Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Celebrating success - What do the results say and WHY?


I have been very fortunate this year to work with an incredible teacher and amazing Year 7 & 8 students at Panmure Bridge School.

The opportunity to observe and work alongside these amazing individuals has renewed my passion for teaching and learning. 

Robyn Anderson and I have had many conversations about the needs of her students and the comprehensive ways she has of supporting her students who have very many diverse needs. I really appreciate the opportunity to share ideas, problem-solve, bounce ideas around, work with her students, carry out additional assessments and most importantly to have the opportunity to be Robyn's critical friend.
I totally agree with Robyn Critical friends are awesome!

Today I celebrate the progress her students have made under her guidance.




Robyn has adapted her programme throughout the year to meet the needs of her students.
She has listened to her student's opinions and consider their interests when recrafting her class programme.

I believe the progress made by these students is a direct result of the explicit acts of teaching  Robyn carries out every day.

Regular strategies I have seen in place daily in her classroom

  • Recapping learning from previous days or lessons and makes clear links to other curriculum areas
  • Checks in with her students regularly to check their understanding of vocabulary and content.
  • Regularly involves the students in the decision making about their own learning 
  • Constantly reminding students of their learning goals and how they can demonstrate their understanding.
  • Reinforced the focus/goal including asking students to share their goals in multiple ways.
  • Actively Models the learning.
  • Guides and scaffolds the students towards their next step goal with appropriate strategies and support.
  • Gets the students to share with a partner their ideas and new learning to reinforce concepts and vocabulary.

But: while these strategies are impressive and I believe they have had a significant impact on learning it is the other important things she does daily that I believe have had an even greater impact -

  • Builds a positive relationship with her students - these students know she cares and wants the best opportunity for them.
  • Has very clear boundaries around expectation and class rules and culture.
  • Checks in with her students daily and is aware of significant events in their life that could have a detrimental impact on the students day eg social and environmental facts that we know can be very extreme in our community.
Explicit acts of teaching and positive relationships make the biggest difference.

This has been a wonderful learning journey for the Teachers and the students!




Monday, October 28, 2019

Student voice and evaluations



I have been fortunate to spend time at Panmure Bridge work with Robyn Anderson in her Year 7 & 8 class. She asked me to interview her students about their learning.
This was an amazing experience to hear these students describe their own learning, achievement and challenges. 
Some of the positive comments where :

  • To hear students referring to specific strategies eg skimming, scanning, inferring etc
  • Identifying specific skills they need to learn eg my times' table to help me solve problems faster.
  • Recognise what they had just learnt or achieved eg adding decimals.


Please see Robyn's informative post here

Robyn gets her students to complete an evaluation and the end of every term, I have linked her blog post here.


At Sommerville, we have been working on our students understanding their learning goals and being able to recognise if they have achieved their goals

Our students need visual supports to help understand their learning goals.





What am I learning?




What do I need to do?


What do I think?



How well did I do?






Sunday, September 8, 2019

Assessment - Writing


Developmental Writing Scale



The students I work with are at various stages of learning to write.
To be able to plan the next learning steps and teaching strategies, we need to know exactly what the student can do and what they need to know to move forward.

Many of these students can not be assessed using the mainstream norm assessments eg AsTTle.

While working closely with Dr Sally Clendon, we were introduced to The Developmental Writing Scale. This has proved to be very helpful to the teachers I work with.




Definitions








To learn more read the article by 
The Developmental WritingScaleA New Progress Monitoring Tool for Beginning Writers Janet M. Sturm, Kathleen Cali, Nickola W. Nelson, and Maureen Staskowski


To see this in action follow my collegue and fellow COL teacher Devs Charles BLOG

Thursday, August 22, 2019

How I may be able to help you.






Currently, in New Zealand Schools according to the MOE, there are 1 in 5 students who require additional support from support services.

We all know there are a lot of other students in our classes who require additional support and are not currently receiving any support.



In my role as Across Schools Teacher supporting students with Additional Needs
I might be able to help with some of the following things:


  • Facilitate Professional Development for your Staff, tailored to your schools' needs.


