Create - Make a Plan

Today I’m sharing a graphic of my first round of interventions.

As I go through my inquiry the first half of the bubbles will remain the same (because my achievement challenge and outcomes are the same), but the interventions, measurable outcomes and ‘what it looks like’ will change..

Click here to open the image above. Inside it notes the interventions include:

Interventions Round 1:

• Paired reading.
• Interactive/guided reading of scientific texts with cultural links as well.
• Revision kahoot after the reading.
• Vocabulary instruction and crossword.
• Modelling of the relationship between new vocabulary.
• Gamification of writing about a volcanic eruption.

Learn - Reflect

Literacy tests used in Manaiakalani and why I can’t use them in my inquiry

STAR tests - Supplementary Test of Achievement in Reading.

e-asTTle tests.

PAT reading.

SEA - Writing Vocabulary. In 10 minutes how many vocab words can you write down on a piece of

paper? It’s a measure of fluency - do you need to devote time to work it out or can you just “go”?

These are all legitimate measures of reading and writing that are pretty universally accepted in NZ

and in the case of PAT, around the world.

However for me they are not useful to measure improvement of literacy in science (hopefully caused

by any intervention that I do) as I only see my year 9 students three times a week for a total of 200

minutes! That means they are spending a heck of a lot of time with other teachers; in English, reading

for 20 minutes a day during the school’s AR programme, and then of course there’s all the time at

home where students could be doing anything at all - they could be reading novels for 5 hours a day!

I need to come up with my own measures of scientific literacy!

I'm thinking about 3 minute scientific vocabulary tests or 5 minute paragraph writing about a topic -

leaving it absolutely wide open. I could either give identical instructions for pre and post tests, or even

return the pre-test at the end to see if they can improve upon it after the intervention.

Study and Success

Today I returned the Year 9 exams to the students - but not before I recorded their data!

I thought it would be interesting to count the total number of questions each student completed during their opportunity to complete a practice exam during class time. 

This is a time-honored study technique. Students attempt practice questions on the material they know they'll be tested on, then get some feedback on it to 1) build their confidence (100% correct already), 2) expand their understanding (getting there) or 3) to fill any gaps in their understanding (unsure).

The practice exam I made for students had sections that exactly mirrored the real one they would sit the next week. The questions only differed a little!

There was a study doc that also matched the practice exam with revision activities, videos, etc, for students to visit and find answers, and I was very happy to help when they asked any questions. 

Anyway. Students took varying advantage of this across two lessons, despite my constant circling of the classroom.

Here is the scatter graph of the number of completed questions that I provided feedback on (or were correct but without feedback - I had to include this second category because the student represented by the dot in the top right corner took the practice exam home to study off):

My conclusion was that as a student increases the number of questions they study, the data shows that their number of correct answers in the exam also increases. 

The equation on the top right says that for each 1 extra question studied, students were likely to get 0.741 more questions right on the real exam. 

This is a nice gradient; the payoff for studying 1 - 2 more questions is to (mostly likely) get at least 1 more question right in the test!

There is one obvious outlier up the top in the middle, where a student studied only 10 questions on the practice exam but got 24 right in the real exam! Maybe they studied at home?

One unlucky person is also about the same distance from the trend line as the student mentioned above. They studied 16 questions but only got 5 right on the exam. Perhaps they were only copying out answers -words and shapes of letters-, rather than trying to understand why the answer was that, while they were studying.

Learn - Research - Professional Development

During the holidays - on my birthday - I went to the WTE National Writing Conference and the keynote in the morning alone was worth getting up early for.

I took all my notes on a Presentation, which is here for you to view below or view at this link.

I absolutely have used these sentence-types in class. With the juniors I ran whole lessons around casting sentence types, to try and improve their writing.

Here's one lesson I ran on precision writing in science - this presentation linked to this set of activities for students.



The other thing I was absolutely blown away by was the way that we present students their assessment tasks. We've been giving them THOUSANDS of words to decipher and try to work out what to do before they even begin writing the assessment.

