My Inquiry

This year for the first two term we will be focussing on Maths and so my inquiry is for Maths.
After considering my school targets, the end of 2016 assessments and the Woolf Fisher feedback from 2016, my inquiry for this year will be on Student Voice.

I have 5 students who will be the target students. All these students are sitting below the national norms.

My Inquiry Question

Does encouraging students to regularly reflect on and articulate their numeracy goals and explain their mathematical understanding help them to accelerate their learning?

What does this look like?

Students will receive explicit teaching through their own data. They will be made aware of the their strengths and weaknesses. They will be able to articulate their learning. They will know why they are at a certain stage, what is it that they can do and cannot do. What skills and strategies do they need to attain in order to achieve their goals. At the end of each lesson, students will be asked some questions that will be based on what they have learnt which in turn will empower them to express themselves about their learning.

What does “AT expectation” look like for these students? What will we focus on?

All students at the end of their academic year need to be at stage 5 and above for Add/ sub, Mul/ div,  measurement, algebra and statistics

What are our hunches about what has happened for the learning of these students?

• Through my day to day observations of these students I have felt that these students are not aware of their goals and expectations. They hold themselves back from participating in discussions about their understanding and thinking. These students are not very confident to achieve in Maths and feel that they do not have the necessary skills and expertise to solve problems. 
• All these student may not have the necessary mathematical language to explain their thinking.
• There may be gaps in their understanding of mathematical concepts

So what action will we take? What will we focus on in our cycle of inquiry?

What will I do differently?

The New Zealand Curriculum (p15) states:

'Students who participate and contribute in communities have a sense of belonging and the confidence to participate within new contexts. They understand the importance of balancing rights, roles, and responsibilities and of contributing to the quality and sustainability of social, cultural, physical, and economic environments'

For authentic student voice, there needs to be a high level of trust within the classroom. These students but have not really had opportunities to communicate and make a contribution to class learning. I will have to make a deliberate effort to channelise the learning of these students through careful planning and teaching.

For this to happen I will need to:

• Understand the preferred ways of learning for each of these students and this will mean working alongside them to understand how learning can be made accessible to them. 
• Facilitate the development of mathematical language to communicate. 
• include them in my planning and assessment process so that there is clarity around their goals. 
• create a class environment where students will be free to ask and answer questions without any hesitation. 
•  support and encourage my students so that they feel confident in reviewing their learning and teaching of Maths
• Make Maths learning fun for my students. 

How will I gather evidence to see that I have made a difference?

I will gather evidence of my students learning through 

• Questionnaires
• Collective brainstorms
• Interviews with individuals or groups
• By finding out their knowledge and beliefs
• What kind of teaching they find the most effective
• Knowing about their backgrounds and their prior knowledge and the experiences they bring to class.
• How interesting or challenging they find the subject.
• Their aspirations at and beyond school.

Resources that I will need

• Nz Curriculum
• Continuous feedback from my critical buddy teachers

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Multimodal Literacy - Digital age

Multimodal Literacy focusses on the task designing of the discourse by investigating and contributing to various resources like - visual, aural or written. Mainaiakalani research says that it is important too use strategies that will motivate students to think critically and to use wide and deep teaching to raise the achievement levels of the students. For this purpose I deliberately chose a topic which was recently in news as it was bound to raise student interest

Click here to get an idea of the news item that I shared with my students.

Multimodal and multimedia texts - videos, short films and news articles helped students to make evidence based interpretations and the systematic task designing and teaching allowed a balance of explicit teaching of parts and developing critical thinking.

Reflection

As most of my students have learnt to decode text, an attempt was made to help them construct meaning and think critically about the topic of their study. The multimedia texts that were made available to students through their chrome books played a big role. I could share videos, short films, news items etc. at the click of a button. They could research about the questions that raised their curiosity, discuss it with their mates and then share their new learning with the rest of the world through their blogs.

Having said that I feIt that some of the texts were too hard for my students and I had to create some easy to read texts for them. This involved simplifying the texts that I found on the net.

Students were engaged right till the end of our inquiry and were connected to their audience in a more meaningful way as they received correspondences from people like the Mayor of Nelson. Opportunities were provided for extended student conversations so that they could clarify meaning and understanding of what they were reading. As we used multiple sites and resources, it helped in bringing the ideas together. Students shared their presentations and google drawings which in turn provided opportunities for creativity and sharing their knowledge. It took me a longer time than usual as it was the first time that I had introduced the multimodal approach to this group of students. I will try this again as the learning that happened at the end of the inquiry was very satisfying and rewarding.

Click here for an extended Plan

Click here to see my students in action.

Click here for the student voice

Critical feedback from Buddy Teachers

Today at syndicate meeting we received feedback from our critical buddies.

