Unpacking a Student’s Point of Need - Part A

Transcript

Okay, welcome to "Unpacking Students Point of Need Knowing our Students ". This recording is the first of a three-part series of professional learning that's been designed by Bastow. It's being designed to support teachers in Victorian schools who are teaching remotely through from foundation to Level 2. for identifying a student's points of need and using the Victorian Literacy Learning Progressions to allow you to pinpoint a student's place on the learning continuum. Upon establishing a student's point of need, recordings 2B and 2C will then follow on to support your planning and the delivery of a differentiated curriculum in reading and viewing.

While the way that we teach has changed from that face-to-face classroom environment to a remote learning space, best practice really does remain the same. We need to continue to be guided by knowing what effective teachers do in their classrooms. We need to understand what engages students in intellectually challenging work. And while we recognise that the complexity of assessment in the remote space is an issue, we still need to find a way to deliver a differentiated and authentic reading program and we need to use the tools that are available to us via the Department of Education. So today we are going to focus on three core questions to guide us - what information do we need to determine a student's reading skills and behaviour, what tools can we use to determine point of need, and what do we do with the information once we've gathered it?

As always, our work can be structured around the four statewide priorities that have proven to have a significant bearing on the effectiveness of a school. We have excellence in teaching and learning, professional leadership, a positive climate for learning, and community engagement in learning. Through curriculum planning and assessment, we are working towards excellence in teaching and learning. HITS are nothing new to us. We've had them in our mindset for quite some time. But how do we apply them in the remote learning space?

This is a really relevant question to pose today here. In a moment we're going to be demonstrating which tools you can use to determine a student's zone of proximal development and as we do that, you'll notice that we are focusing on the goal setting. Assessment for, as and of learning informs your teaching. And really goal setting is never more important than when we are not able to physically reinforce learning intentions and success criterias inside a traditional face-to-face classroom. Students need to be able to refer themselves to their goals and apply the learning they are doing from home. They need to be able to practise and move towards achieving their goals.

We know from the Victorian Literacy Toolkit that effective reading instruction encompasses a range of teaching practice. We need to provide multiple exposures and support at different points of need for students and the toolkit gives us the how to for that. It really is a guide for speaking and listening, writing and reading, but for today the purpose of our assessment task is focusing on reading and viewing.

So we know in the remote learning environment that teachers have identified a range of barriers which is causing concern for them to be able to identify the level at which a student is reading at or to identify a student's point of need in the area of reading and viewing. The most obvious concern is the inability to conduct an authentic running record.

Many schools are running a mixed asynchronous learning style at this particular point in time, which means that tasks are getting uploaded online and they are completed by the parent and the student at a time that is convenient for them and then fed back to the teacher through online methods or through hard packs. This particular type of learning is difficult for us to be able to use live face-to-face conferencing in order to determine students' points of need. We also have the added complexity that emergent readers need quite a lot of adult support in order to carry out any tasks that are given to them.

So if we can't get accurate running records to benchmark, what do we need to do? We need to shift our thinking. We need to think about the skills that the curriculum seeks to deliver in reading. We know that reading and viewing involves students understanding, interpreting, critically analysing and reflecting upon a range of text genres. We also know that we seek to deliver the development of a range of reading strategies for students to be able to build upon their knowledge. And if we are unable to do running records, where do we start in delivering a new method of assessment? What data can we use?

Well, we do have some data and whilst not ideal, the benchmark at which students were sitting at the end of term 1 is a good starting point. We then can draw on the tools outlined in this professional learning to help determine the students' points of need. The Literacy Learning Progressions are a sequence of indicators that outline the development of literacy skills for emerging to fluent readers. These progressions can be used as a tool to facilitate a deeper understanding of literacy development. They can be used to support all teachers in Victorian schools in developing a comprehensive view of literacy and how literacy skills develop over time. They can guide teachers who are seeking to determine individual students' literacy development. They are not a curriculum document, but rather a tool to assist teachers in developing targeted teaching and learning programs by identifying a point of need and then moving children along the continuum. In order to be successful when assessing reading, there are some key components that need to be considered. As discussed earlier, we need to establish that baseline. What level is the student reading at based on the last running record? 

