Videography experience - Self Assessment/ Survey

 Today I created a survey for children to fill out after being a videographer at an out-of-school sporting event. We have 3 events this week so it will be really interesting to see how they get on and find the experience! 

The survey I have created is quite open-ended to allow the children to tell me what they have got out of the experience.

Restating my inquiry question and chain of events/ theory of action

Hypothesis: If a less experienced classmate is supported by a more experienced classmate to learn a new skill, then their confidence in this skill will begin to develop. Confidence will begin improving in this skill as well as in other areas of school and life once they are out making decisions for themselves as members of the PENN (school news) crew. 

Inquiry Question: How does confidence of children improve by being given leadership roles as part of the school news team?

Monitoring Progress (Assessment):

- Self confidence survey (see previous blog post and graphs)
- Anecdotal notes of children's confidence (from past teachers)
- Empowerment and Agency progression

Chain of Events (What I have done so far):

Chain of Events (What I will do next):

End of Year Data Collection

My hypothesis was:

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.

After implementing use of Peter Worley's framework, The Concept Box, into reading lessons, I collected data to compare with the data I collected at the beginning of the year. Graphs from the beginning of the year are also in these slides to make comparisons.

Promoting use of Oral Language and reflection in Writing

This term in Ako 3, we have been promoting use of oral language through purposeful collaborative learning experiences. During writing, we have incorporated this into our weekly schedule through peer editing. The tool which we have introduced to the children to support them in the peer editing of their writing is a rubric. This rubric has been highly successful with our year 5 learners.

Click the rubric to open the google drawing in a new tab (and make a copy if you would like to). Any feedback on this rubric and how it could be made better is warmly welcomed!

Each Thursday morning, the children pair up. These groupings change from week to week. Together, the children decide whose writing they are going to focus on first. Once decided, that child opens their writing doc on their chrome book while the other child opens the peer editing rubric on their chrome book. 

The rubric is broken into four sections: punctuation, correct sentences, vocabulary and organisation/structure. The nice thing about this rubric is that it is accessible for ALL learners. Together, the children have to agree on where the piece of writing fits on the rubric (for each of these sections). Once this is decided, there is a clear 'action' for the children to follow in order to improve their writing. 

Although it is early days using this rubric, we have been really pleased with how the children have responded to using it. It is clear that as the children become more familiar with the rubric, they will begin having more and more quality learning conversations with their buddy. Already, we are seeing the potential that this tool has for the ākonga in our space.

I don't believe that this rubric would be as effective if it didn't have the action prompts. These prompts give the children a clear direction so that they can be critical of their own and their classmates' writing.

Beginning of Term 4 Inquiry Update

Being a 9 week term, end of year (summative) assessments begin for students from week 3, which is next week! I have been thinking a lot about how I can be preparing students for these upcoming assessments. In addition to the next steps, set out in my last inquiry blog post, it is going to be essential to prepare these students for the assessments. To do this, I am continuing to encourage students to demonstrate mathematical reasoning through screencasts and through collaborative problem solving. I will be encouraging students to practice their times tables with their classmates as much as possible throughout the next week. This will be through times tables flash cards, Salute, and through times tables grids (including a permanent one which is now on the class whiteboard). I am also going to spend this week before testing begins, giving students learning experiences which go back to place value (and into decimals for students who are ready for this). In groups, we will go through specific questions which students have, and we will go through some practice questions to discuss how best to approach them. 

It is important that students are feeling confident to share their reasoning as they go into testing, so that they have the best chance of demonstrating their developing knowledge which they have shown throughout the year. 

When assessing these students, it is going to be really important to triangulate data, rather than just make judgements from one or two assessments. This is clearly explained through this diagram by the Ministry of Education. I need to be using a range of data from throughout the year, rather than just through formal testing.

Possible assessment through observations:

- Group work

- Collaborative problem solving (presentations on blog)

- Screencasts

- Maths books

Formal assessments (other than EOY assessments):

- Maths-whizz data

- Xtramath data

Learning conversations are going to be really important too (MoE, 2011). This was really important in creating mid-year OTJs, when I felt that other assessments types were not giving me enough information.