Saturday 11 March 2017

Re-defining my Inquiry

So after returning back from our wonderful day at Spark HQ and reflecting on my inquiry question and with help from Dorothy, I have decided to re-word it.

My new inquiry question is:
How does collaboration supported by digital tools and visible learning contribute to accelerated progress in all curriculum areas for learners?

These are some of the hunches I have and things I would like to check out.


Some target students are making progress, so they do feel successful, but not at the rate that is needed for them to catch up so are still classified as targets.(Accelerating Learning)
-If children are 2 years behind and they are only making a year or a year and a half progress, they are never going to reach the standard.
Teachers are not making the most of the collaborative environment. -One teacher always taking the bottom groups not catering for their needs.
Digital tools are not being used effectively to cater for these learners (Affordances of Technology).

Do Target students know where they are and how are they going to get to where they need to be? Is data being shared with them?
How does more engagement in high quality teaching and learning activities contribute to accelerated learning? What does this look like for target students?
Are teachers making the most of Visible Learning?


Now that we have completed all our beginning of the year assessments, staff have been able to look closely at their data and decide where to next with their teaching. Data has been shared with students and learning goals have been made.

We have discussed our target students at staff meeting and what we have been doing for these students, especially in writing. We have one staff member who is focussing on our target writers this year and is carrying out regular class observations to see if the changes we are making are working.

Target writers from my team have created learning maps, with their goals for writing to get them to where they need to be. They have these in front of them all the time during writing and they have created a screen castify to share them on their blogs.

Here are a couple of examples of their maps:





Next week I am heading into the classroom's to observe what is happening and to see where my support is needed and to develop some goals with the teachers.

3 comments:

  1. Loving the sound of this Alicia and looking forward to coming north a hopefully seeing it in action.

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  2. Hope you don't mind Alicia, but Selena forwarded your professional learning blog link to a couple of us at Woolf Fisher to celebrate your classroom observation inquiry. I do considerable fieldwork at the centre using Dr Rebecca Jesson's observation tool and would be keen to follow your investigation and share in your insights, if that would be ok? I am also particularly interested in how DLO offers affordances for dialogic collaboration, visible learning and creative thinking :) All the best.

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    Replies
    1. HI Naomi
      That is fine. I have just recently used the tool in my first observation round and found it very valuable. Still need to do some more indepth investigation in to some of the parts of the observation tool. If you can help me with this, that would be awesome!

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