Focusing inquiry: Know the curriculum

Learning about my students' needs

What is important (and therefore worth spending time on), given where my students are at? This focusing inquiry establishes a baseline and a direction. The teacher uses all available information to determine what their students have already learned and what they need to learn next.

Key questions

• How might your English programme(s) be underpinned by the NZC?:
  • principles
  • values
  • key competencies

• Which strands, processes, and strategies might be focussed on?

• Which achievement objectives might be selected and at what levels?

Why are these questions important?

Each board of trustees, through the principal and staff, is required to develop and implement a curriculum for students in years 1-13 that is underpinned by and consistent with the principles; in which the values are encouraged and modelled and are explored by students; and that supports students to develop the key competencies. (NZC p44).

Useful resources

• New Zealand Curriculum
• Enhancing the English curriculum: Achievement objectives for levels 2, 4, 6 and 8 which are “unpacked” into “what is important?” and “what does it look like?”

• Teaching as Inquiry  and the key competencies is a model to support teacher inquiry into the teaching-learning relationship.

Focusing inquiry: Know your goals

Learning about my students' needs

What is important (and therefore worth spending time on), given where my students are at? This focusing inquiry establishes a baseline and a direction. The teacher uses all available information to determine what their students have already learned and what they need to learn next.

Key questions

• What school goals, targets, or priorities do we need to consider?

• What about our own department goals, targets, or priorities?

• What moderation processes do we need to plan for?

Why are these questions important?

Planning needs to align with and be informed by school and department goals and targets (for example, the targets to achieve success for Māori as listed in Ka Hikitia). Also consider what priorities may have been set (for example, to focus on inquiry as a way of learning).

Useful resources

Your school’s:

• strategic plan and goals
• annual operational plan
• professional learning plan
• appraisal processes and goals
• moderation processes

Teaching inquiry: Programme content and outcomes

Planning for my students' needs 

What strategies (evidence-based) are most likely to help my students learn this? In this teaching inquiry, the teacher uses evidence from research and from their own past practice and that of colleagues to plan teaching and learning opportunities aimed at achieving the outcomes prioritised in the focusing inquiry.

Key questions

Programme outcomes

Knowing what I do about my students:

• what themes/contexts/texts will connect with their lives, experiences and prior knowledge, including their prior cultural knowledge?
• what learning outcomes are important and relevant for them?
• what period of time will they need to meet these outcomes?

Programme content

• How have we integrated the making meaning and creating meaning strands into our programme?
• Have we created sufficient opportunities for students to develop key competencies and explore selected values, as well as increase their competence in English?
• Will the tasks and texts selected engage and challenge our diverse groups of students?

Useful resources

Brief case studies summarising the planning inquiry in three secondary English departments:

Teaching inquiry: Planning for teaching

Planning for my students' needs 

What strategies (evidence-based) are most likely to help my students learn this? In this teaching inquiry, the teacher uses evidence from research and from their own past practice and that of colleagues to plan teaching and learning opportunities aimed at achieving the outcomes prioritised in the focusing inquiry.

Key questions

• What broad approaches are most likely to help our students:
  • meet the learning outcomes?
  • involve them in setting targets and monitoring learning?
  • support each others' learning (e.g through  ako, teina-tuakana)

• What specific strategies might support those approaches?

• How will we use  assessment for learning, including classroom dialogue and feedback, to promote learning?

Why are these questions important?

The NZ Curriculum (NZC) says that students are “at the centre of teaching and learning” and asserts that “they should experience a curriculum that engages and challenges them, is forward-looking and inclusive, and affirms New Zealand’s unique identity.” [Principles p.9].

You can best support students’ learning by:

• creating a supportive learning environment and positive relationships
• activating prior knowledge by making connections to prior learning and experience
• providing sufficient opportunities to learn
• ensuring students know what they are learning and why they are learning it.
• providing feedback about “Where they are going? How they are going? Where to next?”
• fostering a spirit of ako where there are opportunities to share, to collaborate, to co-construct and to evaluate learning. “In classrooms where a sense of community is built, students are the crew not the passengers.” 1

1 Watkins, C Research Summary –  Collaborative Learning from Learning about Learning.

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Useful resources

The importance of knowing who each student is and not making assumptions is reinforced in this clip

Consider what these teachers in this clip have done to build a positive relationship for learning in their classrooms.

A classroom environment in which students work together to support each other in their learning is one that illustrates the concepts of ako and teina-tuakana in action.

Here is an example of a teacher who changed the content of her lessons to be more responsive to her students’ cultural knowledge. This allowed her to also involve community in the teaching and learning. Wally Penetito and Mason Durie reinforce the key message of how and why culture counts.

• Making Language and Learning Work in Secondary Maths and Science

• Making Language and Learning Work in Secondary English and Social Sciences

• English and e-Learning, explores how you can integrate the use of digital content, software, and other e-learning tools and contexts into your English teaching and learning.

