Welcome to the Mount Annan Christian College Junior School Teacher Blog.

This blog has been developed by our staff to deliver an alternative approach to Professional Learning. We will be exploring a variety of new and innovative approaches to education. Our major focus will be on examining the changing paradigms in education. We hope to share our ideas with each other whilst challenging our current beliefs and practices. We welcome comments from Educators around the globe and look forward to sharing new thoughts and ideas.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Daily 5 as a Teaching Learning Project at MACC

So it's official! We have set Daily 5 up as a Teaching and Learning Project at MACC. We believe so greatly as a whole staff that the success of Daily 5 to date is worth tracking and worth reporting on.

The aims for our project are as follows:

1. To improve students motivation and stamina in Reading.

2. To ensure all students meet the appropriate stage level of achievement in NSW BOS Reading outcomes.

3. To develop new teaching pedagogy based on current professional research in the area of Reading.

We are well underway with this project and have formalised our methods of collecting data. As a staff we decided to take a four pronged approach to collecting this data. We wanted it to be formative data that was useful along the way and not collected just for the sake of proving the point that we are all convinced of...that DAILY 5 WORKS, but to give us some quality information about our students and their progress as well as some diagnostic information about their individual needs to help us in planning for each student.

Here are our four prongs:

1. Standardised Reading Assessment using The Waddington Standard Reading Test 1.

2. Reading Recovery Levels following regular benchmarking from Running Records.

3. Reading Behaviour Rubrics.

4. Data analysis of individual Pensive's and student reading goals.

Of course we will keep tracking our stamina minutes as we go along and celebrate all the little achievements along the way!

Do you know of any other practices we could use for data collection?

How will you plan/schedule these assessment tasks in your classroom?

Looking forward to your thoughts/comments and reflections!


5 comments:

mrs todd said...

The Pensieve has become a valuable way of documenting the progress of students. Goal setting has become a part of teaching. The other ways of documenting have become valuable way of pinpointing students weaknesses and strengths. They help point the way as to the direction of my class.
Its important to give time to these tasks and building it into Daily 5 has become a valuabe and special time to catch up with individual students.
Asking students how they are going has empowered them to talk about their own learning and how they feel they are going.
Its been great to talk about it and this has been great to use this data collection in teaching and it will be interesting to see the results of all of it.
Kate

Debbie Pope said...

Hi Kate,

You've made some terrific observations there. I think one of the things I am most excited about is the dialogue we have happening with the students. Hearing them talking about their strengths and the areas they believe they need to work on has been so valuable. We have been able to give them the language to talk about it. In many ways we've kind of unlocked the secrets to reading. Again, it all comes back to the initial reading in Daily 5 about the powerfulness of purpose + choice = motivation. Thanks for your continued comitmment to keeping the dialogue going Kate.

Unknown said...

It's so empowering for the kids to make a choice about how to improve their reading, having been given the tools to do so.

Mrs Downes said...

Dear fellow awesome colleagues,
It was great to once again reevaluate what we have found useful, what we want to stop, start and continue in D5. The interesting are what 'What do we want to stop?' we could not find anything. I think this reflects the careful planning, research and preparation involved before we launched D5 this year.

Mrs Downes said...

Dear fellow awesome colleagues,
It was great to once again reevaluate what we have found useful, what we want to stop, start and continue in D5. The interesting are what 'What do we want to stop?' we could not find anything. I think this reflects the careful planning, research and preparation involved before we launched D5 this year.