In the last year, I have presented :

  • Teacher Aide training on Oral language development, Early Reading and Writing skills.
  • Supporting Neurodiverse students - How our brain works.
  • Behaviour and Sensory needs
  • Assessment of individual students using additional assessment tools
  •  to gain baseline data
  • to assist teachers to plan appropriately
  • to check the meet criteria for additional support eg ORS, ICS
  • to gather information for Welcome to school project

  • Discussed School Special needs support registers      

  • Supported COL teachers with inquiries and carried out observations.

  • Provided adapted material and resources for students with Additional needs













Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC)



What is AAC?


Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is an umbrella term that encompasses the communication methods used to supplement or replace speech or writing for those with impairments in the production or comprehension of spoken or written language.

  •  Augmentative – add;  Alternative – another option
  •  AAC includes all forms of communication (other than oral speech) that are used to express thoughts, needs, wants, and ideas. We all use AAC when we make facial expressions or gestures, use symbols or pictures, or write. 
Our role is to be a communication partner. This is a very important role, one that will help our students. What we do counts; what we think is important; how we respond matters; every interaction is an opportunity to grow language and communication.
Some of our learners need additional support with their communication skills and AAC can support their production of speech and their comprehension of another person's language.
Examples of AAC :

- used at Sommerville Special school -  Gail Arriola-Bagayas  SLT.



We use the term AAC to describe various methods of communication to get around problems with ordinary speech. Some kinds of AAC are actually part of how everyone communicates: for example, waving goodbye; giving a “thumbs up’ instead of speaking; pointing to a picture, or gesturing in a foreign country.


However, people with speech difficulties have to rely on AAC most of the time. Some AAC tools “add on” to verbal communication – simple methods such as pictures, gestures and pointing. Some people need more complex help to communicate, such as powerful computer technology.
We can best support our learners using Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) by creating a learning environment where they are immersed in the use of their own communication system. Modelling with AAC involves highlighting (pointing to or activating) symbols in an AAC system as we speak so that students can experience how their AAC system can be used to communicate for real reasons. Modelling AAC may also be referred to as Aided Language Stimulation or Aided Language Input. 





Friday, August 2, 2019

Wellbeing Strategy


Ministry focus on Wellbeing.

I attended the Inclusive Education Seminar where Dr David Wales National Director Learning Support Ministry of Education discussed the Learning Support Directions.

David presented the Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy.




Resources and Initiatives available to support student well being.



Additional resources

Wellbeing tools

Student wellbeing

Wellbeing ERO

Positive Behaviour for learning

Using Physical restraint in schools.


Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Deliberate, systematic and explicit of Teaching Phonetics


Are we being deliberate and explicit enough?

Jill Ritchie Literacy Consultant from Impact Learning Consulting presented an information session on Supporting Students with Dyslexia.


Many of the students I  have been out to observe or test in my Across schools role seems to have a deficit in their Phonetics knowledge.   This impacts their progress in Reading and writing.

Once again my research leads me to the knowledge that we must be deliberate, explicit teaching of Phonics and Phonemic awareness.

I am wondering is there needs to be a greater emphasis on Phonetics in our Junior classes and a programme designed for our older students that meets their needs and interests.
I am working on a programme with a fellow COL teacher. Stay tuned for further updates.







Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Change to learning support by MOE



The Ministry of Education is using the following model when working with schools to support learners with additional needs.



The new Learning Support  Delivery model process.



Associate Education Minister Tracey Martin will be making an announcement about the learning support Co-ordinators role sometime over the next month.
There will be 600 Learning Support Co-ordinators across the country - MOE is saying one Learning support co-ordinator per 500 students - this is a paid position in addition to normal staffing allocation.


Developing Vocabulary


I had the opportunity to hear a presentation by Jill Ritchie Literacy Consultant from Impact Learning Consulting.

Jill had some fabulous ideas about embedding vocabulary into our teaching programmes.


The teaching of vocabulary is a vital part of our Literacy programmes but must be all taught in all curriculum areas.




We need to review, reteach and checking in regularly that our Learners have the required vocabulary and the correct definition.








Explicit acts of teaching vocabulary is vital for our learners.
We need to reference this new vocabulary in multi contexts through out the week to ensure our learners understand this new vocabulary especially specialised specific vocabulary.

