Student Profile and Tools/ measures/ approaches

Task: Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge. Justify why you chose these approaches and tools.

Challenge: Across the curriculum, how do we give children the tools and skills to become critical thinkers?

Profile of students' learning: Children who are reading at or above a level expected for year 5 learners, often still lack critical thinking required to be successful at their instructional level.

- Observation: I have observed this through several years teaching year 5 students. There tends to be two separate ability/ skill levels of children who are reading at or above their age: Those who freely make causal relationships and translate what they have read into their own words and those who can't yet do this. 

I want to focus in on those children who do not yet have all these skills/abilities. I feel that this group of children have not yet been a large focus for me. We are fortunate in our team to have Helen Squires supporting us with our children who are learning to read, with a focus on letter sounds. We are also fortunate to have Kelsey Parrant, a year 6 teacher who last year inquired into strategies to support those children who are reading at 7-9 years.

In this inquiry, I hope to be able to work with Sandy Lagitupu, who has previously looked into a similar challenge through the inquiry process. I hope my inquiry will provide a continuation of her inquiry.

Measures:

Beginning of year and end of year running record - with a focus on how the children answer the comprehension questions.

Beginning of year and end of year blog comment - with a focus on the level of critical thinking in the comment in relation to the blog post.

Tools/ approaches:

- Teaching causal reasoning --> see Richard Anderson's research.

- Self-explaining (see article) across reading, writing and maths.

- Talk moves (prompts to use during reading, writing and maths).

- Template blog post to encourage deeper thinking.

- Blog comment prompts to encourage deeper thinking.