• Student management of their own record of learning through e Portfolios.

Learning inquiry: Evaluate your professional learning needs

Impact of changed practices

What happened as a result of the teaching, and what are the implications for future teaching? In this learning inquiry, the teacher investigates the success of the teaching in terms of the prioritised outcomes, using a range of assessment approaches. They do this both while learning activities are in progress and also as longer-term sequences or units of work come to an end. They then analyse and interpret the information to consider what they should do next.

Key questions

Informed by the answers gathered from your evaluation of student learning and engagement, decide what the implications are for your  professional learning.

Useful resources

The Teacher Professional Learning and Development:  Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration illuminates the kind of professional learning for teachers that strengthens valued outcomes for diverse learners. A summary version of this report is available here  Teacher Professional Learning and Development (PDF).

English Online: Professional Development and Support section provides links to teacher support services around the country, subject associations, and other avenues of professional support.

Engaging teachers in professional learning about literacy

Engaging teachers' beliefs

It is very important that you engage with teachers’ existing beliefs about literacy learning and teaching:

“Teachers are likely to reject new ideas that conflict with their current ideas unless, as part of the professional learning, their existing understandings are engaged. Without such engagement, teachers are likely to dismiss new strategies as unrealistic and inappropriate for their particular contexts. Similarly, they are likely to reject new content as irrelevant. Engaging teachers’ existing ideas means discussing how those ideas differ from the ideas being promoted and assessing the impact that the new approaches might have on their students... it is particularly important to engage existing theories when challenging teachers’ beliefs about, and expectations of, those students who have traditionally underachieved” (Timperley, 2008, p. 17).

Factors that influence engagement

Teachers’ willingness to engage deeply in professional development will be affected by how much they believe that improving students’ literacy:

• is an important goal for the students they teach
• will help students achieve better in their particular subject area
• is a legitimate part of their responsibility as subject teachers
• is something they can positively influence (that is, teacher self efficacy).

Building efficacy

Some ways to build individual teacher and collective efficacy include the following:

• Accentuating the positive by showing evidence of teachers and groups of teachers making a difference. For example, even before an intervention, some teachers will be more effective than others in raising student achievement in literacy. For example, there may be a class in which Māori and Pasifika students made higher progress than others. Identify, promote, and celebrate what these teachers did together to make a difference.
• Challenging explanations for low student achievement that ignore the role of teachers and schools. 

Key research and theory about adolescent literacy

Three important ideas that come through in the research literature are that:

1. Young people need advanced literacy to be successful citizens

“Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives. They will need literacy to cope with the flood of information they will find everywhere they turn. They will need literacy to feed their imaginations so they can create the world of the future. In a complex and sometimes even dangerous world, their ability to read will be crucial”
(Moore, Bean, Birdyshaw, & Rycik, 1999, p. 3).

Consider:

• What purposes will our students need literacy for in the future?
• What particular literacy skills will be most important for our students to have?
• How can we better prepare our students for this future?
• You could use this concept star to help teachers brainstorm personal, social, and economic benefits of improved literacy:

Click image to enlarge

2. Literacy has a major influence on overall achievement!

It may be useful to discuss these ideas with teachers:

• All teachers are teachers of literacy because all students learn through language.
• Language is fundamental to thinking and learning.
• Language is the primary means by which we gather and communicate information.
• Students’ literacy skills are a key determinant of their academic achievement in other content areas.
• Academic English is nobody’s mother tongue (Pawley, 1984).

3. Literacy demands become more specialised at secondary school

No matter how effective their primary teachers were, your students will need ongoing literacy instruction because the literacy demands of secondary subject classrooms are so different.

Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) argue that the ‘disciplinary literacy’ skills needed in secondary school content areas are “more sophisticated but less generalizable”. They identify three stages of literacy development:

• Basic Literacy: encompassing skills such as decoding and knowledge of high-frequency words that underlie virtually all reading and writing tasks
• Intermediate Literacy: literacy skills common to most tasks including generic comprehension strategies
• Disciplinary Literacy: highly specialised literacy skills associated with particular content areas

Click image to enlarge

The  Literacy Learning Progressions describe the literacy-related knowledge, skills and attitudes that students need at different levels.

From the time they start high school, your students will read and write texts that:

• include more complex ideas and multiple items of information (in both longer texts and short, information dense texts)
• have an increased range of academic and content-specific vocabulary expressing increasingly abstract concepts
• are frequently organised in a non-sequential manner, for example, with a range of sections of running text, diagrams, and pictures, which are not clearly linked.

Students will need ongoing literacy instruction from their different subject teachers to meet these challenges.

Identifying subject-specific literacy challenges

Teachers may need support to identify the particular literacy challenges of their subject. One good starting point is to have subject teachers bring examples of subject texts (for example, text books, assignments, NCEA tasks) to a staff meeting. You could then ask them to identify potential difficulties these texts might pose for students (for example, in terms of reading, writing, understanding vocabulary, and organisation).

