervention. They have had some RTLit intervention. They have had someone in class that they read to every day.

Not just scores on tests.

However Hattie reminds me that it is not just test scores. He is so right. With my targeted group. I have made positive relationships with the children. I showed them their last score. I gave them their historical data charts at the start of the term and together we set goals. I told them I believed in them and I know they can achieve this. As Hattie said, ensure that the goals were not too hard and not too easy. Their initial goals included retelling what they read in their own language at home, drawing the main idea, pointing to the answer in the text or pictures. Aim for one level higher by the end of the term. These achievable goals were easily achieved. Overall I believe that as a teacher I understood clearly what the students knew already and by studying the reading progressions on TKI I clarified what they needed to work on. I made these comprehension strategies as visible as I could by using images and text. This time I also used part one school journals. So yes I chose texts that were a year beyond their turquoise reading level. But each time I chose articles, stories with settings and contexts that may or may not be outside the student’s’ prior knowledge but they could still relate to them. There was a mix of explicit and implicit content. I thought too that they have probably read everything at Turquoise level because several students had been sitting at this level for far too long. A strategy I learnt too from a previous inquiry was that when student make connections with what they read even if the text was harder than what they were capable of, they were able to shift in their scores.

What success looks like.

I showed the student what success looks like as they began the task. I showed them students at year two who could speak their language reading at and above what they were reading and have the children tell them some of the strategies they used. The regular one was that the successful younger children read every day and retold the story to family members in their own language. I showed the targeted students class members who were their age reading at and above in national standards. These children shared their strategies. The main one was reading everyday for pleasure and information.

Create climate of trust to fail.

I used the three level guides for this section. Between the text and beyond the text, there was no right or wrong answer. The power was in the discussion and in listening to each other. The children also worked regularly in pairs and if they spoke the same language then I encouraged them to have the learning discussion in their language. Comprehension is comprehension, whatever the language of learning. I believe this encouragement of valuing first language helped create the climate of trust.

The learning strategies used.

Teach the learning strategies and provide lots of coaching to reduce that gap of where they are to where they want to be. The children parroted the learning strategies daily. They drew what the strategies looked like. They gave examples in child speak of evidence when they performed the strategy. For one lesson weekly I had the children write down the strategy they were learning and explain what it was in their own words. They include a drawing of what this looked like.

Maximise teacher feedback

I provided piles of feedback and information and gave the student plenty of opportunities to practice to increase their standard and  to reduce their gap.

I stressed the importance of knowing lots of stuff and moving on to extend those ideas and make connections. As the children discussed, I would say things such as.

  • I loved the way you used because… such as…  to extend your ideas.
  • Whoah you used the word if…then  to make connections.
  • Hey … I heard your compare your ideas because I heard you say different…same… is like.
  • When you retold what you read,  I could hear you used sequencing words Then, Next, After Finally.

Using three level guides I was able to have the children know and understand surface details before unpacking making connections using between and beyond the text strategies.

Demonstrate the impact that I am having.

One way of doing this is by ensuring my walls are up to date. I use my walls as think aloud spaces. The children went up to our principal and showed her their progress and with no coaching were able to easily answer her questions. I will also create a sketchnote to highlight the strategies I used.

To finish this term with me, I had a reading around how rice is grown. Each of the students eat rice so of course we finished with a rice celebration. I bought in cooked rice and some general ingredients and the students made a dish from their country. I also made a dish from Samoa. Together we shared what we made and made a special connection. Of course the children wanted to share some with their class teachers and so they did.

Hattie states that the success and failure of my students learning is about what I do and don’t do. Two of the children I picked up part way through have had a lot of intervention. Initially I hesitated to bring them in because of this. From this inquiry and after further discussion with my principal I highlighted ELL children who I believe are not making the desired progress. Maybe like when they were earlier readers, I should have monitored their home reading better with a notebook. Even though they did not shift in data I believe they have a better understanding of what inferencing is.

Where to next

I gave the children a bag of journals to read over the holidays because I want to ensure that they do not slide back. This is a strategy I have learnt to do also from a previous inquiry.

I will show them adults from their own culture who are successful who love to read. I will do that next term and have already made connections and plans via social media.

Some of the children did not have a language buddy. I had a Farsi and a Cantonese speaker who did not have a language buddy. However my Korean, Japanese,Mandarin and Hindi speakers did. I had carried out a phonological awareness test with the children but did not do a follow up. I will do that next term too when I retest them after the holidays.