At the writing conference we sat down in groups with a real 1800-word, Level 3 PE task and all tried to work out what it was asking us to do, and how to get Excellence, and which parts were important.

Then Ian presented us with a single A4-sized task. It had exact word limits and included clear instructions on what students must include to gain top grades. We didn't have to guess what was meant! Why does it have to be a mystery what we want students to do? When he took his single A4 sheet to an NZQA moderators meeting (there were 40 of them there) they were bamboozled - they thought that's what everyone was giving students! The TKI tasks are not meant for kids' eyes!

Ian said the best way to make these amazing tasks is to write your own Excellence exemplar, and then see how many words you have apportioned to each section of the task. Set students a word count (as they would have in University, anyway!), and provide headings for each section. Provide clearly worded prompts about what to include. You can see two examples of this that he provided, in the presentation above.

Here is one that I wrote myself for Year 13

Learn - Research - Professional Development

Improving Boys Literacy PD with Joseph Driessen

First we read this piece of ‘boys writing’ to start with and then we discussed what made this appealing to
boys in particular;

The content involved risk-taking and misbehaviour.

It was humorous and self-deprecating.

The writing was active and fast-paced; not many wasted words, quite honest and blunt.

Similes were basic but effective - easy to interpret.

Next we discussed how would we develop a piece of writing like this; encourage students to write like
this and then develop their writing.

Boys preferences and strengths need affirmation.

Boys can be great writers if they feel welcome (a culture of respect); they will resist and disengage if
their efforts feel unwelcome.

Boys ‘like’ conflict, action, overcoming challenges, humor, the unexpected, irony or an alternative
viewpoint.

Boys discussions are different to girls’

Boys enjoyed being coached how to write ‘edgy’ things.

I talked to two primary teachers about how they ‘coach’ boys writing and whether they agree with boys
liking conflict and action..

One recommended reading Des Hunt novels that link to science; a male, humorous writer with science
embedded.

Another said that choosing contexts for boys is absolutely key to writing (the teacher chooses images
she thinks they will find most interest) and just gets them to write about it.

A small problem; in science we have the contexts given/laid out by the curriculum - in junior science
there is some flexibility to use current events or twist contexts, but senior science is quite limited.

The two primary teachers also mentioned they try not to mark too closely against rubrics like e-asTTle
does because that shuts down creativity.

Another small problem; in science there are stringent marking criteria, sometimes down to the actual
individual phrases that must be included in the writing to achieve a certain grade, such as “reaction rate
increases as there are more successful collisions between particles per second” in the year 11 Acids
and Bases exam. Meanwhile in senior Biology there are lots of different ways to say the same
information, and the best writers know the content well enough to “freestyle” in an exam rather than
freeze when they can’t remember the exact wording of a definition.

Next we discussed what the features of a good writer in our class are:

I said “they just start - they’re not hung up on the PERFECT words or way to write to impress the teacher.”

Vaughn said “some prefer to write plans at the start though and that’s just their style.”

Vaughn added that the best senior writers all re-read and edit their work.

Next we learnt that boys need a learning journey with milestones and accountability.

Introduce a challenging task/journey.

Give learning journey/outline of task with timelines.

Use milestones to set short term tasks; every milestone can be given a tick and celebrated.

Use grids (tick) to get detailed work.

Be supportive yet demanding.

Not meeting targets needs to be a big deal.

Endorse the progress and final destination.

Then we went through some recent literacy research. Research showed that the socioeconomic status
of families correlated with the total amount of words spoken to their children (lower SES = lower words
spoken), and another study found girls are spoken to a lot more often that boys by their parents. Well,
actually, mothers speak more to daughters and fathers speak more to sons BUT mothers speak more
in total so girls hear a lot more words than boys by age 5.

The recent LENA study (2018) found that children who had more two-way conversations correlated
with higher language scores, comprehension scores and school achievement. The conclusion of this
was that engaging children in two way conversation is the most powerful way to develop language
and stimulate cognitive development. I wondered to myself - “could this link to having a reading buddy
like the one mentioned in the National Science Teachers Association article Improving Science Reading
Comprehension?”

