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.