I saw a fabulous example of this when working with Robyn Anderson from Panmure Bridge when we discussed her maths lesson introducing new maths language to her learners.

Saturday, June 8, 2019

Assessment - looking deeper




Criterion Assessment
Criterion Teat of Basis skills



The primary emphasis of this assessment is on phonetic word attack skills.
It uses a multiple- sensory assessment strategies to ensure that visual and auditory receptive skills, as well as vocal and motor expressive skills, are tapped.


















Sample pages from the test book.

This test allows students to respond in many ways. I have adapted this test and used with non - verbal students.

It includes Letter recognition, Letter sounding, Blending and Sequencing, Phonics patterns, Multi syllable words, sight words.


I carried out this assessment on our target group of students in Year 7 & 9 at Panmure Bridge school.
It clearly showed where the gaps were in their phonics knowledge.





Monday, June 3, 2019

Student view of the own learning.


While working with many students across the Manaiakalani schools I have noticed many of the students are very critical of themselves and their own ability.
They seem to give up quickly and believe before they have even started that the task is going to be too hard.

When reading Karen Ferguson blog post about her students self-talking and the possible impact this could be having on your students, it made me revisit this possible challenge for our students. 

We need to get our students to rewrite the messages in their heads so that they are not giving up or being negative about their abilities and their learning.

I think the Stonefields school Learning pit helps students understand that learning can be hard and that is ok! But we need to be determined and positive and keep going.
The visual representation of the Learning pit works well and students in our Sommerville Satellite class at Stonfields now understand these concepts when matched to a visual and situation.



These learning qualities are so important for all our students. We all know learning is challenging and sometimes we just want to give up! We need to show students how to be Self Aware, and determined. Self Efficacy needs to be a skill we gift our students.



Friday, May 31, 2019

Explicit teaching of Phonics








Explicit teaching of Phonics - helping our students learn to read and write.


The goal of phonics instruction is to help our students learn the alphabetic principle — the idea that letters represent the sounds of spoken language — and that there is a predictable relationship between written letters and spoken sounds. In our COL we have students who are learning English and as we all know that English is a challenging language to master with some many combinations of sounds.

My research has consistently found that explicit systematic phonics instruction is one of the most effective ways to teach children how to read, especially for students who are struggling to learn to read or have language difficulties. So why do we not continue to teach our students phonics when they still need this explicit input as they move up through school year levels. As our students move up through the school there seems to be little focus in fulling the gaps in the student’s skill.

Phonics teaches pupils that letters they see written on a page are part of a code which represents the sounds of spoken language, and provides them with the tools to understand this magic code. When these skills are developed and embedded the students can then become fluent readers who are able to quickly recognise familiar words and easily sound out new words they encounter. Imagine reading and writing a language you just don't understand the rules of the language and have to stop and decode every word. 
Phonics allows our readers to develop their reading comprehension. With enough teaching of skills and practice, pupils' decoding skills should become so automatic that they are able to concentrate on and understand the overall meaning of what they are reading. While students are struggling to decode and recognise sounds and words it is very challenging to comprehend the text they are reading.

Vocabulary instruction can go hand-in-hand with phonics instruction which is a recognised area of need in our COL.  This is an opportunity to embed Keywords that contain the target letter-sound relationships etc that we are focusing on in our current topic. Teaching phonics and vocabulary can be done in a fun and interesting ways. 
Even our older Year 7 and 8 students enjoy games and competition when it's done in a nonthreatening manner.
My plan moving forward is to work with Robyn Anderson a COL teacher from Panmure Bridge School to see if creating a Phonics programme for identified students in her Year 7/8 will have a positive impact on students Reading and Writing.

Robyn has blogged about our discussion on her blog



Explicit acts of teaching - making the biggest difference





During our COL PLG we were discussing how can we replicate the accelerated progress we achieve in writing and our other focused areas, maths and reading.
There seems to be an overwhelming need to ensure we are using explicit acts of teaching.


Deliberate acts of teaching instructional strategies are the tools of effective practice. They are the deliberate acts of teaching that focus learning in order to meet a particular purpose. Instructional strategies are effective only when they impact positively on students' learning.

