Data update

56%!

That's how many of my students made accelerated progress in the last 12 months in reading!

I've been nervous throughout the year as to whether I was making enough difference.  What if Manaiakalani made all this investment in me (time, travel, energy, the trip to Sydney) and I was just tinkering around the edges?  I'd seen evidence of progress at key points in the year, but the mid year asttle data wasn't as promising as what I wanted to see, and norm-referenced tests are what cuts it most when you are sharing your project widely like this.

So I was really thrilled to see huge progress showing up in the PAT reading results this term.  As a leader, I've also been involved in supporting initiatives across English classes, particularly year 10 English classes, and so I'm thrilled to announce that we made a big difference across our cohort: 57% made accelerated progress across the last 12 months.  Interestingly, the summer break wasn't a summer drop for us.  The results for value-added from the beginning to end of year 10 are 32% accelerated progress for my own class and 31% for the year 10 cohort.  That is because a lot of students made improvements between October 2018 and February 2019.  Let them rest and read?  

Highlights:

• working collaboratively with my fellow MIT teachers, and Dorothy, Anne, Dave & Gerhard.
• working with my super English team at Grey High.  Special thanks to Lauren Evans, assistant HoD, who has led the implementation of common assessment tasks in reading each term this year.  We have seen huge gains through this.
• Seeing my reluctant readers flourish.  One student, who I had to persuade to attempt the reading test each term (whether it was PAT, Asttle or one of our common assessment tasks that we made ourselves) as he was convinced that he was stupid and couldn't do it, has made 20 points of progress since the end of year 9, and 9.7 points of progress from the beginning to the end of this year.  He read his first novel ever, and wrote about aspects of that novel for me in class. 
• The young man who did increasingly well in the termly common assessments and shared his tips for approaching a text in a test with the class made 21.9 points of progress this year alone (24.6 in 12 months), getting every single question correct in his October 2019 PAT reading test.
• My student who arrived part way through the year, not keen to talk to anyone or to focus on learning.  We slowly built up trust and started to talk to each other, then we worked on writing volume, after months of her not writing anything.  In the asttle writing test, she wrote 198 words.  I am so proud of her.  Next stop is some serious NCEA progress.
• Two very quiet boys who grew in confidence to ask questions about their learning through the year, and responded well to our class use of Socrative for formative assessment.  They both made accelerated progress.

Next steps:

• Some more work on resources for use with my 12 step programme on my tool.
• Sharing my inquiry more widely in our Toki Pounamu community.  I've been asked to present to primary teachers at a teacher only day in late January 2020, which I'm happy to do.
• Linking my work with T shaped literacy.  We all read Aaron and Selena's article on T shaped literacy earlier this term in the English department.  We are up for working this in with our 2020 junior programme
• Further study!  I've been granted a study support grant for 2020 which gives me four hours of release time per week to undertake some postgraduate study in literacy education.  I'm looking at doing one (maybe two) paper(s) at the University of Auckland.

Our Grey High annual plan hui is tomorrow, and my work collating and interpreting our junior literacy data information is here, with my bulletpoints for the slide show below:

1. Results are improved on 2018.
2. Looking across two years is valuable, which fits with the year 10 graduate profile approach.
3. Maori achievement close to, and sometimes exceeding, overall cohort in year 9. 
4. Writing continues to be a challenge for year 10 boys, and this impacts their access to the full range of subjects from year 12. (Target?) 
5. Group of struggling year 10 girls evident in the data. 
6. Has year 9 achievement been adversely affected by very high levels of staffing changes across the curriculum? 
7. Higher than usual numbers of students absent across three weeks of offering the tests. Impact of truancy/medical/other attendance issues on achievement?

Reviewing my 2018 inquiry

My inquiry into using blogging to support the social nature of learning was part of a larger school goal:

How might we improve key competencies for Year 10 in order to experience learning success?

In 2018, I have been conducting my own inquiry into this with my year 10 class (wearing my teacher hat) and leading a professional learning group of six colleagues on this goal (wearing my CoL/Mawhera Kahui Ako within school role hat). Many of the teachers in my PLG also taught my class, so we took advantage of opportunities to collaborate, whether through discussions, observing each other's lessons, or aligning vocabulary and approaches.

Last Monday all of the professional learning groups shared their journeys. Each group had a poster board on which we put summaries for each person for the following headings:

• Improvement Actions (What we did)
• New Learning (What we found out that supported our Inquiry)
• Shifts in thinking / practice (We started thinking x but now we think y...)
• Outcomes for learners (including target students)

Then we all had drinks and nibbles and wandered around reading the poster boards.  The mood was positive and genuinely interested.  Making the spiral of inquiry front and centre to our professional learning at Grey High was our big project as CoL leaders, so it was great to see so much thoughtful and effective work.  Below you can see some GHS staff looking at our poster board.

When I return to my own goal and inquiry process, I am both pleased and wanting to have achieved more. I used a blend of social inclusion strategies and scaffolding of tasks leading to blogging, in order to build a culture of deeper learning and sharing in my classroom.

Outcomes:

• high rates of inclusion in my lessons. Only two referrals in the year, and even for those two students, outside of the week of the referral, lots of evidence of growth in working with me or working with others or both. 
• Student voice (from circle time, restorative meetings, 1:1 interviews) very positive about the supportive environment in English.  
• Growth in students interacting positively with each other.
• Growth in students taking learning risks, both on their own and together.
• The research unit involved students choosing their own topic and sources, learning to evaluate sources, to summarise relevant information and to form conclusions.  I saw many positive effects of the high element of choice, particularly for students who don't love English (or school).
• Progress in students finding a "high school" mode for blogging.  Part of being a teenager is about creating a distance from childhood, and 'selling' blogging has involved creating a distance from primary school blogging.
• I didn't see outcomes reflected in amazing asttle writing scores.  In an environment where students responded best to high levels of choice, these norm-referenced tests were highly restrictive.  Students commented that they found it much easier to write describing the scene on the Greymouth floodwall (one of our practice tasks) than the asttle market prompt.  Of 19 students with beginning and end of year data, 26% made accelerated progress (3+ curriculum sub-levels), 26% made expected progress (2 curriculum sub-levels).  Below this, 21% made one curriculum sub-level of progress, 5% stayed static and 21% went backwards.  
• Even though the work we did as a class this year that I was most pleased with focused on reading skills, they didn't translate to the level of progress I am clear our students need in order to be successful in NCEA.  PAT Reading is a closed test which I don't think draws out the best in our students, but it is the one we have to work with.  Results below:

So, what next?  Two things on top for me that I can change:
1. To set up 2019 with a Friday blogging culture in my junior class, either weekly or fortnightly.  We had some blogging success, but it took quite a while and our frequency wasn't high enough to maximise the culture of sharing.  I need more contexts where the interaction will build deeper understanding.  One on layers of understanding in reading a film could be worth trying.
2. Reading!  Almost a quarter of students going backwards.  Our data across the whole cohort strongly suggests that we need to do more and try new strategies on reading, and think very carefully about our planning for reading opportunities.  Next week in our English department meeting, we are going to take some old paper (we do online testing now) PAT tests and chop them up and organise them according to what skills each question tests, which skills we think we are teaching now, and where there are gaps.  NZCER process a lot of very useful data on the results of the tests, but I want us to start with the student's experience.  Next year is definitely going to be about reading.