The WHY of this inquiry

Below you will see items posted earlier this month.  What I have not stated clearly enough was the 'WHY' behind this inquiry.

WHY???
I have reflected upon feedback via our PAT, IKAN, small group observations, Gloss results also research across the cluster.  It has been found that the rate of acceleration and achievement is slower when hitting year 7 - 10.
*This is the reason for my selection of inquiry - maths for learners in year 7 and 8 in my target group to see if I can shift achievement through using close examination of their results WITH the student.

My inquiry to use data to empower learners is currently my hypothesis to make learners in this age group aware of what they are actually achieving.  In this knowledge be more driven and focused when presented with ongoing maths tasks that target the areas needing development.

From previous post:
Go to this link to find out more detail about my COL inquiry.   The curriculum area it sits in is maths.

Understand the data - what knowledge to I need?

What are we up to?  
The following is my  action plan:

On completion of our most recent IKAN and PAT maths assessments students have and will be 

1. analysing their personal data (what do the lines, numbers and dots mean?)

2. can explain their strengths and weaknesses (dialogic and  text/symbols in blog post)

3. learner access any time to individual sets of data to help set learning goal.   Goal is specific for target strand, determined by analysis in step 1.

Check - we have analysed our IKAN data and found our weakest strand as a group is place value.    Since this time we have spent four robust sessions of the learning of place value with a variety of resources.  

Check: do my students understand the following of the place value strand - what is the question actually asking?  What knowledge do I need?

What the place value strand in IKan actually translates to:

	Q5 and Q6 How many 10ʼs in a number or what is the number made up of this many 10ʼs to 100	Q5 and Q6 How many 10ʼs in a number or what is the number made up of this many 10ʼs into 100ʼs. Or round to the nearest 10	Q5 How many 100ʼs in a number Q6 How many tenths in a number. Or round a decimal to the nearest whole number.	Q3 and Q4 Biggest or smallest decimal Q5 How many hundredths in a number	Q3 and 4 Decimal knowledge of 10ths, 100ths, 1000ths Q5 and Q6 Converting fractions, decimals and %

COL inquiry focus - if the previous post was too wordy!

 Go to this link to find out more detail about my COL inquiry.   The curriculum area it sits in is maths.

Empower learners - show them the data!

Kia Ora, Talofa lava!  After considering my school’s targets, Woolf Fisher Feedback from 2016 and the Manaiakalani CoL achievement challenges I have arrived at the following:

My Inquiry this year as a CoL teacher is to use data to empower learning and teaching in maths.

What does this looks and sound like? Students receiving explicit teaching and guidance through their own data.   Student empowered to interpret from data what their strengths and weaknesses are.   Collaboration of peers and  teacher to map out steps to accelerate their individual and group learning in maths.

Target Group - Priority Learners?

7 children - majority are sitting below the national norm.   2 from 2016 data show to be at.  However small group conferencing and IKAN test it seems that they are sitting below.  The absence in results for IKAN, for 2 due to poor attendance and the other an incorrect filling out of answers.   I hope to test them this week to add their first round of data for 2017.

	Ethnicity	Year	OTJ 16	Add/Sub	Mult/Div	Fr/Pr/Ra	Overall	NS	Fr	PV	BF
Boy	Maori	7	At	6	6	E6	6
Girl	Tongan	7	At	6	E7	5	6	5	4	4	5
Girl	Samoan	7	Below	E6	E6	E6	E6	5	5	4	E7
Boy	Samoan	7	Below	6	6	E6	E6
Girl	Maori	7	Below	6	6	E6	E6	4	5	4	6
Boy	Samoan	7	Below	E6	6	E6	E6
Boy	Cook Island	8	6	6	E6	6	6	E6	5		4

Hypothesise?

Through empowering students to analyse and understand their own personal and group data, the students will accelerate their achievement and move into the 'At' and/or 'Above' in the number strand.  (Gloss, PAT and IKAN assessments)

Slide from Lenva Shearing presentation to Manaiakalani School Leaders PLG

Action plan to date

On completion of our most recent IKAN and PAT maths assessments students have and will be 

1. analysing their personal data (what do the lines, numbers and dots mean?)

2. can explain their strengths and weaknesses (dialogic and  text/symbols in blog post)

3. learner access any time to individual sets of data to help set learning goal.   Goal is specific for target strand, determined by analysis in step 1.

 Lenva presented to the School Leaders of Manaiakalani on 'Using student data to empower learners'.  I plan to use this also as a title for my inquiry.  Lenva's presentation  was an excellent reminder having just completed testing cluster wide.

