My reflections on my Inquiry - Phase 4 (Taking Action)

As said in my previous posts, I had decided to focus on three things for my Inquiry -

For this to happen, I had to change my pedagogy.

Firstly, I needed to change my class climate

Click here to read How I did this.

Next, I needed to support learners to learn complex vocabulary.

• More complex texts deliberately chosen for shared learning. It is in such texts that higher level vocabulary and more complex expressions were potentially available. Then we worked together to grapple meanings of new words and expressions that we came across.  Click here for a COA episode)
• Taught students to notice new words and chunks. Click here for a blog post on noticing words and expressions
• Reinforced the habit of noticing new words and providing real experiences to recycle words
• Developed a sense of excitement to learn new words ( Click here for COA episode)
• Engage students in meaningful talk that supports vocabulary gain. ( Click here for a COA episode on oral paragraphs)
• Involved students in lot of talk and rich learning conversations and then transferring it to writing.
• Made vocabulary learning fun through games.
• Learned to make paragraphs by choosing words that would create impact through topic studies.
• WALTs were created around expressive sentences and vocabulary.
• Continuous monitoring of my students' writing.

This has benefitted my students hugely in growing their confidence and Writing capabilities.

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.