During 2019 I was lucky enough to be awarded a Teach NZ Scholarship which enabled me to take some time away from my position at school to focus on some areas of interest that I am most passionate about, and to work towards gaining my Masters.
My expectations and goals for the year were to continue to grow and develop my professional knowledge and capacity so that I would be better placed to serve our school, tamariki and their whanau in the future. I wanted to focus most particularly on Literacy and Psychology, and gain a greater understanding around kids thinking, learning and behaviour. Each course that I chose and completed helped me to consider the impact of my learning for ....
So here are just a few very brief snippets from my learning journey in the first Semester...
In Semester 1 the Literacy Theory and Practice paper covered 3 different aspects - Bilingualism, Reading Comprehension and Writing.
In this paper I was challenged to consider just how truly culturally responsive we are and in fact
further to this, the degree to which we use culturally sustaining pedagogies in our school needs a thoughtful and critical lens. In digitising our spaces we have worked hard to accelerate learning, optimise engagement and let our children’s voices be heard but it seems we may have missed a unique opportunity to capitalise on the affordances of the technology, and coupling this with culturally responsive pedagogies to produce improved outcomes for our bilinguals, which make up such a huge proportion of our school population. We could do more to capitalise on the funds of knowledge and attribute even more value on the cultural capital of our learners.
With the lens on Writing, it would seem there is still much needed research to be done, specifically around the teaching of Māori and Pasifika students. As Gadd suggests if we can get it right for our struggling learners, the practise will benefit others. And, although research is much less abundant in the field of writing, there appears to be strong agreement around the complexity of the teaching of writing along with an acknowledgement that the explicit teaching of self-regulation is an important and critical factor for learners. Students don’t come to be self regulated without a careful well scaffolded approach to modelling that leads the learners to greater independence.
Throughout this literature around the effective teaching of writing, there is a recurring theme which highlights the complexities of the various aspects which all need to be present for raising student achievement. The body of research around writing only serves to highlight the complex nature of teaching writing effectively. It seems our learners struggle to generalise their writing skills and apply it to a similar or ‘related task’ with any degree of independence, suggesting that more extensive modelling would be an appropriate intervention with these struggling learners.
The Reading component of my studies lead me to consider carefully the reading proficiencies of a learner in the context of their classroom. It was great to have time to go back and consider the breadth of work done by Marie Clay and others. In 2005 Marie Clay wrote “... in the end it is the individual adaptation made by the expert teacher to that child’s idiosyncratic competencies and history of past experiences that starts him on the upward climb to effective literacy performances (p.63)”. This paper was a great reminder that pedagogy, knowledge and thorough assessment are all critical components to unlocking literacy for our hardest to teach.
Lai and McNaughton (2009) state “Understanding classroom instruction in relation to student achievement patterns is an iterative process of developing testing and refining hypotheses …” (p.93). This is affirming in the direction that we have taken with Teaching as Inquiry which if done effectively and thorough sees numerous iterations of this going on and when supported by research and effective pedagogy sees shift for the learner.
This ultimately had me reflect on what a complex business teaching is, where the classroom teacher is expected to be an expert or an in the field researcher and that we as part of the leadership, need to ensure that we provide the necessary support and scaffolds in the form of mentoring, collaborative teaching, and PLD to enable our teachers to grow their understanding and expertise in what is such a complex construct.
Along with this learning, came the realisation that I had grown very accustomed in my role at school to changing tack rapidly, juggling multiple balls simultaneously, whilst trying very hard not to drop any and never really having to focus my brain on one activity, much less an extended piece of text for any great length of time ... so this was perhaps my greatest challenge.
I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity that this year has given me and for those that seamlessly stepped in to the various responsibilities in my absence so that our Village continued to succeed!
