RPI 2 - Knowing Your Learners

 Knowing Your Learner - Day 2 - RPI 

Dorothy - History of Manaiakalani

After discussing how the words Learn/Ako, Create/Hanga, and Share/Tohatoha originated from shared expectations of what makes a great literacy programme, Dorothy talked about how they engaged students in reading through podcasts. Students were eager to be part of the 'rage', so they read to create a podcast. This led to a point where students simply wanted to read for pleasure, which is a success in itself. Now, I can listen to that myself on a podcast.

Base Line Questionaire

We completed a questionnaire relating to our practice, and as an experienced teacher, it was interesting. I made a note of a few of the items I would like to do more frequently and in more depth.

• I plan for learners to reflect on learning intentions and success criteria to evaluate reading progress.
• At least fortnightly, I give learners 'Responding to text' tasks that balance higher-order thinking prompts with 'Create' opportunities.

This idea I have used previously and would like to include it again

• I use termly approaches to promote reading mileage at home such as challenges and learner self-tracking.

I want to monitor this as I love using poetry and narrative text but do I do this

• I use poetry and narrative text to develop learners' literary appreciation of figurative language, character and author’s style.

We will complete this questionnaire again at the end of RPI, so I will be able to report back on how I have improved.

Assessment 101 and Planning for Ambitious Outcomes

To know our learners, we also have to look at their data and understand what they need to learn next. We covered this in the Papakura Achievement Initiative (PAI) in the mid-2000s. I have since encountered this every time a school introduces or revisits Assessment for Learning. So it is great to see that we are not discarding valuable practices along with irrelevant ones.

I have come across the effect size before, but that doesn't mean I remember it, so I am including it in my post so I can refer to and utilise the ideas in my deliberate acts of teaching.

I always have high expectations, but I want to examine how I reinforce them. I've noticed that despite having these expectations, a couple of students still do everything to avoid work. Is it due to the Goldilocks Principle? Or are the purpose and success criteria unclear?

We then took a look at Formative and Summative Assessment, and I love the analogy with the chef.

Many tools can be used for both formative and summative assessments. It was interesting breaking down how we can obtain more teachable data from NZCER Assist to help focus our planning. All assessments should be worthwhile and purposeful. In other words, we should use them to teach from, not teach to. And then, of course, we need to triangulate data, and observation data is just as important.

As teachers, we must prepare students for testing to ensure we catch them before they fall behind and create assessment-capable learners.

Keeping Track of Learning

I found this interesting because when I was working with paper planning and assessment in clear file folders, I did this successfully by tracking what was covered as well. However, the more digital I became, the more scattered it all became and not in one easily accessible format. I look forward to using this workbook to collate and track what is being taught. - example 

Below are images from pages in my class workbook.

Tracking Reader Profiles

I found this discussion really reassuring because the Reader Profiles gather a lot of information. It was explained that we don't need to track all of it in detail; we can focus on certain areas, and these are the first ones. I am going to pick 3 to focus on Mileage, Attitudes and Self-efficacy.

Assessment Tools

It was interesting to hear how the PATs have been updated and to have access to the new manual.

Developing Assessment-Capable Learners

I enjoyed this part of the day. As I mentioned before, I have been taught to include Learning Intentions and Success Criteria for a while (not going to say it will give too much away). It was interesting to see where others display the success criteria. I have done it straight on the site and still do for some areas. However, with groups in reading all reaching for different targets or the same target at different levels, the success criteria can look different.

Chatting about the wording of WALT or LI helped to solve a couple of issues, as I often wonder how much I should include and I agree it is easy to over word preventing students from applying the learning to other areas or too broad.

Where to from Here -

As I mentioned earlier I have some ideas to strengthen my practice and encourage reading that I want to focus on from the questionnaire.

Once we have done our assessment I am looking forward to analysing the tasks and seeing how I can use this data in my planning and sharing the practical part of the results with students.

Of course, I would like to start co-constructing Success Criteria with specific groups and making sure my LIs are clear, precise and not to specific.