Col Presentation- Reflection of my 2022 Inquiry into how to catch students up with foundation learning after Covid 19 and students missing their first year of schooling

Many of our Year 2 students started school this year at new entrant level. 

Data showed they didn’t know any words or letter sounds or have key concepts about print. The catalytic change was to build the foundations as quickly as we could in the first two terms (something that would usually take a year) so we could then have a basis to build the Year Two curriculum upon. 

A foundation skills programme on steroids! I felt that changing practice in my room alone was not enough and that the sharing of effective practice would lead to change across our school. So what did this look like? 

A balanced literacy programme; consisting of a strong Yolanda Soryl phonics based programme, alongside explicit teaching of decoding strategies like rereading and reading on, explicit teaching of Comprehension Strategies from the work of Alison Davis and hands on language experiences to build oral language and ignite a love of writing with the purpose of sharing their ideas. 

Knowing this was contradictory to the current trend of a structured literacy approach, I wanted to see if my hunch as having phonics be an important piece of a complex jigsaw puzzle of skills and knowledge needed to learn to read, not the whole approach, would catch our students up to be working within the expected level. 

After analysing my own teaching what I was doing well and what I wasn’t… I created steadfast daily routines, I used modeling books for the first time in years, this focused my teaching and gave the students a visual. 

We created a ½ hour dynamic phonics program each day which you could hear singing out of the classrooms as you walk through the hallways. 

We explicitly taught comprehension strategies to get our students thinking about the texts and used puppets to explicitly teach decoding strategies to help students when they got stuck on words. 

The easiest thing to change was our daily routines, having the PLC as a team, and setting aside time in our team huis to discuss our Literacy programme meant we could share the journey, supporting and bounce ideas of each other. 

The hardest thing was that we were all at different rates of change and coming at different entry points. The acceptance that change of teacher practice takes time is the hardest thing for me, who wants it to happen with urgency, to accept. 

My big takeaways from our programme is that it took just one term for our students to go from not knowing any sounds to knowing all initial letter sounds, being sound out CVC words and to manipulate the sounds within words and to be moving on to learning diagraphs. This was amazing and at the same time, the students also gained a memory of high frequency words.

They could also not only explain what visualising, inference and retelling were but could totally use these strategies to understand text. These comprehension skills they can build upon throughout their education.

They also love writing to share their learning gained through the hands on vocabulary activities. This has spread through our Junior school. It is a whole approach which I believe will give students a solid foundation to build future literacy learning upon. 

We as a team have worked super hard, it was relentless but we have so many of our students move from pre-level 1 to working within the expected level the hard work has paid off big time.

Stage 1 Phonics Session

Building Oral Language - Student Inquiry PLC Session

 

Monitoring Effectiveness Of Our Interventions

My Inquiry Question: How can we effectively grow literacy practice across our school, developing a balanced literacy program that accelerates our students to where they need to be and builds a solid foundation for future literacy learning.

My Theory Of Action:

-To undergo PLC (Yolanda Soryl Phonics and Alison Davis Building Comprehension Strategies) as a team and share how we are transferring the PLC to our own classroom environments. Keeping the PLC alive within our Junior school environment.

-Creating a Team wide balanced literacy program that incorporates phonics, decoding strategies, comprehension strategies, oral language hands-on activities, and solid literacy routines. Ensuring quality literacy practice is happening across our team.

How am I collecting information about my changed practices/interventions? How am I collecting information about the changes that are happening across my team?

Monitoring Informally:

During guided reading sessions I am recording in modeling books how students feel about the lesson, and whether they understand or need more practice, as well as recording students' responses and a few little notes to myself. This helps me track the effects of my changed practice and monitor changes in progress in real-time.

I'm finding the use of modeling books is really focusing my teaching each session, students are able to see their responses and seem to be more aware of what it is exactly they are learning to do. The use of modeling books is a changed practice across our team. Although the teachers feel it is a little more work planning they feel the shift is a positive in terms of directing their teaching and having something the students can refer back to.

Having students working on whiteboards right in front of me during phonics allows me to monitor progress each session as well as address the things I can see happening and scaffold where needed.

Monitoring informally the transference of taught literacy skills and knowledge is monitored on a day-to-day basis during writing time. I am aware of whether transference is happening as I rove the room helping my students. I will usually write a little comment in their books that reflects the skills and knowledge I am seeing them use as well as a next step for them to work towards.

Monitoring Formally:

Using running record information:

What are they doing? What are they not yet doing?

Using this to inform my teaching, for example, students were not recognising word endings so this then became the next focus for my lessons.

Also, to find out if what we have already taught has been effective and if transference is happening.

What is happening across our team?

We are informally having more impromptu talks about what we are doing (changes to our teaching practice) and talking about what we are noticing our students doing/not yet doing, on a day-to-day basis.

Formally I have set aside a section of Team hui to

1) discuss how we are implementing the PLC we have received, and how this looks in our classes.

2) Share changes we are making to our practice that are working. This sharing of ideas and success is a great way to keep our programs alive, gain motivation from each other and celebrate the successes.

3) Discuss challenges we or our students are facing so we can share ideas and problem-solve together.

This is recorded in our Team Hui minutes so we can track our professional growth and refer back to it when needed.

Collecting Data - Identifying reading behaviours

My inquiry focuses on supporting growing practice across our school through a collaborative inquiry approach with a teaching colleague.

After firstly identifying our target students, our next step was to identify our target students' areas of challenge and strengths. This was done by comparing running record data/ probe data, gathering student's voice, and anecdotal data of reading behaviors within the daily classroom. 