Teachers need to be able to use a range of deliberate acts of teaching inflexible and integrated ways within learning activities to meet the diverse literacy learning needs of our students.
These deliberate acts may include modelling, prompting, questioning, giving feedback, telling, explaining, and directing in your class programme.
Giving students explicit instruction about learning strategies will help them take control of their own learning. Deliberate acts of teaching showing our students how to make clear explicit links to prior knowledge and connection to their environment must impact student achievement as well as building new learning.
Sometimes i think we confuse implicit and explicit in our teaching. Our students with language or learning difficulties need very explicit acts of teaching.
Something is implicit when it is implied but not directly stated. Something is explicit when it is directly stated and leaves no room for uncertainty. Our students need EXPLICIT teaching.

Wanting reminders of what explicit acts of teaching look like in Literacy check out: 
I found this an interesting read around mathematical strategies:

Saturday, May 25, 2019

Snap shot - Learning data


Time to get a snapshot of where the target group of students I am supporting at Panmure Bridge are at the end of Term One.
I carried out the phonics assessment in the Criterion Assessment and Robyn Anderson has kindly shared her results from Term  One.




After looking at this data there is a need to continue with the  Phonics programme that Robyn has carefully crafted.  It is also interesting to note the other factors that are impacting on student progress including self-esteem, attitude. confidence and self-esteem.

Robyn is using the data to create a Needs focused 'Phonics programme" to cater for her year 7/8 students who still need to grasp a full understanding of phonics.

Robyn Anderson blogged about our meeting. Across school teacher support.

Friday, May 24, 2019

Why are our students not getting the support they need.


This year I have been working with the Team from the Welcome to School project to gather assessment information on the students they assessed two years ago.

Moira Nelson SLT has reassessed these students on their Core language skills including Receptive and Expressive language. Some students have made great progress, for example, a student moving from 1st percentile to the 63rd!!
However, she also found several students who are significantly below in Language.
We were interested to see if the students who were still significantly below have been identified by the school and receiving additional support from the Ministry or RTLB.

Very few of the students were receiving additional support from an outside agency and those that were seemed to have support mostly due to social and behavioural needs.

Why are our students not getting the support they need?

I have identified the following hypothesis

1.  When you have a large number of students in your classroom with language and learning delays you are less likely to identify the students that are significantly below.

2. There is no official MOE provided assessment or screening tool for teachers or Senco's to use to easily identify these students.

3. Most of our Manaiakalani schools do not have a designated Senco person who has the time and expertise to identify and assess these students. Our Sencos are often the Principals or Senior Management, who have this responsibility on top of an already extensive workload.
Schools in higher decile areas often have a designated teacher with responsibility for Special needs and release time to carry out this role.

This impacts on schools abilities to assess students and once identified have time to complete the required paperwork to request additional support needed from outside agencies.


In class support:
 I  had the opportunity to be part of an allocation meeting. Students receive points under different criteria. The first criteria is whether a student has had previous intervention or assessments etc from other agencies or professionals eg SLT, Paediatrician, Occupational therapist etc.
As we are all aware currently the easiest way to access these is private, a cost our families can not afford.  Some students had seen multiple professionals so gained several points towards receiving in-class support funding. In one case a student received 6 points before we looked at his academic results.
Students in our COL may have been academically lower than these students but did not gain enough points to receive funding.  This puts our students at a significant disadvantage.

RTlit

There are projects being run in the community by the RTlit that would benefit our students significantly. Currently, the allocation of these projects has gone to schools in higher decile areas within our immediate community.
Is this because they have Senco who can be released to find out about these projects, attend meetings in school time and assess the students and complete the applications before our COL schools have even heard about these projects?



I wonder if the new Learning Support Coordinators that have been promised for 2020 will be allocated to our schools?

Our students deserve better !









Monday, May 20, 2019

Knowing your learner , digging a little deeper.




Supporting our students to acquire literacy skills can look very different, according to the context, the desired outcomes and most of all, our learners. Knowing your learners is vital to teaching and learning. Once we know each learner, we can scaffold their learning and put in place for most appropriate programmes and teaching strategies that will help our learners stretch to reach new levels and gain appropriate necessary skills.

