Inquiring into my current teaching practice - The Plan

Task: Plan and conduct detailed inquiry into specific aspects of your current teaching that are relevant to the hypotheses you identified in the literature. Inquiring into your teaching should give you:
- Formative information about your current strengths and areas for development
- Baseline information that you can use at the end of the year to provide evidence of shifts in teaching
- Use multiple tools such as self- or peer-observations, analysis of your class site, student voice.

Hypothesis: A focus on critical thinking and causal reasoning when responding to texts will support increased levels of critical thinking and ability to create causal links in online written interactions with others for year 5 children reading between 10 and 12 years.

In what ways can I look into my own practice?

- Have someone observe me teaching a reading lesson with children reading between 10 and 12 years. Use an assessment tool that explores how I promote causal relationships and critical thinking. What sort of questions do I ask? How often am I talking? Am I providing opportunities for the children to do the talking and the thinking?

- Video or take an audio recording of myself taking a lesson and assess the above for myself. What are my strengths and areas to develop?

- If I look at the types of questions I ask and how these promote causal links and critical thinking, this would be a good measure to compare at the end of the year.

- Class Site: Analyse the types of tasks we provide on our team site and how well these tasks promote causal links and critical thinking.

- Student Voice: Their thoughts about reading groups. Do they feel they get to share their ideas? Do they feel they can include their own knowledge and understanding? Applying knowledge.

Here is the observation sheet that I plan to give to the teacher who I will ask to observe my lesson:

Techniques to assess my own teaching (as seen in the literature):

In the article, Collaborative reasoning: a dialogic approach to group discussions (Reznitskaya, Kuo, Clark, Miller, Jadallah, Anderson and Nguyen-Jahiel, 2008, page 33), a comparison was made between a recitation discussion and a causal reasoning discussion. It will be important for me to identify if I currently teach using a more recitation type approach or more of a causal reasoning approach.

"While teachers are encouraged to use CR strategies during the discussions, their ultimate goal is ‘to transfer the responsibility for maintaining the flow of discussion to the students’ (Waggoner et al., 1995, p. 584). The type and degree of teacher participation hinge upon the quality of argumentation displayed by the students." (Reznitskaya et al., 2008, p35).

In the study by Reznitskaya et al. (2008), they found that there was a difference in the questions asked from the teacher between recitation and casual reasoning discussions. 

- Recitation discussions: 53% quizzing questions

- Causal reasoning discussions: 9% quizzing questions

It would be interesting to assess what percentage of the questions I ask are quizzing questions. This could then be compared to the end of the year.