Through conversations with members of my school's leadership team as well as colleagues, I have decided to address the following Manaiakalani Achievement Challenge for 2023:
At the end of last year, I had in my mind that I was going to address the achievement challenge : Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/Key Competency using symbols, languages and texts. In particular, I had in mind that I was going to focus on supporting children who were challenged in staying focussed in class and as a result, lacked experiencing the feeling of success. Creative Space is a place which allows children to find their strengths so I thought this would be a great inquiry focus. However, how I would assess progress in this would be a challenge.
After discussions with my colleagues at the beginning of this year, we discussed how our children don't have many opportunities to be extended in Maths. This got me thinking as I teach the school extension programme. I also manage the gathering of assessment data for our extension children throughout the school. Our current school extension programme is more literacy focussed/weighted. With my colleagues we questioned: could we start up a school extension maths programme and what could this look like? Between myself, Clarelle and Danni (both also CoL teachers), we wondered how we could all support this getting up and running. We discussed how we could run it with Year 6 to 8 children OR we could run it with Year 3 & 4 children. The Year 3 and 4 children have a less busy schedule so a programme with them would be more manageable and successful.
After my discussion with my colleagues, I thought more about the WHY. Why do we need to run a school extension maths programme? What is the challenge we would be trying to fix?
Having taught in the classroom, the answer to this was obvious: a typical classroom includes a range of mathematics levels. How do we as teachers realistically support the children who find maths really challenging while also extending those who find the logic of maths more natural? It is challenging, that's for sure! We have a really unique opportunity here where we can run an extension programme for those children who we identify as gifted in Maths, allowing the classroom teachers to spend that session focussing on building the knowledge for the rest of the class. The extension group can then return to their classroom and use their new knowledge and skills to work alongside their other classmates to build their maths knowledge.
After talking with my colleagues, I had conversations with members of our senior management team. In their conversations, I got a really positive response - a programme like this would hugely benefit our school and our students' learning as our current school extension programme is very literacy heavy, mostly as a result of time restraint. Creating an extension mathematics programme would allow extension opportunities to more children. There can be children in the extension maths programme who wouldn't typically be in an extension class when literacy assessment data is taken into consideration as well.
I am really excited about inquiring into lifting achievement in maths as a collaborative inquiry this year!
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