Reference

Hattie, J. (2015). What doesn’t work in education: The politics of distraction. Retrieved April 23, 2016, from http://visible-learning.org

Literacy Progressions. (n.d.). Retrieved April 23, 2016, from https://sites.google.com/a/matata.school.nz/literacy-progressions/

Masters, D. (n.d.). Visible Learning; know thy impact. Retrieved April 23, 2016, from http://visiblelearningplus.com/content/know-thy-impact-4-questions-help-you-pin-down-what-children-are-really-learning

New Zealand Ministry of Education (n.d.). The Structure of the Progressions. Te Kete Ipurangi. Retrieved April 23, 2016, from http://www.literacyprogressions.tki.org.nz/The-Structure-of-the-Progressions

Van Schaijik, S. (2015). Innovative Learning.  Edbooknz terms 2015. 44-65. Retrieved April 23, 2016, from https://issuu.com/ulimasao/docs/edbooknz_terms_2015

Visible Learning. (2014). John Hattie’s Eight Mind Frames For Teachers. Accessed April 23, 2016, from  http://visible-learning.org/2014/08/john-hattie-mind-frames-teachers/

Writing framed with SOLO taxonomy

Sonya Van Schaijik PTC 08, PTC 12, SOLO Taxonomy, Student Learning , , , , , ,

Untitled drawingIMG_1385

I have to share this piece of writing from one of my students. For this post, I will call him Jimmy. That is not his real name.

Jimmy is a 7 year old who has been with us since he began school. He has had several interventions including reading recovery but continues to lag in national data.

I chose to work with him this year because he has finished the other intervention and currently is not having any other form of withdrawal. He is also one of my ESOL funded students and my inquiry this year was to reflect on strategies I use for writing and to try something different. I know when I work with students I can accelerate their progress. I use SOLO taxonomy to frame the learning and I won’t change this strategy because I know how effective SOLO is for making learning visible for the students that I work with.

However it is what I chose to do with the students that is different. Whenever ever I withdraw my students I shudder at what is happening. I know from international research that withdrawal is the least effective strategy for my bilingual students. They are already on the back foot by trying to catch the moving target of National Standard Data. So withdrawal continues to put them on the back foot. If I do withdraw students it is because the numbers are spread across classes, As much as I can I try and work in class alongside the classroom teacher. This is the most effective strategy for working with bilingual children. I have seen this in action too first hand in Finland and we all know about the Finns and their NSD.

So for my current target group they are spread across two classes. They are all boys who have had reading recovery but are not maintaining their levels and that is an ongoing critcism I have had with reading recovery withdrawing bilingual children with no English. If I had my way with the system I would have them begin after being at school for two years and not when they turn six.

For this intervention I wanted to switch my boys onto writing. Usually, I would align my programme with what the children are doing in class so they are not missing out on learning by just doing language based activities. If the class are writing, then we are writing too. If the class are writing about ANZAC then we are writing about ANZAC too.

However for these boys I have chosen to try a different method.

First I had them list all the things they were interested in. I believed I would find a common theme between them. Well that did not happen. I uncovered a different passion in each student and found out that they all like drawing.  For ‘Jimmy’ it was Minecraft. To clarify how much he knew, I asked him to draw the main character from Minecraft. With my own beginning knowledge I knew it was Steve. So Jimmy drew Steve.

I told him that we would describe Steve and to do this we needed to list our ideas.

I then asked him to list everything he knew about Steve and I would help him. Using SOLO I knew listing is a multistructural out outcome and from my initial observation I knew this was not a difficult task to do. I gave him a piece of paper and asked him to list all he knew about Steve. When he was ready I gave him another colour and asked him to list all the tools that Steve used in Minecraft. Then he was given another piece of paper and asked to list all the monsters in Minecraft that he knew. Then a final piece to list why he liked Minecraft. Keep in mind I am not a Minecraft player. I have an account and have played the night time version only once.

In the follow up lesson Jimmy was given the task of writing up his first piece of paper. I changed the usual strategy for this too. I have often worked in our junior class and could see how challenging it was for the children to have their describe map stuck into their books and then they have to flick back and forth with their writing. So for my group I gave them a separate book for writing and used a different book for planning. This was to keep all the artifacts together and also so they can visually see their plan all the time. It is in front of them. A major challenge I know with children learning how to write in English is keeping the thought in their head. It is hard enough that we are asking them to write in another language but we are also asking them to think and keep the thought in their head long enough to get this down. I understood the importance of this strategy from the work we did last year with Anne Girven.