I will be using resources from this page on the Manaiakalani site  to support teachers at PES to carry out the same with their learners.   Also creating DLO that are rewindable for teachers and students.

**In addition to supporting learning in maths, as a Spark-MIT I plan to investigate how to better support home learning.   Home learning being focused on the strand of number in maths.  It'll be interesting to see the change this could bring about too!

Map it out

Math inquiry
*Issue: breaking things right down - work out the building blocks are!  Gift and practice the necessary strategies and knowledge.
*Aim?  Map out clearly the path the target learners need  to become competent in their weaker areas of number.
* How?    Planning with the target learners and experts I have access to on our staff.  This will include use of wall displays that mark out 'Where we are' and 'Where we need to get to'.   Use of student knowledge IKAN forms.  Slow down and provide opportunities to 'show off' this knowledge!

A new year brings new students and another round of enthusiastic learners.   My maths class has these learners in all groups.   Where things are explained carefully the students are able to make connections and bring their understanding to the task at hand.

Most recently we sat an IKAN test - across classes in team 5.  These produced some interesting results which had teachers and students talking a lot!   I overheard reasons as to why some thought they did well and not so.   Some as simple as writing the answers across rather than down the columns.  Others - just found it too hard after a certain stage.   The voice and slides moved too quickly etc.

This was a great opportunity to set some individual and group goals.   My target group decided that we'd tackle one of our weakest strands as shown in the IKAN test - place value.  Our plan is to work on the next area of weakness until we are confident in all areas of number, ready to re-test through another IKAN in week 10.

An extra support will be that home learning will target the number strand also.

Beyond 9 - 3, Spark-MIT 2017 Teachers

Today we met as the 2017 Spark-MIT 2017 teacher group. 8 teachers on a mission to inquire into a range of things that impact achievement for our learners. We shared ideas that connected to the Manaiakalani pedagogy that need to have visible and ubiquitous learning, strong learner agency and connectedness to grow knowledge. 


My focus for Spark-MIT inquiry:
 I propose to explore home learning for year 7 & 8 students.  How can we support ubiquitous learning to become a daily practice from school to home?   Manaiakalani encourages and supports expanding the hours of learning beyond the start and end bell of the school day.  Are our students taking advantage of this open all hours access to their learning? What can we do at school to motivate and maintain this opportunity to accelerate achievement?

 Data Gathered: Just a start... A survey completed by learners in team 5 - year 7 and 8 learners this month found the following stats. *Note these are only some of the questions I asked. It's helped me to see that first issue to resolve would be the access issue. While internet is available at home - over 80% - it didn't translate to students having actual access to it via a device. Over 50% do not take netbooks home - why is this? Another factor - students have voiced the desire for more parent help. How can we support this? How can we teach around the use of resources be it online or in the form of whanau. I'm looking forward to finding out and supporting this to happen and gaining more ideas from this Spark-MIT group who I can see are a rich resource to have. Thanks for today Dorothy@Manaiakalani and Lynne@Spark Foundation for what has been a great day of learning and professional development.

Teaching as Inquiry 2017 - COL

“Recognising and spreading sophisticated pedagogical practice across our community so that students learn in better and more powerful ways...”

The Manaiakalani Community of Learning is working together on this task using the expertise existing in of our community of learning.

In 2017 for my inquiry I have selected the following CoL achievement challenge 

#4. Increase the achievement of Years 1-10 learners, with a focus on Years 7-10,  in reading, writing and maths, as measured against National Standards and agreed targets.  My specific focus will be on maths.  However I will share from time to time on the other curriculum areas as I am able.

The teaching as inquiry framework I will be using in 2017 has been specifically co-constructed for Manaiakalani schools using our familiar Learn Create Share structure.
The elements in this framework share close similarities with other models New Zealand teachers use.

I will be labelling my posts as I update my inquiry throughout the year to make the content easy to access.

Labels:

LEvidence, LScan, LTrend, LHypothesise, LResearch, LReflect,

 CPlan, CTry, CInnovate, CImplement, CReflect,

SPublish, SCoteach, SModel, SGuide, SFback, SReflect

Label Key:

LEvidence	Learn - Gather Evidence	CPlan	Create - Make a plan	SPublish	Share - Publish
LScan	Learn - Scan	CTry	Create - Try new things	SCoteach	Share - Co-teach
LTrend	Learn - Identify Trends	CInnovate	Create - Innovate	SModel	Share - Model
LHypothesise	Learn - Hypothesise	CImplement	Create - Implement	SGuide	Share - Guide
LResearch	Learn - Research	CReflect	Create - Reflect	SFback	Share - Feedback
LReflect	Learn - Reflect			SReflect	Share - Reflect