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. 

Writing Lesson

Writing: Describing a scene. 

Model: School Journal Part 1 No 5 2007. The alien under the stairs.

WALT- Use language features to make our writing more effective. 

Success Criteria: 

- Alliteration 

-Similes 

Students identified what they thought was interesting in the model. - They have their reader hats on. 

All students managed to identify something in the text they thought was a language feature or descriptive language. 

Getting students to talk to a buddy and explain why they highlighted what they did encourages students to think about why they choose that particular sentence or word. This helps students discover what they need to be including in their writing and why it is important. (Allows the co-construction of the success criteria to be very clear) 

Writing Professional Development

Over the last year, our school has been receiving professional development around writing from Team Solutions. Our facilitator Anna meets with us twice a term and works with us to improve our writing program and teaching. 

My Teaching as inquiry this term has been around 'allowing for targeted independent learning that will result in my student's academic learning to increase”. I have focused on what my students are doing away from workshops during their independent writing time (Last years results showed that my targeted workshops had shown an increase in student achievement - with a large increase of students meeting the National Standard compared to that of the year prior- so I wanted, to start a new focus).

Last year I saw improvement in my writing program through the following;

• Gaining student engagement through; Langauge experiences,  Curriculum Integration and students ideas.
• Having a close link between Reading and Writing - Allowing both curriculum areas to drive each other.
• Modeling Books (Have learning intentions, success criteria that have been coconstructed, and an annotated example)
• Following a lesson plan of - I do, we do, you do.
• Focusing on specific learning needs (Gap analysis)
• 
  

I have been working on Questioning (to extend thinking away from teacher lessons), using an Annotated modeling book that has the appropriate learning intentions, success criteria, and annotated example, buddy checking and using Individual goals to consolidating learning.

After my PAC conversation with Anna, I saw that I need more of a focus and to tighten up my Modelling Books and the buddy check system. I am wanting to display my learning intention on the board and have students names underneath them so students know what their focus is for the week. I am going to strengthen my buddy feedback system by teaching 4 strong writers how to effectively give feedback to their pairs- This will allow me to activate pairs as learning resources. They will then slowly model to other students how to give that effective feedback. I will be videoing the students doing this to ensure that it is at a high standard and that it is actually effective, the videos will allow me to gather more feedback and areas I may need to focus on around the buddy check system. I will revisit this reflection next term to check in on my progress.

Manaiakalani Intensive Session Four

Today's session was around sharing to learn, Chromebooks  (Screen castify) and Ipads (explain everything).  Dorothy discussed that sharing is not the end of the learning. We share to get further feedback to promote further learning; specific and focused feedback is "one of the most powerful influences of achievement" according to John Hattie (2009). Sharing also enables others to learn from our learning. TheManaiakalani pedagogy focuses on learning being; rewindable, visible, transparent, personalised and accessible. My goal this term has been around making the learning in my classroom rewindable; I have created online modelling books where students can refer to examples, learning intentions and success criteria. In my class, most students refer to modelling books every day, to either check what they need to be doing or to assess themselves against the success criteria. I am wanting to take this rewindable learning further and record lessons so that students can revisit key learning ideas, this would be hugely beneficial to my learners giving them opportunities to go back and re-listen to instructions or specific learning. My first screen castify is going to show students how to post on their blogs- this is new learning for my students and there are many steps involved, it would be a massive teaching tool to have a video showing students what to do saving my teaching time repeating the same instructions. 

Below is an example of me using screencastify, in the video below I am discussing the four elements of effective feedback. I mainly discuss focused feedback. The feedback I give my students in particular in the area of writing has been the most effective in terms of their achievement outcomes.  I have had PLD around feedback. We learned about connecting our success criteria to a model or an exemplar and annotating it so that students can see exactly what their success criteria is. I then give them feedback on their success criteria and if they have completed all components I provide generative feedback ( I make sure to keep them achievable) I am hoping to incorporate a buddy feedback and self-check effectively into my writing programme so that when I conference with students my feedback can be an additional next step that is going to promote further learning and hopefully provide some acceleration.  (This is happening in my class but they are still getting the hang of buddy feedback and making sure that it is specific and linked to their learning intention or goal). 

 Current annotated modelling books ( I am hoping to include a video with the lesson for some of my groups)