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.

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: 

Deliberate acts of teaching 

I found this an interesting read around mathematical strategies:

Keeping children engaged and achieving in mathematics

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 !

2019 INQUIRY

Achievement Challenge 5 

Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/key competency using language symbols and texts


My Inquiry 



Last year I had the opportunity to work within several Manaiakalani schools and with a range of students with additional needs. The common theme amongst the teachers I worked with was their ability to know exactly what their students knew so they could plan the next learning steps. If a child with literacy skills that were below a level they could test on a running record or AsTTle or PAT, teachers didn't know what to do next and these students were often recorded as a zero in the teacher records.

The concern with this is it gives us no information on exactly what the student does know and what skills they do have. If we don't have this information how can we plan the next steps and engaging explicit acts of teaching?

I found some common themes amongst the students I had the opportunity to assess:
Areas of concern or limited skills in the following areas:
Auditory sequential and visual sequential improved sequential memory can help improve your child’s reading skills.
Auditory sequential and visual sequential memory skills are the ability to remember things seen and heard in sequence. 
Visual Sequential Memory is the ability to remember visual details in the correct sequence.

Update and thanks

Achievement Challenge 5

Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/key competency using language symbols and texts


My Inquiry


Will using fine-grained assessments improve teacher capacity for setting appropriate goals for students who fail to register on standardised tests?


This year :
I have had the opportunity to assess student with additional needs in several COL schools using a variety of assessment tools not normally used in mainstream classes.


A lot of our students with additional needs often dont measure on normal assessment tools eg Asttle, Running records


We need detailed information to identify our students needs and strengths.


This year I have found some interesting common themes across several student I have assessed


These common themes include:


Auditory sequential and visual sequential improved sequential memory can help improve your child’s reading skills.
Auditory sequential and visual sequential memory skills are the ability to remember things seen and heard in sequence.

Visual Sequential Memory is the ability to remember visual details in the correct sequence.


Auditory memory involves being able to take in information that is presented orally, to process that information, store it in one's mind and then recall what one has heard. Involves the skills of attending, listening, processing, storing, and recalling.


Visual Tracking – The ability to look at something and follow it as it moves or the ability to track a line, such as in reading. Visual tracking issues may also cause difficulty in math. Students may have difficulty lining up numbers vertically or horizontally.


My observations

• Teachers are working extremely hard out there ! 
• More of the same “stuff” won’t work 
• What's the goal - learning the student needs 
• We need to be working smarter not harder – and the way to do that is to know what the strengthen and gaps are of our students and so we can support these. 

My inquiry continues ; to look at best practise to support these learners with their specific goals.


One of the aspects I believe will have a significant impact on these learners is to:


Learn - create  -share : The Create aspect needs to be more of a focus especially for our students with additional needs eg hands on manipulative materials, fine motor skills
And the ARTS curriculum is often where these students flourish. 

If I could encourage one additional skill for all our students

· Asking for help or admitting you don't know or don’t understand
- this is for our students and our teachers.


If we want to encourage our students to recognise when they don’t know something or they need to ask for help or know how to find the answer


– then as teachers we need to model the same thing – we as teachers can’t know everything!!Also remember we are all life long learners so remember ask for help and support from our Colleagues 


I would like to take this opportunity to thank the teachers and Senior Management of the Manaiakalani school I have worked with and those who allowed me to assess their awesome students.

Thanks.

My Inquiry half way checkpoint

As part of the Manaiakalani Hui I got to present where is am up to in my Inquiry.
I have been trialing a range of different assessments with student at Sommerville and in our COL schools.

Teacher's receiving feedback.

Receiving Feedback on our teaching practice can be difficult. We need to change how we react to feedback from others and use this feedback as a great opportunity to learn and grow as teachers.

We give feedback to our learners in our classroom everyday. We expect them to use this feedback to develop new skills - new learning.

Why as an adult is it hard to receive feedback?

Watch this TED talk  by  Sheila, I found it interesting.

How to use others' feedback to learn and grow | Sheila Heen

Visual aids to enhance learning.

As part of my inquiry I have been researching my belief that Visuals aids help students to learn and retain information.