As Jimmy wrote down his thoughts, I could barely keep up with him. He wrote quickly. As he wrote I reminded him about the importance of ticking off his ideas. Again the writing professional development learning from last year. In two 30 minute lessons Jimmy wrote 4x pages.When it was time to come to me he would run to be the first into my session. He told me he loved writing. His draft was so raw and delightful I did not want to touch it and so I have not made any teacher edits. Unfortunately he became sick and so missed the next two sessions for editing. So his writing has remained untampered with teacher support. How often do we correct because that is how it is done? We don’t do it to their drawings so why do we do it to their writing? Correcting writers work has also been a real issue with me as a teacher. I am informed it is modelling but I know too from my own experience that until I am ready to make my own spelling changes then it isn’t going to happen. I am empathetic with emergent writers because my own writing is an ongoing challenge for me.

Afterwards in the next session I had him draw the monsters. Then I scanned this into the computer, imported the lined drawings into paint and he dumped colour into them. I learned this little trick from our work with Ant Sang a graphic artist.

Jimmy wanted to come back at lunchtime to work with me. I had to turn down his kind offer because I had other student commitments. I did suggest that he return and work in my room while I worked with other students. This he did.

He missed the self publishing part so I typed up his story for him while he read it out. In the published story I corrected all his inventive spelling and left his initial draft in its current state. I used presentation to do this and then imported the graphics in.

Finally I printed off his home copy and I sent him to receive a principal’s sticker from Dr Kofoed.

Where to next?

For me as a teacher, I was surprised at the relational thinking coming through strongly in his writing. I was aiming for a multistructural outcome but this piece of writing is definitely relational. I will get him to identify and highlight all the relational thinking words that he used to link his ideas.

Because the learning intention is to describe Steve, I will have him rephrase the last paragraph about why he liked Minecraft to what is special about Steve. At this stage of the intervention, I am uncertain if I can push extended abstract thinking but think I can start to develop the early sentence structure to include an I believe statement.

For my next session I will introduce the relational words and the describe rubric and explain how both will help them with their next piece of writing. The decision I have is do I continue to write about topics that interests the boys or shall I focus on the writing that is happening in class? I have identified a commonality with this group of boys and that is a love of cartoons. So maybe I should create a collaborative comic with them.

I spent the afternoon with my SOLO mentor who encouraged me to display the process. I am not the best at making things look pretty for the wall and usually just throw things up. As much as I can I like the children to see too that my own handwriting continues to develop and so they see my handwriting in its raw state. So if you see my writing, that is the writing that the children see too. What I do try and do is make it legible ad I even do this for my modelling books. Several of our children still write with a pencil so if they write with a pencil I also write with a pencil/felt.

For more information about SOLO Taxonomy visit. http://pamhook.com/

#3DPrinting

Sonya Van Schaijik PTC 08 , , ,

Last week, we had the most amazing experience.

I have been hounding Wendy for a few years about getting us a 3D Printer. I watched enviously as Stephen @stephen_tpk tweeted out what they were doing with theirs and then attended Ben Brittons efellows sharing at Ulearn about his inquiry with 3D Printers. Recently even Steve @steve_katene was tweeting out what they were doing with theirs.

Well, a couple of recent events happened for us to finally receive ours. Wendy our principal  was invited by our local rotary group to pitch a reason for us getting a 3D printer for Newmarket School. She invited me along to the meeting and I was so excited I could pop. We spoke passionately about our children and shared some of the recent learning we had been involved in. After we left the session with the group, I returned to school and heard Waveny @wavesbryant sharing that their class really wanted one and had created a pitch to put forward to our Board of Trustees to get one.

Well a few weeks later, Wendy and I were emailed by Brian and blow me down, we were the first chosen school to be receiving a MakerBot Replicator 2 from Newmarket Rotary. They liked what we had to say about how we would use it in the design process and how we worked hard to make our children’s learning visible.

So last week the presentation team arrived at Newmarket School with our MakerBot. Waveney’s class presented their learning around 3 D printing and impressed the visiting group particularly when it was made known that the children were 7 and 8 year olds.

IMG_1174

Waves being the creative lady that she is immediately got to work and designed something totally impressive. I went home and youtubed everything, spoke with Myles @NZWaikato on twittter and had a good look around Aurora blog about 3D Printing, dowloaded MakerBot app in iTubes and adapted one of the templates.

