Appraisal and Self Review

This year as part of the Appraisal process at our school, we use the Interlead Appraisal System. As teachers we are required to self review our Teaching Practice and then our Team Leader appraises us within the same time deadline. Being a Team leader, my principal appraises me.

I was very honest in my self review - this is difficult as there were questions that I found that I was in the middle for some (between the questions). I found the whole activity very daunting in March (first self review) and in September much easier - probably due to our classroom observations in August and my increased confidence from my feed back sessions with my observer. As an experienced teacher, I had not had my teaching practice formally observed for quite a while.

There are areas I need to work on and I will use these as guidelines to develop my teaching practice. So here are the areas -

Instructional Practice & Formative Assessment

• Lessons demand students be cognitively and intellectually engaged.
• Provides succinct accurate answers to students’ questions
• Lessons have clear structure – a definitive beginning, middle and end.
• Uses assessment data to create a learning dominated classroom where the purpose of assessment is to improve the quality of teaching and learning rather than to assess and provide grades
• Students are enabled to develop as independent learners able to accurately evaluate their own learning needs.
• By carefully listening to students, is able to catch their meaning and provide enriching unplanned learning experiences through learning conversations.
• Engages in experimentation and innovation in order to create new and improved possibilities.

Truth to be Honest with Others & Self

• Contributes to shared understandings by voicing thoughts, even when these are potentially embarrassing or threatening to others.
• Demonstrates commitment to continual improvement by gathering evidence to substantiate contributions to raising standards and growing teaching practice.

The positives from my latest Appraisal is that my appraiser has placed me higher on the matrix and regards me as masterful in many areas in my practice as a teaching professional.

 

Inclusion

During one of our staff meeting last term, the RTLB Advisor ran 2 workshops one on behaviour and one on revisiting the Special Needs register at our school. While doing the holiday tidy up I discovered the hand out from the power point for behaviour and some of the notes I had made, this and the CORE Education article (Quite simply included ..by Fionna Wright) that I have just read, have encouraged me the change around my room seating plan.
 

The child in my class has Simpson Golabi Behemel Syndrome - it is a rare disorder with only approximately 130 people in the world have been diagnosed. One of the side effects is that is very big for his age - very large hands, head and feet. I have also discovered that part of the disorder is a very large tongue. He is identified on the special needs register and has a computer and printer, and his very own set of tote trays for his books and pencil case.

 

He struggles to hold a pen correctly and has difficulty write on and between the lines, so his computer is essential. The student is working on his self management, being ready to learn can be a problem. He has learnt many avoidance behaviours - pencil sharpening, lost books, annoying others, reading in the corner (not at the correct time) and no completing the set task. This has all improved since the beginning of the year, still developing too.

 

Being overly large he has a chair that is build for him, I did have a desk placed to one side of the class and all his gear was located there as the power point to charge his computer was there too. But after reading the article and hand out I have rearranged the furniture so that he has his chair located within the class and his gear located near the other children's tote trays. By doing this I have created a very large space for our mat area and my teaching base is now more solid.

 

I am quite excited and looking forward to how the children react to the changes. My main aim is to create a more inclusive and a positive learning environment for all. 

New Inquiry - How can encourage children to reflect on what they have learnt?

My next inquiry has come from my own reflections from my feedback session for my READING OBSERVATION. The children now understand what they are learning, why they are learning it and how they be successful with this learning. Also as part of my own self appraisal, I have realised that I need to focus on my lessons having a beginning, middle and an end.

This is part of my research into improving my teaching - I found a blog with the title
Top 10 Evidence Based Teaching Strategies for Those Who Care About Student Results.
This unpacked is what I need to do to in my class. Number 6 particularly struck a chord with me - Feedback is the breakfast of champions, and it is the breakfast served by extraordinary teachers around the world.

Evidence Based Teaching Strategy 1 : Clear Lesson Goals
I need to be clear about what I want my students to learn during each lesson. The research says that such clarity effect on student results is 32% greater than the effect of holding high expectations for every student (and holding high expectations has a sizeable effect). "If you cannot quickly and easily state what you want your students to know and be able to do at the end of a given lesson, the goal of your lesson will be unclear." Clear lesson goals will help me (and my children) to focus every other aspect of the lesson and on what matters most.

