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. As a CoL leader within the school. I am more interested in inquiring about student learning and my own practice.
Major Inquiry - How can I accelerate learning in Y13 calculus so that my
Maori students (and other students) can pass exams `by getting at least 14+ credits.
Minor Inquiry- Can I improve the Year 11 numeracy credits by collaborating with one
of my colleagues (one of my hunches!) and also with the technology department.
Personal Goal - As an Assistant HOD is to Increase students’ Mathematics achievement
in year 12 and Year 13.
As a COL leader within school I am very confident that these three goals would be a
huge contribution towards Achievement challenge 1.
The catalytic aspect of student learning my inquiry focused on this year is
How can I promote self-efficacy, independent learning and imitate university
environments in the classroom at all times.
I identified this as my focus from my past experience students were finding
it difficult to do homework to rewind their learning, how to manage time and
leave everything to the last minute and hard to understand Merit and Excellence
questions.
To build up a rich picture of my learners I used NCEA results from previous
years. Student voice, Pre-test/Post-test/half way test/end of topic test/Mid-year examination
/ Mock examination.
The main patterns of student learning I identified is This is a mixed ability class.
Currently there are 3 students who are working at the expected level, 5-6 students
who are at an average level and 4 students working below the level. 1 of these
students have never taken calculus before. There are clear gaps here in terms
of mathematics and literacy skills.
My challenge is to accelerate learning to get an entry level for university and teaching
Calculus scholarship.
My profiling of my own teaching showed that I had strengths in teaching up to scholarship
level and how to meet everyone's needs too.
Two key ideas-
My students would likely make more progress if I developed in how to use literacy skills
and find extra time to bridge the gap.
Every time I ask my learner to give me feedback to improve my own teaching pedagogy to
move every learner to 14+ credits to get eligible for university entrance.
The changes I made in my teaching were:
Causal Chain-After mid-year exam causal steps are Literacy strategies, student assisted
learning, collaboration with tertiary providers and testing periodically.
Monitoring
As I get closer to externals I did a tweak to my monitoring their progress weekly. By doing
Do now and weekly tests to improve their accuracy skills.
Literacy strategies played a huge part in calculus I used KWL chart , chunk check
chew strategy, PEEL structure literacy specialist and Dr Jannie helped to unpack
M/E Algebraic contextual based questions for them to understand.
The easiest thing is teaching to use online packages-desmos and geogebra to teach
Linear programming (3.2), Systems of equations(3.15) and Trigonometry(3.3).
The hardest thing is to teach 3 externals during class time and how to fit my Calculus
scholarship program. I did lots of after school hours to make this happen. Has been a huge commitment between my students, parents and me
Overall I would rate the changes in student learning as impressive so far as because I offered 5 internal but last year only 3 internals. There are 11 students are willing to sit all 3 of the papers at the end of the year. This is in contrast to only 3 students sitting all 3 last year.
Learners have finished all their internals and are awaiting external results to make a complete evaluation however here is the evaluation for the internals.
Quantitative shift- There is 15 learners in this class. I offered 5 internals according to their strength/carrier pathway- Four learners have gained14+ credits, four students have gained
13+ credits, six students have gained ten credits and one student gained six credits but
last year I offered only three internal and Furthermore, one learner gained six credits which are better with comparing with other subjects.
Qualitative shift- positive attitude, questioning skills, self-efficacy and independent learners
as a result they produced a movie at the film festival. Awaiting for the externals to finalize my evaluation.
The most important learning I made about working on self-efficacy, Independent learning
and questioning skills. According to my understanding it is working. More time needed and pastoral care needed to address these issues
Some learning that would be relevant to other teachers are KWL chart and PEEL
structure and I did PD in my Mathematics department mtg. Collaboration with two of the units (two internal) with my one of my colleagues and one of the internals with two of my colleagues. I strongly believe that collaboration adds motivation and values, when we work together with teachers can identify the common challenges, analyse common data, it can improve our instructional approach.
My Next steps are I am waiting for the external results to finalise 14+ credits and endorsements. Collaboration with other teachers sharing my findings with colleagues/dpt. Feel free to view my blog