Recently I have been in contact with Tim @MindKits, a connection through Myles who said he was willing to help us as we learn. Last night I spoke with Terje @terjepe in Norway who shared what their school have been doing with 3D Printing.

Some other connection we have made during this process has been with Murray Clark, Marketing Manager from Ricoh, and Brian McMath from @NZProdAccel.

I came back to school on the weekend and worked with a past student who happens to be Wendy’s nephew and we created a Batman cookie cutter from something that he drew. He drew a black and white image and we imported it into shapes and pulled it up to create the thickness.

But I will be blowed if I knew how to export the image into Thingyverse and make the image compatible with MakerBot.

Today after our staff meeting, Waveney took me through the process and voila, I am still here waiting for the blasted thing to print off.

So my learning with design , check the measurement. I also think I might have it too close to the plate and might need to chip it off with a credit card kind of implement.

While it printed I recorded a few minutes of the process using Persicope and I had so many people pop on to view. Therefore I know #3Dprinting is very hot at the moment.

The SOLOtaxonomy in me says reflect on the process, so I am doing that now while I wait for my first attempt to print.

Where to next:

The badge took 1hr 57 to print and it was stuck to the plate. I forgot to raise it a little before printing. I think that when I work with the children I would use beginning templates until we understand the process and then have a go at designing from the beginning.

IMG_1267

Teacher Only Day Part 2 #SOLOtaxonomy

Sonya Van Schaijik PTC 08 , , ,

travelwiseUnder the leadership of Virginia Kung, our assistant principal, Newmarket School are trialling the New Zealand Transport Agency Resource Road Safety, Everyone is a Road User.

According to Pam Hook, “Students need a context where they have a voice and feel like they belong, matter and can make a difference. These road safety education resources are designed to enable students’ agency as active citizens so that they contribute to a safe road network. Students are encouraged to seek community-based solutions to help road users experience safer journeys. This focus aligns with the New Zealand Curriculum vision for young people to be active participants who contribute to the well-being of New Zealand.”

Just from this paragraph alone I am excited because I am Newmarket School’s Travelwise Lead Teacher. It is like a whole pile of events are aligning. Pam Hook came to school and ran a teacher only day for us about the resource and refreshed our thinking around the use of SOLO Taxonomy.

artichoke

Pam, aka @arti_choke, began our session by explaining the use of SOLO Taxonomy in our teaching and learning. If you are looking for resources or a definition on SOLO Taxonomy, then visit her site  http://www.pamhook.com/.

Pam reminded us about loose ideas, connected ideas, extended ideas.

The tool is agnostic in any curriculum area.

Single strips for SOLO is a great way of clarifying understanding and use of SOLOTaxonomy.

Single SOLO line

See, Think, Wonder

http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/spark/researcher.aspx?researcherid=1104322

Pam then shared the New Zealand Transport Agency Resource Road Safety, Everyone is a Road User.

We discussed some learning ideas such as:

  • How much space is taken up by parking.
  • Compare parking spaces with the space for learning
  • Sequence morphing from a driver to a pedestrian. (Typical Pam approach- thinking outside the square.)
  • Wicked problems map (Already in the project)
  • Use google maps to take a snapshot of the area (I am using this idea.)
  • What would happen if the road was not there? (Never thought about this)
  • What does it make you wonder?
  • What questions would you ask Gillies Ave? (Personalise the road, love this idea)
  • Invent the design of the new road. (this idea I am already using)

Situational Awareness is when you are aware of all that is around you and this is one concept I will add to my global project proposal. For me situational awareness happens when Pam Hook runs professional development at our school. Our senses are heightened and our professional discussion and learning deepens. The following weeks has a hive of SOLO based learning happening. One of the challenges is sustaining the buzz that always follows Pam Hook sessions.

Where to Next:

Newmarket School would benefit from exploring what we mean by ‘student voice’. Is student voice a gathering of student views through surveys or focus groups, or is student voice when students actively participate in school decision making. How well do we as a school promote student leadership and students being in charge of their learning? How do we as a school explicitly show that our students have a voice?

This year I wish to investigate what student voice is and the impact that this might have on learning.

One way of doing this is via a planned Flat Connections global project led by our Travelwise leadership team where we are focus on on being Participatory Citizens.

