A new take on 'literacy learning'

Today's Literacy PD with Dr Ian Hunter was fascinating.

Some opening statements:

"Good readers make good writers" ..  it's a myth!!

However, "Good readers read a lot good writers write a lot".

We discussed perceived shortfalls in boys’ writing and came up with this list:

• Ability to plan/structure an argument and link ideas together
• the logic of deeper thinking (or they can say it but they can’t write it)
• Range of technical/subject vocabulary (meta language)
• Ability to structure sentences with simple grammar
• Lack of general knowledge.. do we prepare our juniors sufficiently wrt general/world knowledge

First weapon to improve writing is the questions we ask, and how we phrase those questions.

The question you ask effectively ‘trains’ the students in analytical thinking skills. Boys will write the way we model. Hence our own writing skills are paramount to our boys' improved writing,. and their improved results.

There is no correlation between engagement and confidence. With boys confidence is the route to success.

The best pattern of paragraph length is short intro, shorter paras, one good e.g. per para,

40 130 130 130 etc this rains boys for thinking skills. Most over write.

Conclusion should be as long as a body paragraph.

Regardless of whether external exam or internal we should impose word limits on all tasks to develop better writing skills.

Year 11 650

Year 12 800

Year 13 1000

Maybe Art and PE require a few more words.

This is harder work but you reclaim the ground as a teacher. The boys will learn to be sharper writers. Train by active policy of refusal. Imposing word limits will push boys to use their subject language. Boys are being overworked and are expected to write far too many words.

This was a fascinating PD session, successfully engaging staff and boys in ways I've never seen before. The number of emails I've had from staff commenting on how good they thought the PD was has been huge. They were engaged by both the presentation style, leadership, and practical nature of the presentation material.

This won't end here. It's the beginning of the next phase in our own long term literacy development project.

GoogleDocs assessment and risktaking

This year it fell to me to set and mark our large Level 2 Economics internal assessment. Normally I've had a colleague do this while I set and mark all of the formative assessment for external standards covered by the course. It seemed like a fair split of workload with which we were both comfortable.

The Level 2 Economics course is arguably a course in logic and philosophy as much as it is about economics. The external standards all count for UE literacy credits in writing which signals very clearly the writing expectations that students must meet.

In writing this year's assessment I decided to change things significantly by assessing online using Google Docs and an assignment format rather than an in class paper based written test. I was prompted in part by observation of colleagues' evolutions of assessment format, and also by our previous Moderation report which suggested that an assignment format might produce better outcomes for the students.

So here am I sitting supervising the boys in class as they work on their assessments. I was very nervous going into the exercise - this is a brand new experience for me, and quite a risk, but risk taking is something that we need much more of in education. My perception of risk is heightened by the fact that I lose some control over the process, that I hand control of more of the process over to the students. That's hard - as teachers most of us are at the very least closet control freaks at heart. However I have put in place a strong positive culture of working and thinking, I have emphasised the need for each boy to produce his own work. We have discussed the implications of using other people's work, both acknowledged and unacknowledged. And I have technical processes at hand to help where I suspect that collusion etc may have occurred. There does come a point at which we need to set our learners free and let them fly. They need to 'show their mettle'.

The intensity, the concentration, the output, are all truly prodigious. As with all of the formative writing that the classes had completed previously, the volume of writing appears to be significantly more than we would have seen in the past on paper. The quality will be judged when I mark the work next week of course.

GoogleDocs and the development of thinking and wriitng

One of our school curriculum goals over the past three years has been the development of staff skills in the use of critical literacies (including deeper thinking and analysis, critical questioning, and writing) with the aim of improving NCEA performances. My subject area is economics. In my classes I have been working to develop tools that promote a better standard of analysis and writing from students.

My approach has encompassed three strategies:

1. Creating a writing scaffold based upon best advice from my English teaching colleagues on how to structure a paragraph, using the S.E.X.  (Statement, Explanation, eXample) framework
2. Applying the SOLO framework to enhance the quality of student thinking and analysis.
3. The use of GoogleDocs as the writing tool.
4. Providing improved feedback to students (according to Hattie, feedback has a high effect size in terms of its impact on learning ("Visible learning for teachers: Maximising impact on learning", John Hattie, P255) ).