Evidence Based Teaching Strategy 2 : Show & Tell

Start my lessons with show and tell. Put simply, telling involves sharing information or knowledge with my students while showing involves modelling how to do something. I need to be clear about what I want my students to know and be able to do by the end of the lesson, I need to tell them what they need to know and show them how to do the tasks I want them to be able to do. Concise lesson goals!

Evidence Based Teaching Strategy 3 : Questioning to Check for Understanding

Use questions to check for understanding during the lesson. Making sure to check for understanding before moving onto the next part of the lesson. By using techniques such as random questioning of group, children showing answers on whiteboards and think-pair-share will help me to check for understanding before moving on from the show and tell part of the lesson, and thinking about what other questions I could possibly ask within the lesson.

Evidenced Based Teaching 4 : Summarise New Learning In A Graphical Way

 Graphic organisers have their place to help my children to summarise what they have learned and to understand the connections between the aspects of what I have taught them. Studies show that it doesn’t seem to matter who makes the summary graphic, be it you or your students, provided the graphic is accurate. Discussing a graphic organiser is a way to finish off your show and tell. I can use this tip to help the children reflect on what has been taught throughout the lesson.

Evidence Based Teaching Strategy 5 : Plenty of Practice

Practice will help my children to retain the knowledge and skills that they have learned while also allowing me another opportunity to check for understanding. I must ensure that my students are practicing the right things. My children need to be practicing what they learnt during my modelling, that will hopefully reflect my lesson goals - WALTs. I need to be mindful that the practice is not about mindless busy work. Nor is it about giving them independent tasks that I haven’t previously modelled and taught. Finally, research shows that students do better when their teacher has them practice the same things over a spaced-out period of time.

Evidence Based Teaching Strategy 6 : Provide Your Students With Feedback

Giving feedback involves letting my children know how they have performed on a particular task along with next steps to help  them improve. Unlike praise, which focuses on the student rather than the task, feedback provides a tangible understanding of what they did well, of where they are at, and of how they can improve. In John Hattie’s view, any teachers who seriously want to boost their children’s results should start by giving them dollops and dollops of feedback.

Evidence Based Teaching Strategy 7 : Be Flexible About How Long It Takes to Learn

The idea that given enough time, every student can learn is not as revolutionary as it sounds. It underpins the way we teach martial arts, swimming and dancing. It is also the central premise behind mastery learning, a technique that has the same effect on student results as socio-economic status and other aspects of home life. By adopting mastery learning, I need to differentiate in a different way. I can keep the learning intentions (WALT) the same, but varying the time I give each child a chance to succeed. This could be a struggle with the time framework for timetables and weeks but very much worth thinking about.

Evidence Based Teaching Strategy 8 : Get Students Working Together (in productive ways)

Encouraging productive group work within the class. When working in groups, my children tend to rely on the child they believe is most willing and able to the task at hand. Psychologists call this phenomenon social loafing. To increase the productivity of my groups, I need to be more selective about the tasks I assign and the individual roles for each group member and ensure each group member personally responsible for one step in the task.

Evidence Based Teaching Strategy 9 : Teach Strategies Not Just Content

By explicitly teaching the children how to use the relevant strategies. There are strategies underpinning the effective execution of many tasks that I ask my children to do at school. And, just as with content, I need to tell students about these strategies, to show them how to use them and to give them guided practice before asking them to use them independently.

Evidence Based Teaching Strategy 10 : Nurture Meta-Cognition

Meta-cognition involves thinking about your options, your choices and your results – and it has an even larger effect on children's results than teaching strategies. By using meta-cognition  my children need to think about what strategies they could use before choosing one, and  think about how effective their choice was (after reflecting on their success or lack thereof) before continuing with or changing their chosen strategy. The Teacher Support Materials with the School Journals have a mega-cognition aspect of each possible learning experience.

Hopefully by actioning some of these aspects I can encourage the reflective practice for my children.

Final Data for ALL

The children in the ALL invention group have had their final "official" assessment marked and moderated and now I have to analyse the results.

THE GOOD
There has been movement in some areas of writing with the most achievement being 9 sub levels for one child in the area of structure and language features. The children have all had different areas of success. Confidence has grown, they now are wanting to write and record their ideas - where there was a reluctance before. They are more willing to plan and think about the sequence of their writing.

THE BAD
Some of the group did not make any movement in some areas at all. Some of the children went backwards in the areas of ideas. I was very disappointed with the children's attitude rating as we had really worked on this area - the videos I recorded earlier in the month were very positive.

