My Space and My Place

From what you know already about your classes and your school’s profile and leadership goals for the year, share a possible inquiry focus.

Frame your focus as a desired change in student learning NOT a change in teaching (as yet!)

My target group of learners for my Inquiry 2021 will be my Year 12 NCEA Level 2 class. This group of learners were my target group from my 2020 Inquiry.

Collaborate with your school’s leadership team and colleagues to identify areas where your inquiry will make a powerful contribution to wider school and cluster goals.

My target group of learners for my Inquiry 2021 will be my Year 12 NCEA Level 2 class. This group of learners were my target group from my 2020 Inquiry.

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I consulted with Marc Milford, Literacy Expert and Extraordinaire, as well as Karen Ferguson, fellow CoL, Techie and whose previous Inquiries have had a Literacy focus, about their thoughts around how my inquiry would make a powerful contribution to wider school and cluster goals.

Marc has been asking for Year 11 assessment tasks to critique, to help align current student writing at Tamaki College with NCEA Level 1 exemplars online.  Having previously provided me with support around literacy for my own practice, as well as the Technology Department, Marc is very keen to see my 2021 Inquiry continue along the Literacy focus, in alignment with both the School and Department Literacy Goals.  Marc is also keen to continue supporting me with my inquiry this year, which I believe will be instrumental in gaining critical feedback from somebody who is an expert in this field.

As the original developer of the Explanation Writing Exemplar, which is contributing towards my Inquiry focus this year, it was important that I spoke with Karen and gained her insight and feedback into my inquiry ideas around literacy.  Through our discussion, Karen could see how the ideas I was floating around, could offer the learners steps of support for literacy, by chunking down bigger concepts into smaller ones that learners could get their heads around.  It also helps that Karen's approach in many literacy learning activities, often start from the Unistructural (Yellow) section of the SOLO Taxonomy poster, and the activities staircase up from there.  Karen shared me a folder of learning resources that she has experimented with, to demonstrate various approaches with her learners.  

Although I understood that Literacy is a current and relevant area for Inquiry in terms of supporting student learning, it has helped to talk to others about their perspective, knowledge and experience working on literacy as well.

The following is a screencastify on a quick task that I've set with my learners, so that I know, that 'they' know, how to access their learning on my site.

This was a timely reminder for learners to know how to access their learning, while they are in the classroom, as well as when they are offsite including during lockdowns.  It is also an extremely useful for students who are new to my subject and are completely new to Tamaki College.

Academic Writing - Online Game 

One of the Technology Department Goals for 2020 was based on Literacy, in alignment with the School Goal 2 for Literacy and Numeracy.  

The Technology Department Literacy Goal for 2020 is:

To develop ‘Explanation Writing’ classroom display resources for each specialist technology subject, based on SOLO taxonomy

After the department literacy session on understanding the Explanation Writing process, I developed an 'Explanation Writing' template for Digital Technologies. I shared this with Marc Milford, who provided feedback and changes as shown below.

Discussion Points about the Explanation Writing Digital Technologies poster

In order for teachers to assist learners with fluent writing, beyond the use of sentence starters, it is important to master three types of functional verbs used in writing.  These are:

• relational verbs (small auxiliary verbs that express tense)
• mental verbs (what you do in your head)
• action verbs

Final Writing Explanation Poster for Digital Technologies

Next Steps

The following is one of our Department Goals for 2020:

To develop ‘Explanation Writing’ classroom display resources for each specialist technology subject, based on SOLO taxonomy

Discussion Points about Literacy Issues

• Staff have been trialing a range of different Literacy Strategies with their learners within our different learning environments.  
• Students struggle with the physical act of writing.  Blogging is inconsistent, and time constraints is an issue.
• Students are struggling to read and understand instructions, including identifying and understanding key words.

And so, as a department we decided to prioritize this goal as a Dept Goal focus for 2020.

We are extremely fortunate that Karen has been working closely with Marc Milford to develop an Explanation Writing frame for her students in DVC. Karen lead us through the initial process that she has undertaken to break down a piece of text relating to our specialist subjects areas. The workshop was great, and everyone enjoyed the activities that Karen had organised for us.

The following is a general outline of the process that are following:

1. Each member of the Tech Dept developed our own Visual Board relevant to a piece of text specific to our subject area
2. Karen shared a digital template for each of us to digitise our 'Explanation Writing'. We will complete this by the next department meeting
3. We are going to share our digitised 'Explanation Writing' with Marc Milford for feedback
4. Our 'Explanation Writing' posters will be colour printed to display in our classrooms.
5. As a department, we will decide through the development of the Explanation Writing display poster, how the resource would and could be used to measure literacy progress for the students. 

I'm really looking forward to experimenting with this literacy strategy with an upcoming assessment I have with my DigiTech Level 2 students.

A huge thanks to Karen for leading this session with the Tech Team, and also for modelling the process that she has applying in her subject area.  Thanks Karen!

Describe how you will collect information about the implementation of your changed practices/intervention (so it is clear what you doing differently)

My target group of learners for my Inquiry 2020 will be my Year 11 NCEA Level 1 class. I intend inquiring into the process of using the LearnCoach online programs (content) and VTaL Visible Teaching and Learning (workflow) to accelerate student achievement for Tamaki College students undertaking courses in Digital Technologies NCEA Levels 1, 2 and 3.

The following is a screenshot to show how I am collecting information about the implementation of my changed practice.  The screenshot shows student feedback in the [Current] DigiTech Level 1 Community.  The student feedback is a short comment "Very Helpful" that shows how the student feels about the video explanation to undertake the work.