Qu. #2 - Why we judge this to be the most important and catalytic issue of learning for this group of learners this year...

Robyn Anderson was reminded of the Reading for Enjoyment survey she did last year to get to know our learners as readers. In a conversation with Robyn, she suggested that we could try to create a similar survey that would help us get to know our learners as spellers. Our Principal understands our concerns with regards to spelling abilities in our current class and is fully supportive of our proposed inquiry into word consciousness. 

The results of this survey are below.

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We judge this to be the most important and catalytic issue of learning for this group of learners this year as the results here affirm our initial thinking that a deficit in word consciousness and a 'fear' of getting words wrong, limits the level of vocabulary used in independent writing, and causes meaning to be lost in reading. It will be interesting to analyse the self efficacy rating and the spelling level given when the e-asTTle writing assessment data is complete. (NB: Our plan is to look at the current and historical data of the e-asTTle writing, PAT Reading and the Peter's spelling test to identify trends). 

Question 1: Student Inquiry Focus

 

This year Robyn Anderson and I will be undertaking a collaborative inquiry. What this will look like exactly at this stage is still in the early stages although we do know our purpose. This year we want to find out if a focus on spelling conventions will foster an environment where word consciousness strengthens connections to the learning.

We teach a Year 7/8 class with 40 learners, all who bring different connections to the conventions of spelling to the table. We know from observing students from past years and  noticing the actions of our learners this year stop writing completely as well as stop reading and avoid sharing back to the class when they lose the connection to words needed to continue to make sense of the learning. There are many reasons as to why this happens but rather than focus solely on that, we want to focus on how we can prevent this pattern from continuing as time goes on and being a challenge that becomes too much to overcome. Our thinking is that if we begin to develop these skills and understandings, the transition to language of instruction used in Y9 may be strengthened by stronger connections to word knowledge.

Once we had decided on our inquiry focus this year, Robyn and I spoke with Anna Salmon, our Reading Recovery teacher about the barriers children in the junior school face with spelling, and how she helps the students she is working with to overcome these barriers. We came away from a very rich learning conversation with lots of ideas to pull together a tentative pathway forward. Here are the notes we made to help us formulate a plan going forward.

'Word consciousness involves being aware and interested in words and word meanings (Anderson & Nagy, 1992; Graves & Watts-Taffe, 2002) and anything new is a matter of linking this new knowledge in some way with the already known (Laurence R. Sipe, 2001). Individuals who are word conscious are motivated to learn new words and able to use them skilfully '(Sourced here). Our challenge now is to find out why their is a gap in their knowledge and how we can close that gap. Robyn and I co-constructed a survey that we plan to use to get to know our learners as spellers. To do this we will be looking at shift or change in:

• Disposition
• Data
• Word consciousness
• Student voice
• Strategies used to make sense of new or unfamiliar words

Further Reading/PLD to grow my own knowledge kete:

• Supporting students to become competent and confident spellers - Louise Dempsy

• The Vocabulary-Rich Classroom: Modeling Sophisticated Word Use to Promote Word Consciousness and Vocabulary Growth
• Invention, convention, and intervention: Invented spelling and the teacher's role