Inquiry 2019

Manaiakalani COL Achievement:

Raise Māori student achievement through the development of cultural visibility and responsive practices across the pathway as measured against National Standards and agreed targets for reading Years 1-10 and NCEA years 11-13

Inquiry question:

Will culturally responsive practises improve writing motivation and in turn increase achievement in standardised writing testing

This year I have decided to base my inquiry around writing. As I collated the 2018 data and reflected on the learners lack of motivation throughout the year in 2018, I decided to focus my inquiry around writing. Within the first 4 weeks of the school term, I have identified 10 learners who specify themselves as cook island/maori (4) or maori (6).  Reflecting on last year, I found a pattern within the attitude towards writing and my learners, beginning to plateau and show little interest of completing their writing. I have identified these 10 learners to focus on this year with 8 of these learners struggle to write a sentence and 2 are above standard. 

We were lucky to have DMiC professional development last year which heavily focussed around cultural responsiveness and student led discussions, resulting in students very engaged and enjoying maths so I hope to incorporate this into writing. I can recall my maori learners heavily engaged during mathematics but switching off during writing as it didn't interest them or it was too much of a challenge to attempt to write a sentence. This is what I am intending to change. I intend on changing my writing programme to have a heavy focus on oral language, being culturally responsive. The students will craft a couple of sentences orally and record themselves saying this on an iPad. The students will then copy what they have recorded into their books.

 I'm finding students write very basic sentences such as 'I went to the beach and it was cool.' When they are speaking with their peers, it becomes explicit. Therefore if students can verbally say their detailed sentences, hopefully this will mean students will have effective and complex sentences. I will introduce a system of underlining unknown spelling of words, meaning they have to attempt every word but can acknowledge the fact it may be incorrect. Whereas, previously students would not attempt challenging words and keep their sentences simple with high frequency words (some students in my class feel they have to know how to correctly spell each word to carry on writing so hopefully this will stop this). On Thursdays, we will have a session where we re-craft a piece of writing from the week as a whole class, focussing on how we could make the sentence better as we orally discuss this, student led. I will also be having conferences that take place where we will look at creating effective sentences, punctuation, etc. Students will have confidence to speak their ideas but lose confidence when they are expected to write them down, which is where they seem to struggle. I am hoping that this programme will increase students motivation and therefore increase achievement. 

My main focus is to get students orally speaking their ideas before they squish them down into words they are familiar with and are easy to write. I also intend on having peer share set ups. This will support their oral language as they are recording what they are saying, therefore they will listen to their recordings and become more aware, especially for my ESOL learners.

The 8 learners lack confidence within their abilities and therefore, show low motivation and will either copy their friend or sit there twiddling their thumbs. This is where I want to engage and motivate them with content that is relatable, engaging and exciting where they can orally speak their ideas.

This is the data I collated from the end of year based on their 6 year nets and EASTTLE. As you can see, some students still cannot identify letters from the alphabet and have little vocabulary which will be a huge focus during our literacy time. 

This year we are blessed in the junior school to have a Blogger App which the students are loving already! This will become a huge incentive for these learners. I aim to have a focus on 1 language experience per week where the students gain an excitement towards writing and become excited while also focus on language acquisition as we build on a range of vocabulary to improve their writing skills. I will also look at setting up the norms of writing - I want to make sure students are aware and know they need to locate materials to support them and can work collaboratively to help write their sentence/s.