Reflctions on the ALL intervention 29 July 2015

Last night at our team meeting, our team created this PMI chart on the ALL intervention and came up with ways we would like to see the writing program changed in our school.

P	M	I
· Self-esteem building – the positive flow on from removing the time constraints and pressures have seen children take greater ownership, come in early in class to continue, lengthier pieces.  More passionate and enthused to write. · Wanting to share their sentences/ideas/writing · Bouncing ideas off each other · Positive responses to others and valuing what each other says · Building on from each other’s expertise · “Borrowing” other people’s language to build their own · Having confidence to improve/edit · Publishing pieces shows the quality of the message in deeper features – shows that the guts of their writing is good when not looking at the surface features · Authentic purpose with blog/weebly and home sharing · Greater awareness of own abilities and skills · Being able to articulate their own learning · Reflecting on own learning by finding what they’ve been able to do well; what they need to improve on; what they need to continue · Experiences and having the time factored in for hands-on experiences · Having fun with literacy is valued	· Enormous amount of time for small number of children; takes away from that ‘next group’ up. · Each of us having to individually come up with own resources – be nice to having a folder or resource to call on and save time. · Not enough time for us to get together and share what has been working in our own rooms. · Very little guidance and PD so we’ve had to fly on our own and this was frustrating, enthusiasm drops off. · Workload could have easily gotten out of hand with proposed fortnightly readings/meetings.	·  Has showed the kind of impact you can have on the learners: quality vs quantity ·  Having fun with literacy is valued ·  Resource/folder/gear to provide greater guidance at the beginning ·  We wonder how much further we would have got had we had the opportunity for better coaching.

 

 Ideas for 2016 and beyond

What would our literacy programme look like based on our inquiry learning?

-list of genre set for the year and teachers in classes have flexibility to address this as the year progresses and as opportunities arise.   Teachers/class making these decisions and can ensure greater integration and support with reading and topic.

-moderation doesn’t need to be specific to genre because the rubric is generic (with exception of one line about structure) so can moderate by looking at the skills/quality of writing no matter what the purpose/topic.

-variety of teaching - including groups but based on needs, not on overall level.

-spelling programme needs to happen across the school as it is in the standard, greater emphasis on the skills to come through from the middle school to take the thinking away from encoding to the thinking of writing.

-independent book needs to take a greater focus for writers (and for moderation) rather than “teaching to the test”

-mixture of whole class, collaborative, group and peer interactions for learning.

-time must be allowed for oral discussions and idea sharing conversations to support their writing, the importance of this cannot be underestimated.

-lower achievers need more time for deconstructing, talking and understanding and that is okay.

Being creative in the classroom

Last Tuesday's staff meeting was continued PD on art and giving us useful tips and resources for teaching art and being creative in the classroom.

I personally love art and consider myself to be quite creative, however I don't know all the tricks and techniques artists use.  I have found the two sessions we have had this year on art, to be very exciting, motivating and very helpful.

The timing of last weeks PD was perfect for me as my class is currently doing a unit on illustrations.  Something that the students noticed about picture books, is the vast range of illustrating techniques used.

The focus of our art PD was split into two topics.  The first was about zoomorphic creatures (humans with animal characteristics/features).  The second half of the session was on painting techniques.

Here is a photo of my efforts trying the techniques of

• Drips
• Stencils
• Scraping
• Impasto
• Glazes
• Collage and dry brush

Today I took what I learnt in our staff meeting and conducted the a lesson on painting techniques in my classroom.  My student learnt the painting techniques

• Collage and dry brush
• Scraping
• Glazing
• Drips

Below are some examples of the students exploring the above techniques:

 

 

 

Another interesting technique that I learnt was using Indian ink and a kebab skewer for sketching.  Below are photos of the students first attempt  at sketching their face using ink.

 

 

 

The student feedback on their recent art sessions has been extremely positive.  They have all be highly motivated and engaged because they are constantly working with their hands whilst being challenged to practice a new technique.  One of my boys commented while packing up this afternoon "That was so fun Mrs O'Callaghan.  I learnt 4 new techniques that I new nothing about. I now have so many more options I could use for my illustrations".





How students view their writing now they are over half way through the intervention; And where to from here?

At our last ALL meeting, the question was asked 'What am I transferring from my teaching of ALL to the rest of the class?'  After thinking about this question I realised that I hadn't really changed my teaching practice for the rest of the class at all.  When asking myself why this was the case, I realised it was because of the way we currently plan at school.  At present, we plan around genre with the purpose of completing a writing sample for assessment.  This locks us into teaching genre, rather than student interest or need. 
Because of the need to complete a writing sample and have it moderated by the middle of term, I felt my teaching of writing was based on quantity, rather than quality.  This is because students need as much practise as possible on writing a particular genre in order to be able to write it independently for their assessment.