The plan for this project is that the Travelwise student focus group will be actively involved in decision making. They will practise self efficacy by being in charge of their own learning. They will gather student views through surveys and communicate their findings school wide, nationally and globally. They will think critically about information and ideas and reflect on their learning.

They will do this by investigating a wicked problem in our community.

Through this our student will collaborate with other student focussed groups nationally and internationally and devise a solution that benefits future generations. By using the New Zealand Transport Agency resource I will refine the global project further.

Basically our global project is about our students being involved in local council planning decisions that affect their health and wellbeing. Students will have  opportunities to develop leadership, self efficacy, and resourcefulness while participating with others within a high‑trust culture and through a stimulating curriculum.

Through carrying out this inquiry I want to further strengthen my understandings about student partnership and students’ ability to make and take accountability for their own choices so they can actively contribute to school life and their education experiences. This learning aligns against the Registered Teacher Criteria, RTC 08: teachers demonstrate in knowledge and practice their understanding of how ākonga learn.

Reading Eggs

Sonya Van Schaijik PTC 08 , ,

eggs

http://readingeggs.co.nz/

Reading Eggs Class Management

Date:Thursday 19th February @ 3:30pm

Today I attended a webinar on Reading Eggs Class Management. The session was valuable as it allowed me to see reading eggs fuller features because we were led through the system.

The webinar showed us how to manage classes, monitor student progress and how to access teacher resources.

Some of the learning I experienced included monitoring student data and how this can be exported into a spreadsheet and used as part of data gathering. I liked seeing the teacher resources and a whole world opened up for teaching reading. I was particularly interested  in reading express and saw 1700 ebooks available in the Library which is perfect for our chromebook chromebooks and the iPads. Here you can search for titles and authors.

http://student.readingeggspress.com/library/landing

At the beginning of the year resitting a placement test is advised if you are a little hesitant at the previous years data.

Reading eggs Ages: 4-7

 Reading express Ages: 7-13 years

Assignments can be set so that students must complete the set task before they can complete any online activities. The children can compete with their friends using Reading Express.

Gathering of data

The system also gives you your student data so this is another tool to monitor progress with.

So what is Reading Eggs?

Reading Eggs as a unique online world where children learn to read. Self efficacy develops as each child learns through one-on-one lessons that allow children to progress at their own rate. Motivation is increased as the students enjoy learning using the competitive tool. The children enjoy learning how to read using reading eggs.Second language learners particularly enjoy the programme as the tool is intuitive to their ability.

However the greatest learning happens when the teacher is monitoring and using the tool more than just as a filler activity while they are teaching reading.

Where to next: I think I would like to trial an intervention strategy using reading eggs with my ESOL children to see if this learning system makes an accelerated difference in my student’s literacy achievement.

Clesol Day 2

Sonya Van Schaijik Critical Inquiry, PTC 08 , , , ,

Saturday
Keynote Speaker: Deborah Short, TESOL International
Using Sheltered Instruction to Develop Essential Academic Language Skills

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/
Averil Coxhead 

Give the children something interesting to talk about.
Give verabal scaffolds for elaboration
SOLO Taxonomy at relational by highlighting key vobabulary.

Using word wall to make signal words explicit.

I was fortunate to sit in on Rosa Kalauni session where she spoke about
Secondary  Success
At her school they choose Pasifika Teachers and put the median band children together.
These same children attended the same classes with a Pasifika chosen teacher or a literacy class with a Pasifika chosen teacher. Rosa spoke with passion for the Tama Toa Project. Her session was well thought through and put together and I came away motivated to implement even more focussed projects at out school for our learners.

Today was the day I shared my #TeachNZ project
http://teachmeetnz.wikispaces.com/TeachMeetNZ_2014_3
If you go to this link you will find my slides and also all the 3 minute presenters slides.

Over the next few days, I will take the video and cut it down in three minute slots that the presenters can add to their digital footprints. I am excited to see the reflections begin to come in because I know that here is where the real learning takes place.

The exciting part of running a TeachMeetNZ session is watching the confidence and interactions develop between the educators who take part. The challenge with running a virtual session face to face with a live audience is ensuring a a balance between presenters sharing their stories and having time for the face to face audience.

After a break we moved into ‘In conversation with – Janet Holmes’, Victoria University of Wellington
Janet gave a great presentation and I really liked the way she incorporated photos and video to break up the just listening to Death By Powerpoints that seems to be the focus of a lot of presentations I have seen at the CLESOL conference.

I left the day early to have  rest. Then walked to the evening dinner.