I found this interesting article.
Impact of Visual Aids in Enhancing the Learning Process CaseResearch: District Dera Ghazi Khan

It states:
Visual aids are the devices that help the teacher to clarify, establish, and correlate and co-ordinate precise conceptions, understandings and appreciations and support him to make learning more actual, active, motivating, encouraging, significant and glowing.

 Research tells us:
Every individual has the tendency to forget. 
Proper use of visual aids helps to retain more concept permanently.

Students can study well when they are inspired properly through different visual aids. 

Visual aids grow the accurate image when the students see and hear properly. 

Visual aids provide complete example for conceptual thinking. 

Visual aids create the environment of interest for the students. 

Visual aids helps to increase the vocabulary of the students. 

Visual aids helps the teacher to get sometime and make learning permanent. 

Visual aids provide direct experience to the students. 


Learning can be reinforced with different teaching/learning resources because they stimulate, motivate as well as focus learners’ attention for a while during the instructional process. Visual aids arouse the interest of learners and help the teachers to explain the concepts easily. Visual aids are those instructional aids which are used in the classroom to encourage teaching learning process.

 As Singh (2005) defines: “Any device which by sight and sound increase the individual s' practice, outside that attained through read labeled as an audio visual aids”. Visual aids are those instructional devices which are used in the classroom to encourage learning and make it easier and motivating. The material like models, charts, film strip, projectors, radio, television, maps etc called instructional aids. (Rather, 2004).
Visual aids are effective tool that “invest the past with an air of actuality.” Visual aids distribute the learners with true knowledge, which detention their devotion and help in the understanding of the ancient marvels. They demand to the mind through the visual auditory senses. When we use visual aids as teaching aid, it is one of the aspects which root participation of students in the lesson because when students look at visual model or aid, it is measured as a kind of contribution.


 CONCLUSIONS
From this research following conclusions have been drawn;
 1- The research concluded that using visuals aids as a teaching method stimulates thinking and improves learning environment in a classroom.
2- Effective use of visual aids substitutes monotonous learning environments.
3- Students develop and increase personal understanding of the areas of learning when they experience a successful and pleasant learning in the classroom.
 4- Students find visual aids sessions useful and relevant when it has some direct relation to the course content. 


So what visual aides are you using to enhance student learning ?

This research also showed links between improved vocabulary and the use of Visual aides - which is a major focus for Manaiakalani schools.

Inquiry Focus for 2018

 I have selected the following CoL achievement challenge:

#5 Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/key competency using language symbols and texts.

Questions

Will using fine-grained assessments improve teacher capacity for setting appropriate goals for students who fail to register on standardised tests?

This year I hope to get into more Manaiakalani classrooms and support teachers with assessment of students with additional needs. Then planning appropriate goals and programmes to support the students learning.

Please book time with me if you would like help with a student.

This year my personal learning focus will be to continue to develop my skills and knowledge around language acquisition and how we can support students who have communications difficulties. This was a very common challenge for our students identified by many of my COL colleagues in 2017.

I hope to share my Inquiry and my learning journey with my blog posts.

Please feel free to ask questions and let me know what you would like more information on.

My Inquiry - My story so far.

Alternative Assessments for Students with Additional needs.

As part of my on going Inquiry into appropriate assessment tools to use with students who have additional needs I have investigated the following tools.

Literacy	Maths
Narrative assessment Expanded English Framework (Fuel and Launch) -         Listening , reading,  viewing framework -         Speaking, writing, viewing framework Developmental Writing scale Developmental Spelling  Assessment	Narrative assessment Extended Number framework and matrix (Fuel and Launch) Bracken - School Readiness  (cost to purchase or may be available RTLB)

I have tried these assessments with a range of students at Sommerville special school and several students within the Manaiakalani schools.
These assessments have given more detailed assessment information for students who can not be assessed using standardised school assessments.

Narrative assessment, Expanded Framework and Bracken - school readiness are all recognised assessment with the Ministry of Education. These assessments cater for students with very complex learning needs.

