Kootuitui Data 2017 - Park Estate School Analayis of Data

Kootuitui Data 2017 - Park Estate School Analayis of Data.

We looked at the Data collected by Wolf fisher. We discussed how the data connected to what we are actually doing in our school and what we want to be happening in our school...

My thoughts and goals for next year....

Teacher created texts: Perhaps not using only slides. I want my students to be looking at many texts and gathering information for a purpose. At the moment, there is a focus on a teach created slide and them answering specific teacher-generated questions.

Teaching our students to become digital citizens- Giving them resources to build critical literacy skills. (e.g.  using logic or reasoning, identifying more or less trustworthy sources). 

Feedback for students- Wanting to move more towards generative feedback opposed to evaluative feedback which I am guilty of doing often. Next year I am wanting to use learning goals that are evaluated one-on-one with students every few weeks to allow more learning discussions to take place.

Mathematical skills - Through an inquiry. ( DLO- for students to use their skills in Maths) Link to inquiry real life example. Rich discussions - explaining our thinking and solving real-life problems.

Observation of ELL strategies

Alida came into my class yesterday and modeled to me how to implement some oral language lessons to help some of my ELL students and the whole class. The first activity was running dictation. Students were in groups and had one scribe, each child had a turn to run to the fence look at the word and run back to tell the scribe. It was a great example of bumping up students vocabulary and helping students remember difficult spelling words- some students who weren't sure how to spell the whole word just remembered chunks. Everyone had a go and it was great to see the children learning new vocabulary in a fun way. The next activity was around extending vocabulary. Students had one word on a piece of paper ' gobbling' and they had to use a thesaurus to find other words that meant the same as that word. This was amazing to see such an extension of students vocab. I can see how this could work in my class before any piece of writing. Students often will use words that are familiar to them 'we had fun' but getting them to experiment and explore other words will only extend their vocabulary. Overall a great lesson for ELL strategies and watching Alida model them made it easier for me to see how to use them in my own classroom.

So what? 

Once a week we are going to do these oral language activities and I should see a shift in their writing vocabulary. I will comment on this reflection in a month and see if I have noticed any change in their vocabulary. 

Teaching Fractions

Today lesson on fractions was interesting. It was challenging for the students in the group and they found this confronting. Many students in my class have been struggling with fractions and moving into more challenging fraction concepts. 

I am learning to find fractions of lengths, including seeing when a fraction is greater than one.

Diagnostic Snapshot Ask the students questions such as: • “How much chocolate will each person get if we share five chocolate bars with four people?” • 

I started by using materials (colored paper) and we had a go at cutting the paper into equal parts and seeing if we could work out how much chocolate each person would get. I also used whiteboards and students could manipulate the fractions more and if they changed their mind they could rub out what they did and try again. One student in my class found using the materials very successful- she seemed to click, with being able to manipulate the paper 

So what?

This weekend I'm going to look into Book 7: Teaching fractions, decimals, and percentages to become more familiar with how to teach a high level of fractions. 

Teaching as Inquiry - Literacy

Inquiry Goal/ Problem-

My student's ideas in Writing and Reading at times are limited and lack critically thinking/ depth in their responses and ideas. Students need work on their oral language to enhance their critical thinking in reading and their responses in writing.

Week 3 - Oral language Task. - Links to Writing and Reading.

Students are going to individually take notes about birds. ( WALT- take notes and gather important information). This was scaffolded to my target learners. This was successful, students started to develop deeper thinking questions about birds and the learning.

Next steps:

Students will get into groups of four and discuss each of their findings. While one person talks the others will record ideas and take notes. ( I will be using the Shenna Cameron and Louise Dempsey 2016 Oral language Book) I will model this before the lesson and use a timer for each person to talk. I am hoping to see students talking about their notes and becoming more familiar with the topic and vocabulary which will help as they move towards a deeper level of thinking. The students will be in mixed ability groups which should provide support for lower learners.

Other opportunities to promote oral language and critically thinking:

-Question Dice - To allow for critical questions to support the student's inquiry.

- Say it square

For example:

	A	B	C
1	You are ….Say why …	You are ….Name 3 …	You are ….What did …?
2	You are ….How did … feel …?	You are ….Explain how …	You are ….Who was …?
3	You are ….In your opinion …	You are …. Talk about	You are …. Describe ….

HPS School Action Plan

This year I have been working with Health-promoting Schools to collect whanau and community data to create an action plan for our school. Yesterday I met with my coordinator from HPS and discussed our action plan for 2018.

In July we completed a community survey and had an 83% completion rate. The data showed three key areas that we could improve.

1. Room for school to improve school management of communication with parents ie  bigger focus on reporting bad behavior rather than good behavior and how they report student progress

2. Room for school to improve curriculum/learning in the school so that it is relevant to students builds on what students already know and do well and offers a variety of high-quality learning experiences  

3. Students who have challenging home circumstance are not excluded from participating in learning opportunities.

Our action plan for next year is going to be around Communication with Parents (Rubric number 4 L2) . 

15% of our families disagreed with the question 'When my child joined the school, I worked with school staff to plan ways to support my child to feel settled.' 60 % agree with this statement but there is room for improvement. Our goal is to get this to 80 - 85% by the end of 2018. ( We will re-complete the survey to compare the data in July 2018). 

25% of our families disagreed with the question 'The school regularly contacts me to share my childs'  60 % agree with this statement. We also want to get this up to 80 - 85%. 

After analyzing the data we decided that a focus on 'Staff responsibilities and providing an educationally powerful relationship between families and teacher. This would be key to reaching our goal of a 80-85% positive response in our next community survey. 

Possible action plans to reach our goal 

Create a system where parents are updated after their student joins PES  (Could be a brief statement about how their first week went and any assessment data teachers have completed) - It is key not to make more work for teachers. But most teachers, when new students start will complete assessments to work out where the student is academically, this with a statement home will put us in good stead to building positive relationships with whanau. New entrants teachers are already communicating with parents when students first join the school. 

Increasing blogger & seesaw Interaction-  Next term we could possibly have a blogger day every week. I would monitor blog comments and keep a record to track parent interaction. Could host another 'blog sharing afternoon' with families or teaching families how to comment on blogs. We will try to build on our plan already within blog commenting and measure success and progress.