When I work with teachers, I have noticed how challenging it is for these teachers to identify exactly what the learner needs to learn when they are well below their chronological peers. To be a competent reader we need a range of skills, it’s like a big jigsaw puzzle. For some of our learners, there are pieces of this puzzle missing which means they are not able to use this knowledge to be competent literacy learners.






Recently, I have noticed the need to go back to basics. Our learners need explicit teaching of strategies and knowledge. One common area seems to be a need more focus on Phonological awareness such as rhyming, word families and onset rime.

eg :     The "onset" is the initial phonological unit of any word (e.g. c in cat) and the term "rime" refers to the string of letters that follow, usually a vowel and final consonants (e.g. at in cat).

  • ·       They help our learners learn about word families, which can lay the foundation for future spelling strategies
  • ·       Teaching our learners to attend to onset and rime will have a positive effect on their literacy skills
  • ·       Learning these components of phonological awareness is strongly predictive of reading and spelling acquisition






Wednesday, April 17, 2019

The New Learning Support Delivery Model





As you may be aware the Ministry of Education has developed a new way of delivering learning support. This Learning Support Delivery Model is being phased in across New Zealand with the
Ministry’s regional offices working with groups of early learning services, schools, providers
and communities to strengthen inclusion and modernise how learning support is delivered.
cluster. In response to the Learning Support Delivery model, we are working with the Ministry of Education Learning Support, Kahui Ako and Supporting Agencies to align current practices with the Disability and Learning Support
Action Plan.
https://www.education.govt.nz/our-work/changes-in-education/a-new-way-to-deliver-
learning-support/. 

They are working on Response to Intervention (RTI) is an evidence-based, multi-tiered approach to the early identification and support of students with learning and behaviour needs. It is a framework
which can be tailored to suit each school. RTI can be used as a lens over a school’s special
needs register so that a school can feel confident that the right level and intensity of support
is provided to each student’s needs.

The aim of the RTI  is to allow schools to ensure that the level of support is appropriate to the needs of their students. It is supposed to provide confidence that the interventions being chosen are evidence-based, robust, effective and well matched to the student. Like the classroom, once good RTI systems are in place, this helps to prevent learning and behaviour challenges and also enhances
learning for all students within the learning community.



I am going to a workshop about the data base being set up by the RTLB cluster 8 in May and hope this provides me with further information to share. I am interested in the concept of gathering school-wide data and Across our Kahui Ako.

Stay tuned - the true information and the value for our student is yet to be seen.
I am hoping this will help me gather information for my inquiry about our student's and whether they are accessing the support they need.

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Current assessments in Manaiakalani COL schools




To gain knowledge about what is currently happening in our Manaiakalani schools around assessment I  meet with  Roseanne Gibson the manager of   RTLB Cluster 8.
They have generously shared me into the RTLB Response to Intervention framework survey results. I appreciate RTLB Cluster 8 for their willingness to share this information with me.

Nine of the 13 schools in Manaiakalani Kahui Ako have completed the RTI survey with
their liaison RTLB to date. Eight of the nine responding schools were familiar with the
Response to Intervention Framework.



         
How learning progress is tracked in classrooms across Manaiakalani Kahui Ako  Schools
Assessments:
• Pre and post assessments
• asTTle,(Reading, Writing, Maths), easTTle
• IKAN, Gloss
• PATs
• Running records
• Curriculum assessments
• School based - base line testing -ongoing formative assessment in       classroom, summative as per cluster agreed protocols
• Beginning, middle and end year assessments




       
Cumulative Records and Reports
• E-Tap records
• Student reports which go to parents
• Parent/Teacher interviews
• Online tracking shared across staff
• School Talk (this is a a customised software package that teachers use for everything.
Planning, assessment, uploading evidence against learning outcomes
-students do this, timetables for the day, modelling books etc)
Teacher Tracking:
• OTI's by class teachers
• Learning groups
• Differentiating curriculum
• Anecdotal notes



My goal now is to work with our Manaiakalani school and introduce them to a range of alternative assessments.