As I am able to identify the students, it is interesting to note that results plateaued for many of the students that didn't connect during the lockdown. Whereas, those students that did connect have all continued to make progress (this is with exception to one student). This data was collected 3 weeks after returning to school.
This is my second year teaching this group of students, and my second year of inquiring into my practice in order to raise these the achievement outcomes of these students.
Last year I identified that most students didn't begin to make progress through the reading levels until around their first year at school. It is my hunch that factors contributing to this could be the extremely low levels of the oral language they have at school entry, the social, economic and health factors influencing their readiness to learn and the acquisition of English as a second language within their first year at school. These were the factors influencing my hypothesis during the first year of this inquiry and informed my changes of practice up until this point.
My hypothesis has been...
Utilising the student's strengths in their first language, working in bilingual and multilingual ways, creating Talanoa, and working in partnership with families will help build students English language and literacy.
Developing oral language through short high-interest topics and real-life experiences, with a focus on intensive oral language acquisition, will create an environment of language in abundance.
A collaborative inquiry across the junior school (Years 1-3) will grow professional capital across the school. The shared inquiry will allow all students across the junior school to benefit from the effectiveness of changed practice and allow teachers to learn from and with each other. It will hopefully also enable an effective changed practice to become sustainable.
ENGAGE games were introduced towards the end of the first year in response to students inability to self-regulate and the effect this was having on their ability to listen and engage in learning.
I feel it is important to keep the same hypothesis however I have seen significant shifts in many of my students, however, I now want to shift my focus away from those students that this has worked for (as I hope that me continuing with methods that have worked will keep on working for these students) towards those students that are not making the expected progress. What can I do differently so that those achieving keep on achieving and those that aren't making the progress do too!For me, certain aspects of this hypothesis have been explored more than others...The standout area that last year I didn't explore was 'working in partnership with families will help build students English language and literacy.' Lockdown has made me realise that even though I thought up until that point I had developed strong home-school partnerships, I really hadn't. How can I use the strong relationships that I formed over lockdown to make a difference to the outcomes of those students that are not making the expected progress?
If I work in partnership with families then student learning will flow across home-school contexts and the student, whānau and school will have a greater common understanding of learning needs and the best ways to meet those learning needs.
Although I will be collecting and analysing data across my class. I will form a new focus group consisting of students that are not making the same progress as others within my class.
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