CoL Teacher Inquiry: Where am I up to?

Restate your inquiry question and your theory of action/chain of events.

My Inquiry Focus:

Will a focus on cultural visibility and prior knowledge accelerate student confidence and capability in Reading?

• To explicitly teach inferencing to help students draw conclusions and make educated guesses based on the information provided in the text and their own background knowledge.
• To give explicit instruction in comprehension strategies to help students understand, predict, summarise, question, visualise and make cultural connections to become strategic readers.
• To provide explicit teaching around extended discussion to develop students’ ability to engage in in-depth conversations about a text, sharing ideas and building upon the opinions of others.  

Describe how you will collect information about the implementation of your changed practices/intervention.

• Providing a clear explanation of what inferencing is by allowing learners to go beyond the literal meaning of the text and find the hidden meaning.

• Incorporating Multimodal learning such as visuals, audio, and hands-on activities.

• Tapping into learners’ cultural capital and selecting texts related to their culture.

• Encouraging students to activate their prior knowledge by using the KWL Chart (Know-Want to Know-Learn) 

• Teacher modelling so students know what an extended discussion looks like.

• Providing more extension activities such as analyzing short stories, poems, or more complex texts where inferencing plays a significant role.

Timepoint 2 data (shared and analysed in this blog post) was captured through:

• Informal teacher observation

• Student voice through Google forms

• Assessment (PAT & e-asTTle)

• Recording my lesson

The PAT and e-asTTle assessments were carried out in mid-term 2. I am really looking forward to seeing an accelerated shift later in Term 3 and Term 4. I believe Term 1 & 2 data collection will help me to make clear comparisons at the end of the year.

Term 3 Check-in with Students

I sent a Google form to my target students to reflect on the extended discussion that is happening in the class. Here are the responses, when they were asked how having the extended discussion chains helped their reading.

I am getting there! Collaborative dialogue taps into social learning theories. Learners can benefit from each other's experiences and insights. Peer support and feedback can be motivating and helpful in overcoming comprehension challenges.