THE UGLY
The results for the spelling component of eAsTTle  were very discouraging. There were not any changes in their results - the mark before the intervention being <2B and then at the end of the intervention <2B. I was very alarmed until I looked at the individual papers, before and after. Initially the children's results were very low, some words had only initial and ending sounds. For the second sample the children had made some improvements but still not enough to move them above <2B. I did try using a spelling programme as a component of the intervention but to no avail. In this group 4 out of the 6 children have been diagnosed with dyslexia, I need to do more to support these children with their processing of words.

Literacy Circles - Clarity In The Classrrom

This term we are working on writing and illustrating a picture book.  During reading I have been using narratives and articles from the School Journal to give the children background and scaffolding to assist their understanding how a narrative "works". The articles were about two New Zealand illustrations and what they do to illustrate - their inspiration, how their day works, what process is needed to get their drawings approved to use in books.

I can sometimes struggle to use the correct WALT - what do I want them to learn? Yes, they need to know the structure of a narrative, but what are the skills needed to identify that structure? From the PD I took part in earlier in the year with Jeff Anderson, the phrase "What do you notice about what the author has written?" - helps me to redefine this. I am asking the children to understand the author's purpose, finding the evidence within the text, using inference to understand the 'hidden message', make connections with they know, ask questions, use clues to work out unfamiliar words as well as skimming and scanning to identify the main idea. So do I need a WALT? Should it be WDYN - What do you notice? and How did you do that? Helping the children identify the skills they used is very important to improve their own understanding.

To teach reading when the children can 'decode', is all about the understanding/comprehension of the message. This can be fiction or non-fiction, the skills needed are the same and the children need to use a range of skills and strategies to fully understand what they are reading. They need to practice reading - ask questions when they don't understand and think - How can I understand this better? Good readers will use strategies confidently and without thought. How can I make my good readers more mindful of what they are doing?

I have chosen to use novels with my more able readers to motivate them to read with more intent and to extend them more with fictional genre. While discussing the progress so far with a colleague, I mentioned that one child was relying on his knowledge of the movie based on the book. She asked if I had used Literacy Circles before and she would send me the labels for the jobs to do this. So tonight I needed to do some research on what a Literacy Circle was and how it worked. I was quite excited when I realised that this just what I needed to make these children be more mindful of what they were reading and to take more ownership of their learning. So to make this work I will work with this group to teach them the skills for each role, use my guided sessions to gather them together and unpack their success.

The difference intervention can make

One of the children in my ALL group has been part of my Inquiry - how can I make writing more successful for her with her dyslexia and elins glasses. I discovered that using different coloured pens would make her feel "special" and that she can write. Often her ideas have been over shadowed by her ability to write.
So here's the proof :-)

Student Lead Conferences

The weeks have flown and now Student Lead Conferences are here! This year I made the decision to let the children share "their" learning with their parents. This meant that I did not give them the graphic organiser with boxes to fill in, or teach them what to say during my guided sessions or put markers (stickie notes) in their books.

This was because a couple of weeks ago, a child in my class was going to be away for these conferences and her parents wanted to book in a Student Lead Conference, and because I had deadlines for reports and other school stuff I hadn't set her up as before. So one Friday, she came with her parents after school, sat down with her books, a whiteboard and proceeded to tell her Mum and Dad what she had been learning! Not the doing... She was confident and very clear about her achievements and what she needed to learn next. She even showed them the strategy she was learning in Mathematics and taught them how to do it.

The most surprising thing about all this was this was a child at the beginning of the year who used to drive me crazy asking for clarification every time after instructions were given. I taught a unit at the beginning of the year about how we learn best - she had great understanding of herself and now knows how to she can best learn.

So this week all I asked the children was to share their learning - and they are!  I have empowered them to share with their parents and anyone listening what they now know. It was refreshing to hear parents saying that they had learnt from their children, and were actually surprised by what the children could tell them.

I did mark their books vigorously and made sure that they had all work up to date. My style for teaching in my guided sessions has changed too. I now make sure I discuss the why and the success criteria - how do you know you can do this? The children help with the setting up of task boards and constructing the WALTs. I have tried very hard to give  the children a variety of perspectives and cross over ideas/concepts through curriculum areas to build a deeper understanding. THis has been most successful.

How will I run Student Lead Conferences in the future? I think that the children need to tell me.