The Developmental Writing scale and Developmental Spelling assessment were recommended by 
                                   

  

Dr Sally Clendon PhD Univ North Carolina Chapel Hill

Senior Lecturer in Speech and Language Therapy, Massey University NZ.

I have found that these assessments are very informative for establishing what the  student  can do  and what their next learning steps should be.

Please feel free to contact me if you would like some more information.

Whanua involvement in the learning journey.

Sommerville school held an EXPO on Saturday 28th October , where we offered our families an opportunity to come along to school for an information day.

We had community organisations  run information sessions on relevant topics for our families included : Medical concerns, behaviour management , special needs funding etc.

We provided supervision and entertainment for their child ,while families/adults attended the information sessions. This was the fabulous idea of our Principal Diane Hankins. Our families are already asking about next year's Expo and offering ideas and suggestions for what they would like more information on.

I ran an hours session on how families can support the learning of their children at home.

My focus was to show families how they can get involved in fun, engaging ways that are enjoyable for everyone - adult and child.

Here is an example of some of the slides I presented.
Our parents are very keen to be involved in their child's learning, we just need to show them some ways of making it appropriate for their child in their home environment.

Time to reflect

Time to reflect.

I had the opportunity to attend the APPA Leadership conference this week.

I attended Bek Galloway's workshop.

Thoroughly enjoyed her presentation and she has left me with lots to ponder.

Firstly, it confirmed my strong belief that teachers should be constantly learning and reflecting and our Teacher Inquiries give us a structure to this.

Bek talked about a Learning Culture Space.
The power of student focused learning and a curriculum that supports this.

Time to Reflect and Refocus.

The Next Generation

Tony Ryan Educational consultant spoke at the APPA conference about the future of the next generation.
What skills will we need?

 

Are we preparing our students for the future? What can we do as educators ?

There seems to be a common  theme from several presenters today  around the importance of the

  Key Competencies.

How do we increase the inclusion of the important competencies in our daily class programmes.

Tony Ryan also talked about the vital skill for our future being  Oracy.

This is a major concern considering the low levels of our students oral language skills.

Tony suggested we teach our students about how to self-talk, the beginning of thinking our thoughts through and problem solving.

Thanks Tony lots to consider.

A common theme - our students' language.

Manaiakalani Boards' Forum

At the BOT forum tonight 6 Col teachers presented their Inquiries. Well done to our presenters you were very informative.

Common theme: - The limited oral language and vocabulary of our students.

Each COL teacher presented on their Achievement challenge - everyone of us talked about how our Inquiries had lead us to realise that our students language levels were significantly impacting their progress across all curriculum areas.

Raising achievement in Maths - students did not understand the maths vocabulary
or could not follow instructions with positional concepts.

Lift the achievement for boys' writing -  students do not have  the vocab to describe and explain.

Lift the achievement in Reading for all students, - students need the confidence and language to share their ideas and the language vocabulary to understand what they are reading.

Here is the next challenge team - how do we accelerate our students language skills?

Watch out for some exciting professional development Sommerville will be offering next term.                            

Update on my Inquiry.

Update.

I had the opportunity to present to the BOT from Manaiakalani school tonight.

This was a great opportunity for me to reflect on what i have been up to.

HUI - Sharing

Sharing Our Inquiries

What a great afternoon of sharing and learning.

I was so impressed with the creative ways the COL teachers displayed their Inquiries - Well done team.

I realised that I need to be talking more to my colleagues about alternative assessments that may give a more detailed picture of our students with additional needs. I was surprised by the number of teachers who were unaware of any other assessments to  possibly use on students who failed the mainstream assessments.

I  have exciting work ahead!

Differentiating our Assessments in Literacy

Literacy Assessments at Sommerville.

Sommerville Literacy assessment

As part of my on going Inquiry into using appropriate assessments

Questions

Will using fine-grained assessments improve teacher capacity for setting appropriate goals for students who fail to register on standardised tests?

I have put together a overview of assessments we are currently using at Sommerville to help us establish exactly what our students know and inform how we set appropriate learning targets and goals for the students next steps.

The teachers at Sommerville now have a range assessment to chose from . It is important that the assessments used give the teacher as much information as possible not just a pass or fail!