Now that my team are starting to plan for term 3, I thought it was timely to ask my ALL students to self-reflect on their writing now they have been a part of the intervention group for a term.  I am hoping to take their comments to the team when we meet next week for planning so that I have student voice and evidence, with the hope to change the way we teach writing for the whole class in term 3.

It was interesting students commented on both writing improvements, but also attitude improvements towards writing.

Below are students comments about ALL writing:

"I enjoy writing a lot more because I get to write about cool things and different things.  Before I joined ALL I didn't like writing because we had to write boring stuff so we could do our writing sample.  I've been using full-stops and capital letters correctly.  I am editing and making changes a lot more.  All has helped my writing because I'm using more descriptive words, my hand writings improved, and I think writing is fun now" By W, 1-7-15
 
"I like how I get to publish everything so I don't have to look at my book, I can share my publishing folder and show off my best work" By L, 1-7-15

"I am adding a lot more description so my story is more interesting.  I am using a lot of different punctuation and I know what a semi-colon is" By L, 26.6.15

"I am using more punctuation.  I am editing more and proof-reading.  I am using a lot more descriptive words so my writing sounds better" By J, 25-6-15
 
"ALL has helped because I was struggling and I didn't like writing.  I was always distracted.  I really like writing now because we have fun in ALL and get to do activities to help our writing" By J, 22-5-15
 
"I'm using rhetorical questions for description.  I now know what a semi colon is and use it to join two sentences.  My spelling has improved.  My writing now flows and is in order" By C, 25-6-15
 
"I like writing more because I like the ideas I'm using.  I am using full stops in the right places. I am trying to use different sentence starters.  I am doing a lot more editing.  I am making my sentences longer because I'm putting more detail and descriptive words in" By B, 25-6-15
 
"I am crossing out words and making them better words.  I enjoy ALL because I get to write different stories because before I didn't get to write stories that I could always share my ideas with.  I get a lot more say in what I write about now because I always get to share my ideas when writing.  I feel good about writing now because I use more descriptive words and can use paragraphs" By B, 1-7-15
 
"I like ALL better because I get to write a lot of different things.  I like writing now because it's easier because I get more help with spelling and ideas.  My writing has improved because I use more descriptive language.  I'm using full stops at the end of sentences, and capital letters at the start of sentences.  I write with more detail.  I'm using paragraphs to improve my writing and organise my ideas" By M, 1-7-15
 
"I like writing now and want to write.  I enjoy writing now because it's easier to write because we all share our ideas" By M, 22-5-15
 
"I'm using more similes and onomatopoeia to make my writing more interesting.  I'm using capital letters and full stops properly.  I'm using more punctuation and speech.  I'm putting more information in my plans" By J, 25-6-15

Reflecting on students feedback, it's great to see they are starting to articulate specifically how their writing has improved.  At the start of ALL, the feedback included things like, 'I am using more punctuation', but now most students are saying what punctuation is being used and how they are using it.

What next?

• Make changes to the way we plan so that the things that are working well in ALL is transferred into writing for the whole class.  I would like to do this by:

1. Plan for the needs and interests of the students, rather than planning for the purpose of a writing sample.
2. Give writing a purpose for the students. 
3. Students to write for an audience.
4. Give students plenty of opportunity to publish their writing so they can see it all complete, neat, and tidy.  It also helps to lift the quality of writing because students know it is going to be read or put on display.
5. Quality vs quantity when writing.  1-2 pieces of excellent, high quality writing is more empowering and encouraging for student, as opposed to 5-6 poor-average pieces which show little improvement.  Quality pieces gives students good models of writing to refer to, and also makes them want to share it.
6. Give students more choice in the context of their writing and use their ideas. 

• Give students rich learning experiences to motivate them with their writing.  This also enables students to use more description in their writing.

• Consider whether doing a writing sample is necessary every term, especially now we are doing PACT judgements for writing.  Would an E-asttle sample be more relevant and appropriate?  E-asttle would mean one writing test completed in one writing session, as opposed to 1-2 weeks spent on students writing independently to complete a writing sample on a specific genre that has been taught.  (Time spent on assessment means students miss out on guided teaching time).

• Mixed ability writing groups.  Students then can share their ideas, opinions and perspectives.  This could enable struggling students to have higher ability writers as role models so they get advice on how to improve their writing, rather then the ideas and advice always coming from the teacher.