CoL 2025!

Malo e lelei everyone :)

Another year and yes I'm still here. From joining CoL back in 2018, I have always been an advocate for the learning area of Literacy. This year, I am taking a leap of faith and choosing Maths as my area of choice.

Inquiry question? Still pending.

For the last couple of years I have been looking into the transition of students from Primary level to Secondary. Being an Across School CoL teacher last year, I worked closely with our local high school - Tamaki College. I was able to create a mentoring/coaching group that consisted of Y9 students, to work with some of our Y8 students. The purpose of the group was to 'prepare our Y8 learners for the realities of High School'.

The content of what we covered was at High School level and was co-constructed by myself and one of the deans at Tamaki. Critical Thinking was a focus for us, so the activities, reading texts, pieces of writing that students worked with, stemmed from Critical Thinking.

I was confident that I was going to continue with the role so that I could branch out to the other schools in the cluster and initiate mentoring groups for their students too. Unfortunately, I missed out on that and thought that I would leave things where it's at, because I felt like I wasn't heard.

But this year, even with a Within School role, I would probably continue with my own Y8 students. It will be hard to work with the High School students due to time restrictions and timetable clashes and because I don't have access to the release days I had last year.

Anyhow, that is the plan for now. Things do change. But I remain hopeful I can continue with this phenomenon of helping my Y8 learners as best as I can with transitioning from Primary to Secondary.

Bursts & Bubbles 2023

My Inquiry focus for 2023 is: 

WOULD A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO TEACHING AND LEARNING INCREASE STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND READING DATA?

What was happening for my learners?

• My learners were both teachers and students. Our current reading programme at the time was ok but we needed a change.

What evidence do I have to support this?

• In Term 1, my team and I worked in our school hall due to class renovations. Obviously, this meant my teacher practice had to change. MLE wasn’t new to us, we’d heard about it and we’d visited some MLE schools, but to teach in an MLE environment, that was new to us. We were in one big space with 75 kids and 3 teaching.

• We thought we could continue with the usual timetabling schedule we had in our single cell classes…one week later? It flopped…groups were too big, kids weren’t engaged, teachers were exhausted.

What changes did I make?

• We sat and re-grouped our students - where we teach students from all 3 classes.

• Our students are learning through a collaborative approach.

• We included RPI resources into our Reading programme 

•  Our Teacher Practice was constantly evaluated, driven by this new approach to learning.

• We referred to the pillars of practice document guidance of our reading programme, we created interactive taskboards, a digital teacher work-book, a tracking sheet for students to link their work into etc

• We sat termly e-asttle tests to monitor and track learning progress with the RPI intervention.

Some literature that helped me along the way were:. 

• Literature I used can be found on my blog.

The hardest things for me to change was:

• My practice…Being part of the RPI programme, you are constantly reflecting on a daily to ensure that you’re applying what you’ve learnt the Reading Practice Intensive in the classroom.

• Ensuring the students a reading for enjoyment, that they’re aware of the ground rules for talk, that my teams groupings are flexible, that we read like writers and write like readers and we provide our students with effective feedback and feed forward and we provide opportunities for Higher order thinking learning.

My wonderings?

• Much of what drives me as an Educational leader is a commitment to the well-being of students and positively engaging with them in a culturally responsive way.  Students value those who 'hear them out' and make an effort to understand them. Could this relational pedagogy help when they transition from Y8 to Highschool?

• How can I ensure that the knowledge and understanding my Y8 learners leave GTS with, is maintained and cared for in Y9?

• Why is there a drop-off in Y9?

• Could a collaborative approach to teaching and learning be effective in Y9?

For my EOY results - check out my blog :)

Blogpost #13: Intervention Tools - RPI Resources and Ideas

 

A huge drive in our Reading Programme this year has been the implementation of RPI resources and Ideas into our teaching and learning. Being the mentor teacher for our 2 teachers in the RPI programme has helped with the consistency of running it.

Here are some snapshots of some of the RPI learning by the mentee teachers and we have implemented in our teaching for the term. These were also some of the favourites for our students:

 

- Vocabulary activities to help with decoding words

- Word Consciousness activities

- One Shot Film - a unique way of promoting the book you are reading.

- Figurative Language in our Writing to make our writing more effective and appealing to the readers. To also help with painting a visual image in the readers minds.

Upon discussion with my team, we have decided to dedicate at least a week each next term to what has been covered in RPI. Some of those ideas are: 

• Great Beginnings Writing
• Figurative Language 
• One Shot Film
• Creating visual representation of the book we read
• Levels of Thinking - Literal, Interpretive & Evaluative
• Word Associations