Near the end of the session I had a bit of a chat with a teacher next to me from Henderson Intermediate
- she’s been recording herself read along with a text, so lower-ability readers can read along with her at
any time. An example of this can be seen here.

Strategies to include in class:  

• The opportunity to write freely and safely (in pairs, with an audience they trust) for just 3 or 4 mins.
• How would you parent your mother?
• A list of class improvements for the Principal?
• Let them try to write something funny in just two sentences, judge based class laughs.
• Anything you would investigate or invent if you could.
• Should we use genetic engineering to create more food for growing populations?
• If we had the power with science to bring people back to life, who would you bring back?
• Which extinct species would you bring back and why?
• Other science topics they could “freestyle” about:
• Everybody can do science.
• Potential research subjects should be told about risks AND benefits of the projects.
• New technology can change cultural values and social behaviour.
• Any belief about the world is as valid as any other.
• Animals should not be used as research subjects.
• The international community should enforce laws to prevent further global warming.
• Companies should be allowed to drill for oil in protected wilderness areas.
• Cloning of humans should be allowed.
• Funding for future space programs should be reduced.
• Unwanted, frozen, human embryos should be used for genetics research.

Use STORIES in class!!! 

Real life stories and storytelling of real people, or real people in to tell stories, or get some men in to read out loud, or get people in to talk about how they read in their different jobs.

Give INTERESTING CONTEXTS for writing; one guy dressed up as a pirate and then was really gruff for 5 mins, told kids to get under the desks, and read excerpts from a slave trader’s diary from in history.

Give safe and respectful OPPORTUNITIES for writing.

Increasing two-way conversation (GENUINE, NOT teacher-driven, closed-answer questioning) is the most powerful way to develop language.

Boys need care and consequences; some need more than others. Be firm and fair for boys.

Build boys up and make them feel like being part of a winning learning team; “in our class we always” and “I expect.”

And those are all the things I learned during my professional development today, which I feel is quite a lot compared to some other sessions! 

Learn - Research - Literature Review

Literacy in Science - Minnesota STEM Teacher Centre

The list of strategies and tools from the Minnesota STEM Teacher Centre include a lot that have
previously been mentioned, so I have omitted them. The remaining, previously unmentioned
strategies are:

KWL- a graphic that helps students identify prior knowledge , establish a purpose for reading
and summarize or synthesize what they have learned (K = what I already know, W = what I want
to learn, L = what I learned).

Posing questions of the text (Lee & Spratley, 2010).

Learn - Research - Literature Review

Integrating Literacy Strategies into Science Instruction by the American Museum of Natural History.

This source was a website rather than an article, and it included links to six different literacy-boosting
activities which I’ve also linked straight through to here.

Paraphrasing - The teacher should select a text that is not overly complex for students. The goal of
that first lesson is for students to experience what it feels like to paraphrase successfully; first orally to
a partner without annotating in the margins.

Summarising - determining importance while reading a text. Summarising large sections of text or a
full text is a strategy that helps readers make meaning of complex material. If a reader can’t summarise
then that’s an indication they need to stop and use a comprehension-repair strategy before moving on.
Students could first try and summarise to a partner. Eventually they can move on to written summaries.

Interactive Reading - Interactive read-aloud that a student can do with a peer, with little invasion by
a teacher. They are given a text and a set of instructions which include when to stop, what to do; e.g.
sketch based on some information, underline the most important sentence in a paragraph, paraphrase
a section for a partner, write a summary each and compare.

Vocabulary Instruction - Our science-teacher-instinct may be to front load unfamiliar terms and get
students to research definitions for new vocabulary. Research suggests that the best approach is to
thoughtfully plan the learning sequence so it involves students observing or investigating phenomena
PRIOR to presenting definitions, or having students construct their own definitions (with teacher support)
from their own observations and new experiences.

Writing a Scientific Explanation - An explanation tool is provided on their website that looks quite useful!