My Reflections on my Inquiry - Phase 3 - Collaborative sense making

As I was investigating into the learning of my students I wondered what my students were thinking about me and what do I think about my teaching and practice? Do the two align? Am I at the same page as that of my students?

For this I needed to collect some student voice to make sure that my students felt comfortable and all the efforts that I had put in building the class climate was benefiting them.

Survey done on the the 10th of May shows that 'Teaching and Learning communications' in class had improved and that students felt more comfortable asking questions than at the beginning of the year.

HOWEVER...

When I looked at the survey deeply, I found that I needed to change my delivery a bit more.

The question asked in the Survey were-

• Mrs. S tells students exactly how to do better.
• Mrs. S knows when students don't understand and slows down.
• It is easy to ask Mrs. S for help.
• Mrs. S makes things easier to understand.
• Mrs. S asks students for help on how to improve her teaching.
• Mrs. S answers questions very well.

The survey showed that my students

• Wanted me to slow down as they sometimes missed on information.
• They found it hard to ask me questions about their learning.

So these became my teaching goals because I was a very important factor in developing the classroom culture of my class.

Here is a link to my post on how I had worked to change my class culture.
Survey was done after three weeks. The survey showed that there was work that still needed to be done.

My reflections on my Inquiry - Phase 2 ( Gathering evidences)

What evidences did I have to base my Inquiry on?

Writing levels of students in previous years

I began to investigate and see how my students had performed in their previous years of schooling.

The data of the previous schooling years showed that students had not moved in the previous years of schooling.

Reading comprehension

Evidences show that these students were able to decode well but their comprehension level was too low.

When I further investigated, I found that most students failed on vocabulary and inferential questions.

Student Survey 
I did a survey on students to find out why they did not like writing?

Three students were aware of them being low achievers in Writing.
Two students did not think that they had to work more to be successful in writing.
All five students did not like to write as it was hard.

My Reflections
I needed to motivate and encourage these students for engagement. For this the whole class climate needed to change because it was not just these boys who did not find writing interesting but overall the class response showed little interest in the subject.

If I focused on Vocabulary, how could this help in improving Writing of my target students?

So I roughly framed my Inquiry question.

Does talking about topics and noticing Language chunks in reading help students to recycle their learning into writing?

My reflections on my inquiry - Phase 1 (Noticing)

What did I notice at the beginning of the year?

Students were continuously achieving low in writing in their previous years of schooling. This was partly because students did not believe in themselves. They had very low self esteem and had continuously been told to work hard in writing but perhaps not shown how they could be successful.
Statements like " I am bad at Writing" said D. " I don't like Writing" said M. " Writing is boring" said X, were enough evidences for me to know that these children were not motivated enough to write because they found it difficult. The question for me was to see how I could change their views on writing and encourage them, and even more, get them intrinsically motivated by realising that they were well capable of becoming good writers.

What did I needed to change in my class?

Class Climate
"We all can do this" had to become the mantra of the class. Everyone including the low achievers and the high achievers were truely seen as people who can achieve. I believed in them and was a bit annoyed at how children can be labelled as low achievers so easily.

Mixed ability grouping
All students got opportunity to work with each other. This fostered more congruent classroom community in which students developed relationships with a range of peers and learned of each other. Activities were not differentiated and emphasis was on engagement and learning.

More Positive ( warm Relationships) classroom climate
It was okay to make mistakes. Students felt comfortable making mistakes, asking questions and support one another with their learning. Teacher scaffolding played a vital role. Opportunities were provided for students to learn through their mistakes. This was also done through lots of group work.

A climate that provided Intrinsic motivation
The psychosocial climate in the classroom also depends on the way teacher communicates with the students. I had to create this psychosocial environment that provided challenging learning experiences and clear goals. Students were expected to respond with high intrinsic motivation and a determination to be successful in their learning.  It was a climate that emphasised on cooperation rather than competition. I had high expectations for every student and all students were well aware of this.