CRITICAL BUDDY FEEDBACK

ARCHANA

DATE:  7TH MARCH 2017

https://sites.google.com/a/manaiakalani.org/onair/sharma

PLEASE COPY PASTE YOUR PLAN HERE WALT use tens frames to learn our basic facts SC: I can use the tens frames and quickly add my numbers. I can explain how I solved my problem. I can interpret my working in an equation. Modelling T models how to read the ten’s frames. Dots on the Tens frame represent a number. How do Tens frames help us to do mathematical calculations quickly in our heads? Prompt students to solve an addition problem using tens frames. Prompt students to use an equation for the problem. Prompt students to share their mathematical thinking around solving a problem. Solve addition and subtraction problems using Tens Frame Taking to fluency using place value cards through imaging. Task Use the tens frames to add or subtract two numbers. Get quicker at solving problems.

NAME : ARCHANA
	WHAT I LIKED	QUESTION	SUGGESTIONS	WHAT I TAKE AWAY FROM THIS LESSON
RESHLY	Using materials from lesson for follow up task. Great way to allow children the opportunity to practice what they have just learned. Rich discussion. In depth explanation from children about their understanding.			More use of materials in follow up tasks.
OTTILIE	Sitting at same level to students encourages discussion Having students respond to the frames. “How did you know it was four?” Students having to explain in their own words. Great that you can have students explaining their different strategies. I know that 4+6 = 10 It is a clever cognitive strategy flashing the cards and having them remember. Having students explain understanding is awesome. Why do you think these ten frames are important? - putting it back on the students “Can I have an equation for that?” - great opportunity for showing strategies and learning “So tens frames teaches you what?” - bringing it back to them and showing them the importance Great follow up task - shows imaging and how they can combine their learning.		Using talk moves to have different students answer and grow in confidence Using positive framing of questions “You are still learning about tens frames” for student voice.	Having students use cognitive strategies by recognising patterns Great follow up task
ASHLEY	Using names of the material - tens frames. How did you know? I like that you showed them quickly - encouraging instant recognition instead of thinking and analysing. Subitising is an important mental strategy. Good that you built on from the Youcubed lessons about maths thinking - multiple ways of thinking are accepted and encouraged. Making connections. Awesome follow up - still using materials but in a different way.		Could extend by getting them to write 6+4=10 for each one.	-Getting student voice - what were you learning to do today? Do you think you achieved it?

Scaffolding Language Learning into content areas

Prior experience becomes a context for interpreting 
the new experience ...prior experience serves as the contexts 
within which the language being used is to be understood.
Lily Wong- Fillmore

Before I began teaching this year, I set certain rules for classroom talk. One of the most important rule is to listen to everyone's ideas respectfully because everyone perceives things differently and  everyone's opinion is important.

To clarify this idea a bit more I started with one of the lessons from Jo Boaler's week of inspirational Maths. In this lesson the teacher shows a pattern ( as given below) for a few seconds and then questions students on how many dots they could see in the pattern. 

All students gave me the same answer. There are seven dots in the pattern. Then I asked them how they saw it and below is a picture of the different ways they saw the dots. The discussion became very interesting when they realised that everyone's answer was the same though each one saw the dots differently. 

This mini lesson engaged students in lots of talk and confirmed the idea that people see things differently and so it is important to respect everyone's ideas. I noticed that some of the students were struggling to explain their thinking so the more proficient ones encouraged, helped and supported them. 

The above lesson served as an awesome warm up activity for my next lesson where I introduced the tens frames. When I showed the Tens frames, most students made connections with their previous lesson and said that they were dots. I acknowledged what they knew and what they had recently learnt... and then moved them on to simple problems. It was interesting to hear them say things like -

  " There are only 10 dots on it, five on one side and five on the other... This one has just two dots..." The foundation work that had led to this lesson paid off. Students were able to make quick connections and this helped them to learn their basic facts. They quickly translated their mathematical thinking into equations. The golden moment was when they tried to form equations for both addition and subtraction problems.

We kept practicing till we became fluent!

By this time my students were completely drowned in their study of exploring patterns around them. They showed me patterns everywhere they found in their environment. I encouraged them to take pictures of patterns and they saw symmetrical patterns, stripes, crisscross patterns and many more...

When I asked them to explain their pattern, it became very challenging for them as they did not have the specific vocabulary. So we explored words like alternate, overlapping, symmetrical etc. below is a presentation made by one of the students in which he uses the new words learnt to explain the patterns in his environment.

Integrating with Language

Integrating with Maths Strand - Geometry

During their exploration of patterns some students clicked pictures of geometrical shapes and so this was a great opportunity to learn about 2D and 3D shapes. We talked about the differences between the two also identified the characteristics of various shapes. Students learnt the vocabulary related to shapes e.g. what corners, edges, faces and sides were? How a side was different to an edge and what was a difference between a surface and a face?

 As a follow up they had to make a presentation on shapes.




