Drawing on John Hattie's research around the 7 Characteristics of Expert Teachers we focused on the parts that create the greatest shift.
Assessment is key and we as teachers need to think about formal and informal assessment, as well as formative and summative assessment. Using a range of assessments helps to support the idea of knowing our reader's cognitive and emotional needs around reading.
By creating students who are 'Assessment Capable Learners' we help them to understand where they are at with their learning, and what they need to do to move forward with their learning. For example, knowing they are at 9 - 9.5 years in reading helps them to understand what they need to do to become a reader at 10 - 10.5 years. Assessment Capable Learners also need to understand what the task they are being given is trying to teach them (learning intention) and what they need to do to achieve in that task (success criteria).
When I think back to my time in the classroom I worked hard to help my students understand both of these things and what I noticed is that what I did the majority really began to take ownership of their learning and wanted to focus on things because they knew it would help them progress with their learning. Even students who were 'below' found that by thinking about the steps they were making in their own learning (away from the 'average student') they felt empowered to work hard on their next steps.
Formal Assessment - PAT Assessments
Drilling down into PAT Assessment reminded me of my University days going to tutorials for weeks on PATs and not really understanding what the point was until I was using them. It surprises me that this isn't covered anymore in teacher training.
It is important to understand that there are three types of questions in PAT Reading Comprehension; Retrieval, Local Inference and Global Inference. This diagram helped to clarify the difference for the group.
Learning Intentions and Success Criteria
The final part of our day was looking at where these come from (Achievement Objectives), how we make them relevant for our students and how we help to develop co-constructed success criteria. Something that stood out to me was the idea that we want to think about three areas of learning when we work on designing tasks for students. These areas are the process (of learning), the product (being created by the learning) and the disposition students must take as they look back at the process and the product. I notice that sometimes as teachers we forget that there are these three parts to learning and we end up focusing on one part a lot more than another. If we are truly thinking about the Learn Create Share process then all three of these parts should be easily included in learning a lot of the time.
Today has been a full day with a lot to take in. I find I wear two types of hats with the RPI; the first one is coach and the second is learner. I find that I am learning things as we guide our learners through the day. The learning is around the content but also as a coach.
Today's learning as a coach is that I need to have better questions and tools up my sleeve to help draw people out with what they are thinking and being challenged on. It is hard online but I know it is possible. Having a screen between you and the people does make reading some of the 'cues' harder, but I know that I have the skills to be able to do this. Something I will try next time is giving the ownership of the discussion over to the group and sit back a bit more.
As a learner I was happy to have a number of things I did as a teacher confirmed as correct. I had a teacher workbook that had a lot of the data I was gathering about students in it. Something I would add to this is the more informal gatherings. It also made me wonder about how you would use this for writing and maths. I am keen to play around with it to create a 'writing' version.
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