Inquiry season is all go at Grey High this term. We have a professional development programme of late starts every Tuesday morning for students so that teachers can attend professional development sessions. The PLD committee work on aligning our annual plan with inquiry and teacher needs and then creating sessions and time for us all to extend our practice. We work on incorporating teacher feedback as much as possible so that we are offering sessions which are what teachers are looking for in order to pursue successful spiral of inquiry work and be more effective in the classroom.
For my year 10 class, we have had two meetings this term where all the teachers of 10QI have met and shared our observations on the strengths and challenges in the class. Like the other groups meeting to share their scanning so far, we used the Seven Principles of Learning as our lens. From our work with the class, we knew that we needed to zoom into the 'Social Nature of Learning' and 'Emotions are Integral to Learning.' After the first staff late start session, Jason (PB4L & Wellbeing specialist in our school) ran a workshop with 10QI in my lesson time where he collected a range of student perspectives to help inform our next steps on what the students wanted from their school programme. We met again and discussed next steps across our classes and people chipped in to support each other with offers of watching lessons and sharing resources.
Tomorrow we start some more activities where Jason leads a session on wellbeing with the class, sessions that teachers of 10QI, including myself, will carry on with and develop further.
I'm learning and experimenting all the time with this class. It's not the classes which run smoothly which teach us the most, but those which surprise us, where the road is rockier and relationships and learning journeys require more preparation and re-evaluation. Lots and lots of students in this class don't like reading, which is quite challenging when my big project for the year is about raising reading achievement.
Last term we focused on a study of the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, and during that time I had lots of requests for a film study. This term we have started with the film Akeelah and the Bee. Lots of interesting material on going outside of our comfort zones and of resilience and determination in both texts, and we have been drawing those elements out.
I've been including some stealth reading activities amongst the film study, and I saw some good work on paraphrasing yesterday. We have done some work on how to write a clear definition for a film technique, one which the reader can learn from. If we can keep up the shift from jotting down key words to writing clear descriptions and explanations in complete sentences, we will have the necessary skills in place for tackling unfamiliar texts in year 11.
Our weekly focus on skills has been supported by Jo Newton, our RTLB who is running a sequence of lessons with a small group from 10QI to build up their reading and writing skills, with the idea of sharing what they learn in this sequence with other teachers and supporting transference across classes. Jo has been using a School Journal on Bruce MacLaren which has been going really well.
I have been developing resources to extend students while Jo is working with the smaller group, and familiarising students with Socrative at the same time. I developed a comprehension resource on Maya Angelou's 'Still I Rise' (This link will work if you have a Socrative teacher account) which enabled me to collect information via the Socrative report function, showing me how students got on with the multichoice at a glance, and to read their paragraph responses. At a glance I could see that I hadn't taught the terms "stanza" or "verse", which is easily fixed. The paragraph work was slower reading for identifying next steps, but it is still really useful for zooming in on a few students per lesson and identifying with them how they can use the SEXY (Statement-Explanation-eXample-whY it is important) paragraph formula to show their extended thinking.
Next up: round one of our experiment with cross-class collaboration.
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