You could then support teachers to see that many of these literacy demands could only ever be addressed in their own subject area. For example, an English teacher will probably never teach students to:

• read information from a table
• write an explanation of a scientific process
• understand and use specialised economics vocabulary
• identify relevant variables in a mathematics word problem
• read or write complex technical instructions.

Using student achievement data

Three important concepts when using student data to engage teachers in literacy PD are the following:

Benchmarks: To make a judgment about a student’s achievement you need to have something valid with which to compare it. Useful benchmarks include curriculum expectations and national means. It is most useful to compare student achievement in your school with external benchmarks (such as national means or similar schools).

Level and Progress: It is important to analyse both students’ levels and their rate of progress. Teachers should obviously be concerned about students who have relatively low levels of literacy and are making low progress. However, they should also be concerned about students who have relatively high achievement levels but who are making low progress.

Disaggregation: It is important to look at the achievement of different groups separately. Important groups to look at include groups based on ethnicity, gender, and language background. It is particularly important that teachers understand the achievement patterns of Māori students, Pasifika students and English Language Learners (ELLs). A key focus for schools is to lift the achievement of diverse learners though effective literacy teaching and learning practices. Understanding how different groups are currently achieving is vital if teachers are to realise the potential of all learners.

Student voice

At the beginning of a literacy intervention, student voice can be used to find out their knowledge and beliefs about:

• what types of texts they prefer to read and write
• what kinds of teaching they think are most effective
• their home literacy practices such as oral traditions (story telling, chants) worldviews
• their background: cultural capital, worldviews, prior learning and the knowledge and experiences they bring into the classroom
• how challenging/interesting they find literacy tasks
• why literacy is important in different subject areas
• their aspirations at and beyond schooling, and what role they think literacy has in realising these.

Case study: using student voice to engage teachers in Te Kotahitanga

In order to engage teachers in rethinking their theories, Te Kotahitanga employed a Kaupapa Māori strategy of ‘collaborative storying’. Early in the professional development experience, teachers were presented with stories that had been compiled during an earlier phase of the project. These stories came from students (both engaged and non-engaged), their parents/whānau, principals, and teachers and concerned the influences on students’ educational engagement and achievement. There were marked differences between the descriptions of daily realities provided by the students themselves, those parenting them, principals, and teachers. The extremes were represented by the teachers and the students.

“Teachers attributed the difficulties experienced by Māori students to personal deficiencies. They pathologised the daily experience of Māori students—many believing that Māori learners were simply less capable of educational achievement because of limited language skills and poor home backgrounds. But the students’ powerful stories focused primarily on their classroom experiences and their relationships and interactions with teachers. They recounted the negative attitudes and beliefs they experienced, and their sense of being excluded when teachers mispronounced their names and Māori words. They were also able to identify positive relationships—with teachers who knew and trusted them and made an effort to know them as Māori. In addition, they described how their achievement could be enhanced through a range of alternative pedagogical approaches that essentially were more discursive and inclusive than the expert–novice transmission model that that was their experience in many classrooms” .

Timperley et al., 2007, p. 171

Principles

Principle 1 - Effective teaching develops students’ own literacy skills and strategies

Teachers need to support students to read and write challenging texts, as well as prepare them to cope when their teacher is no longer there to assist. The ultimate aim of literacy instruction is to develop students’ own literacy skills and strategies. The difference between teacher support and student independence is illustrated below.

The diagram below is a framework for developing students’ own literacy skills and strategies.

Figure from Ministry of Education, 2004, p.22.

Because ‘literacy’ is a continuum, the stages in the diagram are recursive: once students achieve greater independence in using one strategy at one level of text difficulty they will start on a new cycle. Once again students will be in the ‘dependent’ stage of the diagram – but this time in relation to a new strategy and more complex level of text. There is no limit to the number of times this progression will be repeated, with more strategies and greater complexity of text.

Principle 2 - Effective teachers have adaptive expertise

To be effective, teachers need to do much more than teach a range of practical literacy teaching activities. All the clozes, clines, clusters, concept maps and K-W-Ls in the world will not improve students’ literacy – unless teachers have the expertise to understand when, where, why, how and for whom these activities are likely to prove effective.

Teachers often develop their deeper knowledge of effective literacy practice after they have seen how literacy activities engage students.

Principle 3 - Literacy pedagogical content knowledge

“Effective teachers know much more than their subjects, and more than ‘good pedagogy’. They know how students tend to understand (and mis-understand) their subjects; they know how to anticipate and diagnose such misunderstandings; and they know how to deal with them when they arise. This kind of knowledge has been termed ‘pedagogical content knowledge’” 

Grossman & Schoenfield, 2005, p. 205

Literacy pedagogical content knowledge is a vital part of effective content area teachers’ expertise: You cannot be an effective subject teacher without being an effective teacher of the language of that subject.