As the three external economics standards at Level 2 now count for UE literacy, it seemed natural that good writing should be an imperative of the development of thinking in economics.

Philosophically, I believe that NCEA as an assessment framework is fundamentally about thinking (which is not to say that every subject area has got that right with every standard). I also believe that thinking cannot take place in the absence of knowledge (although I was challenged in this idea at the recent Edutech conference. Is it 'knowledge' of 'knowing' that is the new imperative?). So the development of students' ability to reason within the knowledge framework of economics seems to me to be my 'main game'.

Research suggests that we write more when we write electronically, and we write better (for and example of the research see "Meta-analysis: Writing with computers 1992-2002", Goldberg, Russell and Cook, December 2002).

Many of my colleagues and I had noted the minimalist imperative that has pervaded teenage boys' writing. In addition my own hand writing has always been at best deplorable, and so when marking their work my feedback was both minimal in volume, and at best difficult to read. I therefore felt that if I could get boys writing electronically I was likely to see better writing from them. I also believed that I was more likely to give them more effective feedback, feedback that they could tread and act upon.

My first step was to set up an electronic task structure that used the SOLO framework. I created a series of appropriate questions that evolved through the year as students built their base knowledge. These were physically structured into a table format.

These questions were set up in a master document that I created in GoogleDocs. The table allowed students to structure their answer using our paragraph structure, and also provided a dedicated space in which I could write feedback.

As the subject of economics is a 'high user' of graphical models (and the GoogleDocs draw tools are not yet as sophisticated as I would like) I provided a series of diagram/model templates that students could use. They are required to copy/paste the appropriate template into their answer, and then reference it in their writing.

The tasks are then arranged in course order, with headings that are set into a table of contents at the start of the document. The document also starts off with a simple reminder of how the SOLO framework works, and an exemplar on how it is used.

Finally I shared the document with all students in my classes using the Hapara 'Teacher Dashboard'.

The results have been very positive. Boys write more, and they write more effectively/coherently.

Here is a snapshot of some writing:

I also give more and better feedback, much more akin to 'coaching' (in the spirit of best practice with formative assessment there are no grades allocated for this work):

Conclusions:

1. Student thinking and writing has improved.
2. The quality and quantity of my feedback has improved.
3. Overall NCEA grades have improved
4. Student engagement in their writing seems to have improved (I have NO empirical evidence to support this by the way, simply that age old, but much over rated, teacher 'feeling').
5. I have no means of determining whether the use of GoogleDocs has been the major contributor or not.

Overall however, in the absence of valid replicable research data, I would still find it hard to abandon this tool as an effective means of developing improved student thinking and writing.

Google Add-ons .. wow!!!

Today a good colleague introduced me to a new Google Add-on - 'Texthelp - Study Skills'. I showed the tool to two classes today, and frankly they were wowed.

Here's the problem that has been looking for this solution. As a laptop school our students now mostly take notes most of the time mostly on their laptops.. you get the idea. Our concerns have included their ability to keep their work organised, and to retrieve that work and use it purposefully when revising.

So they have notes that they may have taken in GoogleDocs, or Word (mostly), and then there are those articles that we have distributed via our learning management system Moodle as pdfs.

I showed the boys how to:

• Import a pdf into their Google Drive and convert into a Google Doc. Of course the tool can be used directly with their own notes if they have used Google Docs to take notes in the first place, no conversion required.
• Highlight using the Add-on "Texthelp - Study Skills"

• Collate their highlights into a summary document using the Add-on
• Finally (and this isn't the Add-on) to write their own summary/synthesis of their highlights in order to cement their learning.

What a great way to engage students with text. Interestingly I was attending some staff PD this afternoon, and grabbed an online journal article to support the topic we were discussing. My first response was to import it into my Google Drive, covert it, and start annotating using this tool. Great.

'Anticipatory reading guides' and literacy development

Twenty-first century technology is making communication ever easier as it connects us around the globe. The fact that we are capable of communicating more easily does not however mean that communication itself becomes easier. Good communication has always (and most probably always will) demanded the skills to decode for meaning, and to express meaning and deep thinking.

