Describing and Explaining the changes or tweaks I have made in my practice along the way.

 Describing and Explaining the changes or tweaks I have made in my practice along the way.

Inquiry question: Will a focus on spelling conventions foster an environment where word consciousness strengthens connections to the learning?

My Thought Process

When I first undertook this inquiry it was to enable my students to have the confidence to be able to use the language the student wanted to use in their writing. In discussions with Robyn Anderson she had also noticed the same scenario within her groups, so we decided we would do a shared Teachers Inquiry. As we shared the classroom this made sense, however activities that were implemented in her groups did not translate in my groups and vice versa.  As a consequence we shared the focus but our implementation was individualised.  

Initial Thoughts of How I Could Achieve My Goal

I was under the naive impression that changing the students confidence in spelling and new language could be done by phonics and 'everyday rules' of spelling conventions.  This however was not the case.  I implemented the use of our school's Steps program ensuring it was timetabled each day as well as entering specific words we were looking on top of their assigned Steps work.  

While Robyns groups were working with affixes and suffixes we were working with beginning phonemes eg ph and f.  After looking at some examples of how that would work, I designed a form for my year 7/8 year group. I thought this would aide in my Teacher Inquiry but it didn't. I had once again over thought what my students needed and put too much on the task sheet and it became too confusing (not only for my students but for myself). 

Changes and Tweaks

I needed to make a few tweaks to the task to enable it to be an effect resource for my students.  This worked for part of the task but not the whole task. My students wanted to learn, but they wanted to learn words not the sounds of the words because they had already done that in the journers. So back to the drawing board, we played a form of a game. I choose a letter we would work with and gave a few examples of high-frequency words and the groups then added to those words by calling out words they knew starting with the same letter - this not only worked but was fun and gave the students some confidence that they knew more words than they thought they did and they could spell them too which was a bonus.

Children must learn to spell some “high-frequency” words conventionally if writing competencies are to develop (Croft, 1983). These high-frequency words are best learnt as a component of writing and not as a result of studying isolated lists of words as this enables teaching that is responsive to the individual child (Croft, 1983). Developmentally, children should be learning to spell words they almost know. These words will fall naturally within the child’s zone of proximal development, which refers to the gap between what a child can do independently and what can be achieved with the help of a teacher (Wood, 1988).

Language Experience

A change in my practice was recognising that when I was having conversations with my students they were taking on board new language that was in our conversations and I was making new discoveries about my students - making stronger connections to their worlds, therefore enabling me to change how I plan my lessons.  

Ashton-Warner (1963) referred to the conversation between the teacher and the child as a “passionate interchange of talk” (p. 66), saying, “I reach a hand into the mind of the child, bring out the stuff I find there, and use that as our first working material” (p. 34). 

At times I think I have taken for granted that the students prior knowledge would have included some of the language we were reading as some of it was what I would consider 'everyday talk'.  I had to change how I was having conversations to think explicitly about what was being said and how I could use that information to inform my planning decisions. 

Changing my Target Group

Looking at Time Point 4 it came apparent that one of my target group did not have the correct data for me to analyse.  I decided to take that student out of my numbers which in turn changed my data. Time Point 1 and 2 Data.   

Language Experience: Teaching for the Integration of Early Literacy Learning by Using What Children Know to Develop Active Problem Solving