Some of my students struggled to verbalise their thinking, I made a barrier game for shapes and gave them sentence structures to talk about their shape.

Integrating with Reading

Now was the time to know that it is important to learn about patterns because they help us in our daily lives. So I gave them a text on Braille. This developed heaps of discussion - Students said that patterns are important to build something... like a house... or a table... they were important for blind people... Important to them to learn their basic facts...etc. I was very excited to see how my students could make these connections readily and could talk about the topic without being shy.

Integrating with Art

Lastly, Students made a shape collage. They chose the shapes and used their imagination to design a cat or a dinosaur or a mouse. They further explained their what shapes they had used to make their art. Most exciting bit during this lesson was when a one student who is usually not so social, showed most of the students how to put commas when listing things in writing. Students wrote stories like " I have used 3 triangles, 4 squares, 5 rectangles and 2 semi-circles in my picture.
It was just Perfect!

At the end of this whole week long lesson I felt very satisfied as I had been able to engage my students meaningfully into different tasks. Language learning is not a simple linear process. It involves and revolves around the content - in this case patterns and basic facts. By focussing on ways to scaffold my students could not only attain the subject knowledge but also learnt the language. 

Reflection It was delightful to see how the sequence of lessons rolled on from one learning to another. By linking tasks to other curriculum areas, it was easier for students to make connections to what they already knew and hang on their new learning to their previous knowledge. During the course of task designing, I have deliberately created tasks where students would get the opportunity to formulate ideas, set and evaluate and reach tentative decisions in a set up that is informal. The aim is to to develop an interactive classroom where students are proficient in explaining their ideas and their thinking. I want them to face challenges, make mistakes and then learn from them so that each student in my class grabs learning opportunities to improve their learning. My next step would be to continue to link my topics to other curriculum areas so that students have lots of before hand experience to think deeply and critically about the topic of their study. This is just the beginning...

From a mother to her Daughters

It was hilarious when during our conversations I told my daughter "You will only get one gift from me at your wedding... and that will be my favourite book of recipes by Annabell Langbein". She looked at me and then burst out laughing especially when she is aware that being born in a hindu Indian family, she will be bestowed with gifts on her D day.
Not that she is going to get married or that she knows whom she would marry... but cooking good palatable food is an art and a skill that every child should be taught.

These holidays I have been teaching my girls how to cook. This became a necessity when my younger daughter's hostel closed down their kitchen at the end of last year. Some of the basic needs of every served meal are -

Food must be cooked with love, care, empathy and positive vibes for those who will have it. Such food is bound to taste good and will greatly benefit the health of all who consume it. Food is the essence of life.

It should have a balance of spices. The aroma from the food when being cooked should arouse the appetite to have it.

The different dishes cooked should have a balance of cooked food and salads. So try and have as many colours as possible in your dishes. The rainbow of colours should be appetising to the eye before the tongue tastes it.

Food served should give a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction after finishing. To achieve this completeness, the cook needs to make sure that all 6 tastes, sweet, sour, bitter, astringent, salty and pungent are delivered. The taste determines how we experience our food. The flavours in our foods are very therapeutic and so ultimately effects the overall flavours of our existence.

Food served should be freshly cooked as much as possible.

It has been a great experience of bonding with my children especially after a very busy year at work. Though they keep saying that it is tedious and they are not going to cook all the things that I have taught them, but I know they have seen me cook and so will definitely have an idea if they decide to do it later in life.

Holiday Reading

Just finished reading "Me before you" by Jojo Moyes. It is a good romantic novel with a message.Will Traynor who leads a big life suddenly gets tied down to a wheelchair after a nasty accident. I loved the character of Will more than the main character Louisa Clark. Despite of him being a handicap, Will leaves no stone unturned to improve the quality of Louisa's life. He encourages her to take risks and gives her the confidence to achieve and do better in life. The book certainly left me in tears.

Instant benefits of meditation in a classroom

One of the most simple ways to meditate is to close eyes and concentrate on the breath. The simple intake of air through the nostrils, feeling it travelling through the windpipe into the lungs and then release of carbon dioxide back from the body. This is s a very calming exercise for students especially after they have come back form their lunch hour.
Though I have always encouraged meditation in my class but it was not a very regular feature last year. In 2017 I will make sure that I keep ten minutes  aside for meditation. Usually I would play a soft meditation music from you tube and ask students to listen to the music and concentrate on the breath. Music helps them to settle down quickly and once their eyes are closed and and they start taking deep breaths, they become more relaxed and ready to learn.

Some of the instant benefits of meditation are -

1. It improves the mental health of a person and so helps in improving concentration.
2. It reduces anxiety levels and so helps in having a class of more calmer students.
3. Helps in improved blood circulation, so energises the body.

I am determined to create tiny buddhas in my class in the coming year. I would love to hear any feedback and would also love to know if teachers out there do meditation in their classes to get some more ideas if they do it differently.