Comment Threads

 To follow on from the post in June, after several months of practicing our open and closed questions students are beginning to develop confidence and independence when trying to gather more information.

At first the first comment was the focus to engage the original blog poster to share some extra information.

The next step was the original blog poster was to engage that person after the reply to see how the relationship can lead to a shared understanding or learning activity.

Students are now explaining the purpose of this for their learning, and splitting the focus between the post itself and the comment.

The next step will be to simplify the post to share a succinct explanation, recount or report to develop longer threads to unlock information in a meaningful way.

Open and Closed Questions

 2020 has definitely been an interesting year, and that has delayed slightly a focus in to getting students to gather or obtain information from their peers.

Distance learning allow us to gauge independence when developing a blog post or a text type based on the purpose they wanted for their audience.

It was abundantly clear that consistent years of being made to assess the ability to recount had 2 negative effects. First the students seem disengaged and not really genuinely wanting to recount their learning. They also seemed to lack the ability to correctly formulate the structure of  a range of other informative text types such as information report or explanations. This is where the previous blog post on the structural prompts and help came from.

The Next step was to see how even a well written blog post can be unlocked for further information and learning. We parked the idea that by now it is well ingrained in our students that they know how to write a comment. Greeting, something nice, or learned and perhaps some next steps.

Commenting allows people to build each other up and give positive affirmation, though is that going to increase shift or knowledge! Short answer is probably not...

So to start on this journey we needed to unlock how to question to gather information, before we could even entertain the idea of threads of learning conversations. 

Open vs Closed questions is where we started.

The first piece of learning was how to start a question as that determines 95%of the time what information you will gather, and how useful it will be to you.

Once we got the hang of some simple investigation type starters we looked at the purpose of what you are trying to do. Are you trying to confirm or reaffirm something, or was there a piece of the puzzle missing that together could be unlocked.

UPDATE Blog post structure

Over the past couple of months we have noticed that student's blog structures have improved. More capable students are drafting blog posts that clearly use the correct structure for the text type. Less capable students are drafting blog posts that demonstrate at least a rudimentary understanding that there is a certain order for each kind of text.

The aspect we haven't observed yet is an increase in the use of appropriate language features. That is our next step for teaching blog post writing...or rather writing the text types recount, information report, and explanation.

To aid this process, I have updated the Blog Guide poster to include the language features and examples of those features.

Blog post structure

Recounts, information reports, explanations. How do we write them? In spite of having taught these text types in detail consistently for several years, we are still giving feedback on the same aspects of these text types. To scaffold students into self managing their usage of these text types, I (Greg) have developed a diagram/ flow chart showing the structure, and an example of recounts, information reports, and explanations in one place.

Students will be referred to this diagram for feedback on these text types for their blog posts.

Increasing learning conversation and literacy through blogging and commenting | Teacher Inquiry 2020

Accelerated learning, the holy grail being sought by schools in the Manaiakalani cluster. At Panmure Bridge School, our data has shown acceleration particularly in Writing. This acceleration has been aided in recent years thanks to a flattening of the 'Summer Slide', related to implementation of the Summer Learning Journey (SLJ). Grant Oglivie and Greg Wong's joint teacher inquiry for 2020 is to increase students' other forms of literacy, i.e. reading and oral, by leveraging learning conversations through blogging and commenting as used in the SLJ. The first step in this process is to codify and teach a system for blogging, then do the same for commenting.

The system for blog posting has been decided as using the recount, information report, and explanation text types taught in the Writing curriculum. There are several reasons for using these text types rather than developing another structure. Using these text types will compound on Writing lessons, providing students and teachers with more opportunity to refine students' writing techniques and find areas needing improvement. Working on these text types so frequently frees up Writing lessons to be dedicated to the grammar, style development, and the remaining text types (narrative, persuasion, and procedural). Finally, areas to be commented on are made available when students have written their posts in a well structured and thought out manner.

Evidence from students' drafting process will be used to inform the exact teaching points needed and when to continue to each phase. This process is likely to take a whole school year and possibly reach into 2021 to establish good routines in this year's year 5 students. Small scale improvements are likely to be seen by mid 2020, with long term improvements appearing as students reach Years 7 & 8.

Student Voice

At the conclusion of the plays the students were asked some very basic questions and put their hands up. Eye closed to allow them to be honest and not just copy their mates.

Surprisingly the larger majority of student found the 5 weeks extremely difficult. On the other hand the large majority enjoyed the process and wanted to do more.

After this students were ask several more questions to blog about. Reading the responses it was pleasing to see that overall the students perceived they had improved in their oral language. Was this necessarily true........Short answer is NO! Even though they enjoyed it, were they ready to take on Broadway?? Absolutely not, but there was enough positive energy and excitement that it will be interesting to watch their improvement over the next 5 weeks. Students wanted more so they have been given the remainder of the term to put together one last performance. Surely 4.5 weeks of practice will be better than a 2 week period......... Only time will tell.

Overall however ever student took part and didn't shy away from the challenge.

Oral language through performance

An under utilised and extremely good resource are the plays in the school journals. Why?? You can search reading level, topic and amount of parts in each play. This makes planning easier.

These were used to enable students to develop their oral language skills in a realistic setting, that they had on most cases not been exposed to.

Students started with just understanding the vocabulary in the text and how it was used to tell a story. Something they have always done through guided reading!

The next stage was to learn their part, this proved very quickly to be the challenge. They had never been asked to learn lines before. Why is this important? They quickly realised learning their part in isolation was difficult but learning as a group made the "cues" easier and soon the flow came to their reciting. Listening was a skill they didn't first think they needed, but soon it was as big a part as say their lines. Another part that helped was they also needed to have an under study partner. Once they had their lines, students were tasked with thinking about the character interactions and expression of certain lines.

Once they were learnt we could go on to expression and delivery of lines. This was the fun stuff! Students experimented with anger, sarcasm, excitement etc; Something they found they never did when reading before.

This all tied together over a 2 week period, with a "show" at the end. No lighting, no props, and costumes, just voice and body to tell the story.