My colleague asked me to do my own assessment of her students to gain a different perspective and see if I identify the same challenges as she did. This was really beneficial as it means we both have a clear idea of where the students are at and where to take them next and was the basis of rich discussion about possible focuses on raising student achievement. It also confirmed what she had identified as challenges as both of us had noticed the same reading behaviors.

Reading behaviors noticed:

Manaiakalani Create Staff Meeting

Teaching Literacy Through Drama 

Big thanks to the wonderful group of educators from across our Manaiakalani schools that came to my drama workshop. The discussions around the power of teaching drama through literacy were thought-provoking and exciting. Love that drama strategies can be used across curriculum levels from new entrants right through high school to get students thinking critically and deeply about the elements of storytelling and the texts they are reading.

Using story fragments and the mapping strategy, together as teachers, gave us the opportunity to put ourselves in the shoes of our learners and become aware firsthand of the learning experiences that could possibly arise.

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How is my inquiry going to benfit everyone?

Every year I do an inquiry. It has an impact on my class, I innovate my teaching in response to a learning challenge identified within my own classroom.

This year though I am hearing the same challenge when I talk to other teachers not only in my school across levels but across our schools. What can we do to catch our students up after the massive amount of time they have had away from school? What can we do know that will make the biggest difference?

Surely there is no better time to pool our resources to share our practice so that we can take from each other those effective practices that are making a difference for our learners. 

We all have unique ways of making a difference in the learning of our students and can sometimes get stuck in the rut of what we already know. Instead of working in our silos, struggling with the same challenges why don't we break down those walls and take the best bits from each other and use and adapt when needed to meet the unique students' needs. 

I want my inquiry to be about shared effective practice across our school and how this can benefit all our students, not just my class. Lockdown has made evident the importance that a teacher has on the learning of a student. What if we multiply that power by combining teachers superpowers (the effective practices they have acquired through experience)?

What is my class landscape today? How is it different from 3 weeks ago?

What is my class landscape today (End of Term 1)? How is it different from 3 weeks ago?

Three weeks ago most of my students were at home. Only one student has been at school all term, unaffected by covid. The rest have had between 0 (some students not returning at all) and 4 weeks at school since the start of the year.  On average 6 students attend each day with the makeup of students different on any given day.

The upside of this situation was the ease of developing relationships with my students. The small class size meant each student got more teacher time. One-on-one time meant it was easy to assess their learning formatively and get to know them as individuals. This was so different from the usual start to the year where it takes a term to really get to know your students.

It was easy to do 'spare the moment', 'teachable moment activities', and to target individual needs as this I feel is sometimes where the best learning happens. For children with additional learning needs, they had my full attention which is much harder to give when you have a full class. 

By week 5, most students had been back to school for at least a couple of weeks, so most had learned our class routines. The downside was teaching routines up until this point was difficult with each day being like Ground Hog Day, having to reteach routines each time a new student arrived back at school.

Also, the inconsistency of attendance meant that students would start to learn things like the letter sounds and high-frequency words, then without having time at school they would forget what they had learned. It was like taking two steps forward and one step back all Term. This was challenging as my students had not attended school since before lockdown and prior to that had only had a couple of months at school, catching my students up on all the early literacy and maths knowledge and skills they had missed out on was something at the top of my mind. 

From Day 1 this Term, my team and I had the determination to put all our energy and effort into working with the students in front of us. Making the most of every moment that we had them with us. Covid has taught us how precious this time is and the impact we can have on student learning when we are face to face with our learners.

Today I have 12 out of 16 students back at school. The classroom is the noisy happy place that we have missed so much. The anxiety evident on students' faces as they returned to school has been replaced with happy excitement to be back at school learning with their peers. It is super strange to feel the excitement of the beginning of a school year right at the end of the first term, but that is exactly how it feels. Instead of feeling exhausted and ready for the holidays, we are feeling energized and excited about all the possible learning opportunities ahead of us. 

As each student returned to school I assessed their knowledge of letter sounds, the number of high-frequency words they knew and their number knowledge. With the exception of 2 students, they knew between 0 and 10 letter sounds, between 0-5 high-frequency words with the majority not recognising any and most students had knowledge of some of the numbers to 10. Except for 2 students, the rest of the students were at the pre-writing stage of making marks on the page. So it was safe to say most of my Year 2 students were working at a new entrant level. 

My goal from day one this term was to spend Term 1 jump-starting their learning by using dose and density to accelerate the acquisition of knowledge of letter sounds and the most common high frequency words. Most of my students now know the letter sounds ad with support can write at least the first sound of words during writing. They are still finding it difficult to remember high-frequency words. I'm really happy with this as learning all the alphabet sounds in a Term full of in attendance is I feel a great accomplishment. 

A major difference I have noticed this Term is our home school partnership with whānau. Our relationship is relaxed and communication free-flowing and easy with so many different ways to communicate. We used to have to wait to come into school a couple of times a year but now we can talk anytime. 

We are working together in terms of student learning. I feel this is a direct impact of lockdown whereby we had to find many different ways to connect with whānau and became so used to working together. We gained such a greater understanding and respect for our students within their whānau (not separate from them). For the first time in my teaching carrier, I feeI truly understand the power of strong home-school partnerships.

Yes, there is no doubt, my students, our at least a year behind where they would be expected to be at their age. But moving forward from here, what will make the biggest difference for our students as we catch them up to where they should be if covid hadn't happened? We are set with an amazing challenge of accelerating our student's learning, our students are hungry for it, excited to be back at school, and ready to learn.