Reflection on Professional Reading
The following is a guide to challenge your thinking while reading professional articles.
Name and Author of the article:
Evaluation-Education Review Office
How does it link to your goals?
What other writing initiatives can I introduce to increase student engagement?
This article gives me many ideas for writing initiatives that I could use to increase student engagement in writing:
-put up examples of exemplars best practices in writing
-highlighter editing by the children/pair marking
-writing corner to use in children’s spare time
-observe other teachers
-children’s goal in writing (student voice)
-classroom displays showing successful goals achieved
-use objects, artifacts for motivation
-interesting/exciting words chart
-planning: use diagrams and charts
-dictionary lesson: challenge to fix 3 words in their writing
What is this article telling you? Key Issues:
- Best use of writing assessments to inform teaching
- How well teachers in Years ½ classrooms used instructional writing strategies in their teaching
- The overall quality of teaching of writing in Years ½ classes
- Promoting and monitoring high expectations for achievement in writing
What is challenging and interesting?
“Learning to read and write is like being a ‘code cracker’. Writing has conventions that require the decoding and encoding skills of reading and writing letters, words and text. Learners have to master not only the code but also use their knowledge and strategies to get meaning from what they read and to convey meaning through what they write.”
I thought it was an interesting choice of words that would be good to use with the children, motivate them, make it fun. I already use ‘detective’ in my teaching and think this would be good to add to it to explain what they are doing.
What is the writer’s viewpoint? What led them to this view?
That there are many things working well in schools and many that are not from their evaluation. They want to draw your attention to the critical things that must be done to promote high levels of children’s achievement in literacy. The evaluation from the evidence they collected led them to this view.
How valid are the claims the author makes? (Is this article substantiated by quality research?) The claims are very valid coming from the Education Review Office and the evaluation they did with 212 schools in 2009 as part of their review.
What is one thing that you will change as a result of reading this article? The children are not keen to reread their work and make changes. I will introduce highlighters and get the children to analyse their own work against their learning outcomes. I will ask the children what their goals for writing are (student voice) We will introduce peer marking. Look at exemplars together/success criteria
What steps could you put in place to bring about the change?
Use a child’s piece of work (photocopy) to demonstrate how to edit and make changes. Use highlighters to mark against the learning outcomes. Children to share their writing more by reading it to buddies, other classes. Put more of an emphasis on writing for an audience-first sentence to hook the reader in! Teach the children to edit other children’s work appropriately/set up guidelines. Gather together exemplars to show children.
How might this impact on your teaching and the teaching of others?
Look into more exemplars to show the children successful examples of different learning areas. Many ideas to engage the children in writing to try. Work on implementing the things that worked well in schools into my writing programme.
How might you evaluate the degree of success of the change or improvement?
Monitor the evidence from the highlighter marking in their books/editing
Observe children engagement at writing time
Children state their learning outcomes/next steps, refer to exemplars
Synopsis:
Evaluation:
-Terms ½ 2009 ERO evaluated the quality of teachers literacy practices in Years ½ in 212 schools having an education review.
-52% full primary schools, 45% contributing primary schools, 3% composite schools.
-2 overarching evaluative questions guided this evaluation:
*How well do teachers assess, plan and teach reading and writing to children in Years ½
*How well does the school promote and monitor high achievement expectations in reading and writing in Years ½
-ERO collected evidence by:
*observing teacher practice
*talking with key groups of teachers and senior staff members
*looking at school documents relevant to inquiry
*school questionnaire-70% schools responded
Writing: ERO evaluated:
*How well teachers in Year ½ classrooms used writing assessments to inform their teaching
Working well in schools:
-Professional development:more accurate judgements about children’s writing
-Use of The NZ Curriculum exemplars, literacy learning progressions, Effective literacy practice in Years ¼ handbook
-Share research/literature about effective writing practice, discuss to implement in the classroom
-Observed each other teaching
-Shared successful teaching approaches
-Critically analyse writing samples: Children mastered/next steps/groupings
(within school/clusters)
-Team/School/Cluster meetings:reflect/discuss practices
-Regular meetings to moderate writing samples/children’s needs/children’s goals-monitored through conferences
-Classroom displays:successful goals
-Three way conferencing
-Writing conferences when marking work with the children
*How well teachers in Years ½ classrooms used instructional writing strategies in their teaching
Working well in schools:
-Purpose for writing, familiar experiences
-Used objects, artefacts, books, visual-photographs, computer images of events, learning activities/discoveries - for motivation
-Big books/texts during shared reading to show link between reading/writing
-Children made choices about writing topics
-Many opportunities to write independently
-Oral language activities promoted discussions before writing
-Effective questioning by teacher encouraged children to think more deeply/clarify thoughts before writing
-Children talked in small groups/buddies before writing
-Teachers immediately reinforced children’s suggestions when they offered interesting/exciting words
-Introductory discussions carefully timed for motivation
-Teacher showed interest/enthusiasm in children’s ideas
-Given ways to improve their writing
-Broke down the skills
-Plan using diagrams, charts and pictures
-Good classroom management/groups-additional help/extension
-Teachers roved reinforcing children’s success with the language features/writing skills
-Children assess their own writing/help peers critique their work
-I can../goal sheets, highlight in work when achieved
-Time to share writing/recognise writing for an audience
-Celebration of children’s writing display
-Word cards, simple dictionaries, highlighter pens for editing, computers
-Displayed books of children’s writing to read
-Writing corners-write in spare time
*The overall quality of teaching of writing in Years ½ classes
Working well in schools:
-Knowledge of the processes and features of writing
-Regularly provide highly motivating opportunities for children to develop and enjoy their writing
Promoting and monitoring high expectations for achievement
Working well in schools:
-Clearly expressed, well-known, well documented literacy expectations, Agreed, written and shared with school community, part of class and school-wide monitoring and review, outlined achievement levels
-Teachers/school leaders used resources(Literacy learning progressions, standardised 6 year net scores, progress indicators-NZ Curriculum exemplars) as reference points to set of modify expectations
-Expectations: challenging/focused on improvement
-Children’s progress rates monitored regularly, identify need for support/enrichment programmes
-High, realistic writing achievement expectations shared with parents/families
-Parents invited to information evenings
-Children expected to make meaningful progress right from when they began school
Teacher’s Questionnaire:
-71% of schools that completed questionnaire reported having a writing goal/target for Year 1 children, 70% for Year 2 children
-Schools used various tools to explain writing achievement expectation
E.g NZ Curriculum exemplars english matrix, modified matrix linked to asTTle assessments, Level 1b, 1(ii)/1p, 1(iii)/1a, level 2.
Teacher’s Next Steps:
-Use the findings in the report to:
-Reflect on the quality of teaching, assessment and monitoring of writing
-Participate in ongoing opportunities to extend their understanding of the theory and content knowledge
-Develop their capability in using reference points to monitor children’s progress towards expected achievement levels.
