Focus for the Manaiakalani Collaborative Inquiry

Task: Collaborate with your school’s leadership team and colleagues to identify areas where your inquiry will make a powerful contribution to wider school and cluster goals.

During a discussion with the leadership team we decided that due to the poor outcome of our students' achievement in Maths, my inquiry should focus on the year 5-8 senior team where the results showed a gap in the students' learning and hopefully my teaching as inquiry method will make a difference to our students' learning.

This focus aligns with Manaiakalani's Collaborative Inquiry number 6, 'lift the achievement in maths for all students years 1-13'.

My team and I want to find out what caused the gap in our data at the end of 2019.

There will be a lot of issues I will look into such as our school structure, school resources and equipment, teacher understanding of content and curriculum, the existence of a differentiated teaching programme in our school, professional training, delivery of the full maths curriculum, engagement by students and teachers, teacher reflection and evaluation of appropriate teaching practice, student voice and so forth.

Once we have decided what factors contributed to our poor student academic outcomes, we need to put in place an intervention plan that resolves these issues.

For an investigation to be successful I need the support of the teachers. I put this idea forward to our colleagues in the staff meeting and they were happy to support me in this Inquiry.

An Inquiry Stocktake

Use the ‘inquiry stocktake’ doc to reflect on and write about what you aim to learn about inquiry this year.

Identifying valued learning outcomes (VLOs) to focus on:
My aim here is to learn about, with other colleagues in the Manaiakalani community, what the best learning outcomes for our students at Ruapotaka would be. I'd like to hear their viewpoints, ideas and feelings about how they identify their outcomes and why they have chosen a particular outcome.
Profiling students’ learning in those VLOs:
Here I want to know who our target students are and to track both their progress and achievement over time.
Generating hypotheses (especially teaching):
I have my own thoughts what the hypotheses might be and I would like to know if similar hypotheses have been generated and how successful were they in their conclusion.
Testing hypotheses (investigating school senior team teaching):
This is an area I am looking forward to and I hope that sharing and talking to my colleagues both within my school as well as my colleagues within the Manaiakalani community will help me understand what is going on with our students at Ruapotaka.
Using research literature and other sources to identify more effective approaches:
Data is easily accessible and offers guidelines towards our students academic achievement. My biggest concern is gaining access to readings especially those from the University (which is not so easily accessible unless I am a student) to gain a better understanding of the issues going on with our students at Ruapotaka.
Implementing new approaches:
We currently have staff who have not had Professional Development (example: maths PLD) and we need to create a consistent teaching approach that involves a variety of methods, programmes that are challenging and targeted, regular data analysis and to take a hard look at ourselves as teachers and professionals.
Monitoring (and tweaking) new approaches:
Through this inquiry I want to know if my hunch that student achievement improves when consistent teaching approaches get used across the school (such as differentiated teaching approaches, talk moves, regular monitoring of students, regular self-reflection, analysing data for where to next) have merit.
Evaluate shifts in own teaching: Using data, my colleagues teaching techniques, self-reflection, children's feedback etc.
I hope that the approaches I take benefit the students. I feel if I follow the inquiry model, do my readings, talk and share with my colleagues, hopefully I will have made a difference to our students.
Evaluate shifts in student learning:
This is the part I normally feel anxious. Have I done my job well? Did the students make a shift? How much impact did we make? Will the students new learnings stick?
Keep a clear and detailed record of all stages of inquiry:
Like any scientific research that involves a hypothesis, a detailed journal account of the stages, procedures and process that I have taken is recorded with accuracy and with evidence so that others can learn from my inquiry.