TAI2020 'Say And Do Activities' In An Online Learning Environment

How does 'saying and doing' look learning online?

My inquiry over the last two years has been to grow student's oral language through an intensive oral language programme implemented across our junior school. 

One of the main changes to our teaching has been 'hands-on tasks' whereby the students talk about what they are doing as they do it, using vocabulary and phrases modelled by the teacher.

Moving into lockdown has made me and my team think about how this could look using a digital platform.

Some other challenges we were facing:

• Engaging students in their learning, with feedback from parents that they were finding it hard to get their children to focus on their learning at home.  
• The age of the students as they are too young to follow written instructions, we needed learning activities to be easy for them to understand, independently, without needing help from an adult.
• Not knowing if students were connecting with the leaning site at home as it has been hard to contact some families.

Evidence of Learning

• Videos shared with me via email, often through older siblings show engagement and connecting with learning online.
• Videos show children talking about what they are doing.
• They have understood the instructions and learning about concepts and contexts outside of their daily worlds.
• Use of correct sentence structures as they teach others how to do the activity.

Here are some examples of moving our intensive oral language acquisition programme online...

TAI2020 Tools, Measures And Approaches Used In My Teaching As Inquiry

This blog post identifies the tools, measures and approaches used In my inquiry to gain a detailed profile of student achievement.

How am I going to get an accurate profile of students' learning in relation to the challenge?

I will be using the combi list developed by Dr Jannie Van Hees to measure language development factors of all students within my class and a focus group from the other 3 junior classes. This assessment tool measures factors important in language development using the scale of Yes/Sometimes/No.  
The tool measures

• Willingness to communicate
• Communication with teacher/adults
• Participation in discourse
• Contribution to the discussion or discourse
• Benefits from feedback

Initially, I was going to gather data at the end of Term 1 however, because of lockdown I will now collect data term two. this will give me data collection points evenly spaced out over the two years.

I will also use running record data to show student achievement in reading. This will also be taken in Term 2. running record data over time shows the rate of progress as well as shows oral reading accuracy, analysis of errors made and reading comprehension. However, for the purpose of this specific data gathering, I will focus on the rate of progress over time.

PELP data was helpful to see the growth in language development in both first language and English, although this is time-consuming to do across the whole school I will do it within my class and like the combi list, for the target students in the other junior classes. I will gain data in the number of words spoken in heritage language and English to see if teaching in culturally responsive ways has an impact on language development.

All the above assessments will have to be put on hold during the lockdown. Although initially disappointed that I am unable to collect this data at present during the lockdown. As mentioned above, collecting it Term 2 will show data collection at evenly spaced out intervals. Data points over the two year period will thereby be Term 2 2019, Term 4 2019, Term 2 2020 and Term 4 2020.

One source of data that I can collect from some students at present is student voice. Some of my students with low oral language levels are not connecting but I am going to take this opportunity to gain student voice from those students that are. It will also be a great opportunity to gain whanau voice as well.

Why do I choose these approaches?

I'm choosing these approaches to show patterns of achievement and effects of changes of practice over a period of two years. Consistency in data gathering will hopefully give me an understanding of the effectiveness of my change in practice, however, a change I want to make this year to my inquiry is sampling throughout Term 2 and 3 to see if desired change is happening. If it isn't then I can fail fast and change what I am doing. 

Moving Into Lockdown

I wanted to write a post regarding my own experiences as an educator this week as we quickly moved from Level 3 to Level 4 in the fight against Covid-19.

In this unprecedented time, we have all seen changes that only a few months ago we couldn't have dreamed of happening. After seeing the heartbreaking news stories from countries like China, Italy and Iran and the insanely quick spread of the virus it still felt unreal until the borders closed. Then with the announcement on Monday of preparing to move into lockdown... we suddenly needed to move into top gear to prepare for schools to close and us all to go into isolation.

Monday: Sitting in our MIT PLG via hangouts at home, many of us trying out hangouts for the first time we were excited about the opportunities this tool could provide students and teachers. We were inspired by Matt's class site and shown how he would teach if (when) we went into lockdown. For me I was super excited.... how would hangouts look for a junior class where the little ones can't yet read and need that face to face contact, lots of modelling and oral instructions? I envisioned my phonics lessons being continued over hangouts and the connection students could still have with each other.

We left the hangout at 1pm to listen to the Priministers announcement that on Wednesday at 12pm we would be in lockdown and to prepare.

I think everyone processed that news in different ways. For me I felt emotional, my instant reaction was a concern for my little students who I love dearly.... my second response was to buy hair dye and my third response was that I needed to buy wood so I could work on my house while in isolation. It is funny the thoughts you have in times like this.

I also felt very far away from my school, working from home (I live 100kms away from my school and commute each day) and felt like I needed to be there.

Tuesday: Arriving at school it was suddenly all on.... how do we prepare our students for learning at home when they aren't with us to hear it. How can little ones access their learning without devices or wifi at home? What do we need to give them so they can continue to write and read and explore the world outside their four walls during this time?
For us junior teachers it looked different than the senior teachers. They could print out worksheets that they could read. Anything like that would need parent help with for our little ones and we can not rely on that happening for some of our children.
We put together packs with writing books, stationary books, ready to read books that we could attach the audio to our class site, plus these are free books provided by the ministry. We also included whiteboards and a ball, ballons and Engage activity cards for them to play at home.
Tensions were heightened as we were stepping into the unknown.

Wednesday: Getting ready for shut down day. Getting the go-ahead that we could deliver the school iPads to our families was a huge relief. This meant equity for some of our junior students. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough iPads for the whole of the Junior school so the decision was made that they would just be for Year 2 and Year 3. We also had out IT technician coming in at 3pm to try and connect them to the cluster wifi. What a crazy afternoon! I started delivering learning packs and iPads to whānau at 5:30pm and dropped off the last of them around 8pm. Whanau were so thankful. We still have 8 that need to be delivered by courier.....but this means our little ones have a way of connecting yippee!

Thursday: First day of lockdown. My Acting Principal who is leading us through this time has been amazing. He prioritised what we need to know and do during the next few weeks. Amongst all the admin involved with closing down a school, on the top of the list was ensuring support systems were set up for our vulnerable families, we also needed upskilling our staff so we can use hangouts via our class sites. I feel so lucky that we are already a digital school within the Manaiakalani cluster, therefore, we have been preparing for something like this for years without knowing. However, hangouts was a frontier that we had not needed to explore until now. How exciting that this tool is going to allow us to teach in new and exciting ways during this time.


Friday: the realities of the difficulties our families are going to face during his time became real as our first case that required agency support occurred. Having agencies working remotely is going to be difficult. As a whole staff, we connected over hangouts and I felt very proud of all my colleagues as they worked hard to quickly upskill and think outside of the box in terms of their new teaching practice.


My personal reflection as I took a walk around my 'block', which consists of a beautiful beach and bush track, was a vastly different reality of lockdown for many of my students and their families. My school is within a community that battles social, economic, housing and health issues. There are some things I can't impact however there are things I can... and that is what I'm going to do. Watch this space as I delve into the world of distance teaching.