Changes to teaching practice over the last two years have seen significant shifts in my student's oral language acquisition, extremely pleasing progress in reading and surprisingly huge shifts in my student writing data (surprising because I had intended to gain shifts in reading). All within the craziness of teaching and learning with the challenges of Covid-19.
What did I do differently?
- Two-week high-interest topics exposing the students to as much rich vocabulary within contexts that were outside of their day to day worlds or connected to wonderings about everyday phenomena that they didn't have the vocabulary to explain. Before this, we would teach whole school topics for the whole term. By making this change I saw the urgency in exposing students to as many different contexts as possible but still at a deep level. This also meant giving students hands-on engaging activities that they could connect new vocabulary to, and prior experiences and knowledge that they can build onto as they move through their schooling. Example Of Two Week Unit
- Shifted my two-week high-interest topics to a digital platform. For this, I had to be mindful that my young students were mainly learning independently without parent help. I videoed me taking through hands-on activities, using resources they may have at home and explaining, using, reusing and recycling rich vocabulary. Video evidence showed students doing the activities and using the vocabulary at home which was exciting. I kept this going via our class site after lockdown for those students who still had not returned to school and to follow the Manaiakalani Pedagogy of learning being ubiquitous Learning At Home
- Valued the use of students first language within the classroom. This allowed students to make connections to English through their heritage language. I created opportunities for students to learn in their first languages and share their language with others. I utilised the opportunity for families to help their children with their learning at home during lockdown by shifting to more culturally responsive teaching practices. I became aware that I needed to be cognitive about this as it was easy to slip into old habits, especially when faced with a different way of teaching and learning e.g. totally online teaching. A Shift To More Culturally Responsive Teaching
The Effects Of My Changed Practice/Intervention
Reading
Whole-Class Reading Graph Tracking Students From 0-120 Weeks At School
Target Student Reading Graphs For 0-120 weeks at school
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| Student 1 |
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| Student 2 |
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Student 3 Student 4 Whole-Class Reading OTJ Data |
This data shows that those students that returned to school after lockdown made accelerated progress of expected progress. This surprised me as usually after time off school e.g. summer holidays their reading level drops back. Also, many of my students' families were going through difficult situations due to lockdown/covid and from my own experience, difficult situations at home can influence students learning at school.
The Pie Graph shows that many of my students are still working below the expected level for their age but some of these students are just one colour wheel level of reaching the expected level. I, therefore, believe that with the continuation of this intervention they would quickly reach where they should be.
Writing
EAsstle Results Term and Term 4 For Target Students
Results show where my target students sit against National Norm from Week 3 Term 4 EAsttle writing sample. Since this sample was taken my students started to make even greater progress, as shown on the below pie graphs.
Whole-Class Writing OTJ Data
Their writing shows that they are now able to sequence their ideas. They have the vocabulary to express themselves and their sentence structures are becoming much more complete. Having engaging experiences to write about not only motivated them but they also had so much to share and the language to use that the writing became so much easier. They went from students who would say one or two-word utterances who found it difficult to say a sentence let alone write it....to students producing writing like the piece above.
Next Step:
My next step is to support my team to implement the intervention across the Junior school. I know implementing change across a team can be challenging, especially gaining buy-in however I hope this data shows that a rich oral language acquisition programme makes a difference to student learning and has the capability to accelerate student progress.
