My Inquiry Question and theory of action/chain of events
How will I change my teaching practice to ensure my learners are developing a deeper understanding of vocabulary (in Literacy)?
With the ever so changing year we're in, my inquiry has experienced twists and turns along the way. I was unsure of whether I was going to continue with this, or change it because of the impacts of lockdown, but evidence, assessment data and my heart tells me, to go back to square 1. Stick with the initial inquiry question because it's an area of concern in my class.
Theory of action
For a number of years, teachers and researchers have identified VOCABULARY as one of the key areas of concern amongst our learners. While our students have made great progress in Writing, there are still unanswered questions with why the results are not the same in Reading (vice versa). My concern is that students vocabulary knowledge will continue to be a weakness amongst our cluster and school community. For this reason, I decided to focus on the reading achievement for my inquiry challenge.
In reading, I introduced the Daily 5 programme as a new approach to the teaching of reading. Reason for this, I felt a lack of structure to my reading programme. I needed something to follow, something of sequence and something that proposed order. Daily 5 has been great. It took 6-7 weeks to set-up the programme and I feel like it's an effective running programme in my class. All Daily 5 tasks support VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE, providing opportunities for students to read to self, read to someone, work on writing, word work and listen to reading. This Daily 5 tasks are great for independent activities and self-driven learning while I focus on my group guided sessions.
From this, I noticed when working with my groups that 'decoding' was a struggle. Bringing to awareness the need for a huge focus on VOCABULARY. Taking this into consideration, I began looking for resources that supports children's understanding of vocabulary. Some of the activities I'd include in my reading lessons were word diagrams, vocabulary ranking, front-loading of key words and its definition and analysing vocabulary choice. Miss Wilson Says pdf
In addition to this, I finally opened up 'The Reading Book' by Sheena Cameron & Louise Dempsey. This was the missing piece to the puzzle. It provided me with a structure on how to run an effective reading programme, it made me bring back 'shared reading' into my programme, and it brought structure. #LightbulbMoment
The reasons I think these changes in my practice will be effective for my learners are because it brings increase focus on DECODING. Enabling learners to practise chunking, phonics and analogy. Small changes like paying attention to prefixes and suffixes, use of small whiteboards during shared reading and encouraging moments for 'think, pair, share', 'walk and talk' and 'tap and read', giving students base words and getting the learners to add prefixes and suffixes and even reading aloud rhyming words. These changes can result in huge progress. Says who? Says Sheena Cameron.
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