The NZ national curriculum identifies five key competencies:

·       thinking

·       using language, symbols, and texts

·       managing self

·       relating to others

·       participating and contributing

“Using language symbols and text “is a nice ‘eduspeke’ way of talking about communication, and we probably most commonly associate the first two with our academic work, although all are important as the bases for those behaviours that generate success.

The KCs are intended to underpin our work in all areas of the curriculum, and this in itself makes us all teachers of literacy in some way shape or form, albeit that individual subject literacies might vary across learning areas.

In those subjects that are text rich the traditional skills of reading and writing are brought into relief and coupled with the emphasis on critical thinking conversation easily transitions to the term critical literacy (although the exponents of ‘critical literacy’ would no doubt take me to task for too lose a use of the term).

My basic ‘thesis’ when it comes to literacy concepts is that secondary teachers in New Zealand have not traditionally been trained as teachers of their subject literacies. It is in my opinion one of many fundamental flaws in our pre-service teacher education. I am no exception to this claim, and so have had to work hard to up skill myself. I’ve had to become the learner; that’s refreshing.

My first attempts at improving student literacy came from the development of more effective writing scaffolds and tools.

More recently I have shifted my focus to promoting reading for meaning. While completing a ‘Secondary literacy’ course run by UC Ed+ several years ago I became acquainted with a nice tool called the ‘Before and after’ grid that promotes reading for meaning.

The grid looks like this:

Before reading Place an X under either Agree or Disagree, reflecting your pre-reading opinion on each statement.

After reading Place an X under either Agree or Disagree, reflecting your reading opinion on each statement. Find the evidence from the reading to support your view after reading. Copy and paste the evidence into the right hand column

Agree	Disagree	Statement	Agree	Disagree	Supporting evidence
		1.
		2.
		3.
		4.
		5.
		6.

(Blogger formatting limitations have confounded me here, but you can find the grid on the TKI page).

The process is as follows:
1. Select the reading that you intend to use. 2. Identify a series of statements that relate to the reading. These are pasted into the ‘Statement’ column. Where appropriate (and it may not always be so) use the SOLO framework to ensure that you cover both the surface and deeper thinking that comes form the article. Don’t just seek regurgitation of fact. 3. Before allowing the students to read the material that you have selected, ask the students to read the statements, and then decide whether they agree or disagree with the statements. Check the appropriate column on the left hand side of the table. When I do this in class time (usually it is done at home) I ask them to complete this part in silence so tat their response represents what THEY currently think as individuals. 4. Now have the students read the resource material. They must then decide whether they still agree or disagree with the statements that you made. They mark their new thinking in one of the two columns on the right hand side. They must also identify the evidence in the article that supports their view. This evidence is written in to the ‘Supporting evidence’ column on the right. 5. Ask students to highlight those rows where they have changed their minds as a result of reading the resource material These rows essentially represent ‘new learning’ for the students.

Now this is NOT an original resource. I have blatantly copied it from the one supplied at the Secondary Literacy course. I have found the grid presented as an ‘Anticipatory reading guide', on TKI.

I have now added an additional element. In a box below the reading I pose a question based on the reading, and ask the students to answer that question. They are encouraged to use evidence from the article to support their answer. This tests their learning/understanding from the reading.

My early work with this tool was undertaken on paper. However it was a very simple exercise to adapt this to a Google Docs format. The tables were easily drawn into Google Docs, and it has been a simple matter to paste suitably attributed reading material into the same doc. It became a matter of doing a ‘copy and paste’ when finding the supporting evidence, but that is of little import as they must have read the evidence in order to understand whether or not it supports their decision. The Google tool gave me the opportunity to give more detailed feedback to students on the Google Doc.

I developed a document that contained a series of these tasks, with a ‘Table of Contents’ at the beginning, so students can easily go to the task I want them to complete. Topics are now introduced using the 'Before and after reading' grid, and I use the approach to help students to dig more deeply into readings on more complex topics, especially what I would call 'real world' readings written by experts in the chosen topic.

The use of the Google Docs tool means that I get better written responses where I pose the final question to test understanding. I also seem to get better reading responses as students read the material more carefully and thoughtfully. Obviously I can't claim that the use of eLearning tools has done this, but it's interesting speculation isn't it.