We take that information and we ask the parents to record students' reading at the allocated level reader and we also ask that they orally retell the story at the end of the recording. We gather information from that recording around fluency, decoding and comprehension. We can gather further information about reading behaviours and skills via student reader responses that have been done either this term remotely or towards the end of term 1. We plot the students on the Victorian Literacy Learning Progressions. We need to break down what you want to know about a student and how you're going to be able to plot them on the progressions and to move them along the learning continuum.

As we are listening to a recording, we are going to focus our attention on fluency, evidence of comprehension strategies being used, and evidence of decoding. We need to explore the Literacy Learning Progressions which can be found via the VCAA website. You can also click on the link at the top of this slide. It will take you straight there. They can be a little tricky to find, so if you don't already have a copy of these on file, I encourage you to download them, save them to your hard drive. You can also download the writing and the speaking and listening. For the purpose of today, we're looking at reading and viewing. Specifically, we're looking here at fluency and we will be plotting students along the continuum here that you see in front of you. 

Now, whilst the continuum for this particular area of reading is from level 1 to level 3, it's important to note that if we're offering a point of need for foundation students who have already established one-to-one matching and are reading with some expression and intonation, we would plot them here also. Now, fluency is an important focus of literacy teaching and can be thought of in two different ways. We're just going to break it down quickly here.

When you're observing your recordings, you can look at fluency in a qualitative way, which means the child's referring to rhythm, phrasing, intonation and naturalness and is using voice for some different characters and mood. So we're referring to the quality of the student's reading there. We also can refer to fluency as a quantitative method referring to the accuracy of a student's reading. So the number of errors compared to the number of correct words will have an impact on their fluency and the rate at which they read. So we know that quality and efficiency together are good indicators of a fluent reader. However, it's not enough. We need more information.

Fluency is dependent upon the ability to actually decode the text, including phonemic awareness, phonics and vocabulary abilities. So fluent readers work with meaningful units such as phrases and clauses as they read. Readers become more fluent when they can quickly and accurately decode the text with ease. The learning progression here describes how a student becomes increasingly proficient in using letter-sound relationships and visual knowledge for code breaking. Phonic knowledge and word recognition are among the range of resources students use as they read increasingly complex texts.

The other progression that we're going to look at today is understanding texts. Part A is for foundation to Level 1 and then there is a part B, which is for Level 2 all the way through to Level 8. You'll note through all of these progressions that you're seeing there are no ages put along the top on that continuum. There is just a starting level, at expected level and an ending level which would be at expected. In between there is an understanding that all students learn at a different rate and are all somewhere different on that continuum.

So now we're ready to put our theory into practice. We have everything we need to try to determine the points of need for a student based on the recording of their reading. This particular recording does not have the retell component, so we will be unable to determine their ability to retell and comprehend the story, but for the purpose of demonstrating, we are still able to find valuable information. Rosanna Golf Links Primary School have been recording students reading aloud for some time.

This is part of a reliable method that they use to determine a student's points of need. As you watch this recording of an emergent reader, look for these key behaviours - the rate at which they read per minute and their accuracy, knowledge of print concepts and text features, are they self-correcting and, if so, which strategies are they using to correct themselves? Is there evidence of reading for meaning. Which fluency characteristics can you identify and is there evidence of decoding taking place?

We're going to listen to the reading now and see what information we can pick up. My Pup. I have a pup. His name is Yap. My name is Em - Emma. Mmm-hmm. I like to - I like my pup. Well done. I like to play with my pup. Yap likes to jump. Yap is on the roof. Yap can not get off the roof. I can not get my pup off the roof. I get my dad to get Yap from the roof. Dad soon gets Yap from the roof. Yap is - Remember, sound it out. Sit - sit in my room. Okay, so what did we learn from our observations from that recording?

We were able to determine that one-to-one correspondence was taking place. The child was successfully decoding CVC words and CVCC words and in fact there were CVVC words being decoded as well. Common sight words were being used accurately. There was evidence of self-correcting. He stopped and checked and went back and sounded out words when he understood that the words did not make sense.

The student has an understanding of the text structure for basic text. He was reading left to right. He was sweeping his finger along and he was able to read from beginning to end. He was observing some punctuation, specifically full stops, and he had basic phrasing of simple sentences. The student can orally segment words and was able to decode and sound out particular words of difficulty.

Okay, so from observing that recording, we're able to gather some information about fluency and determine a point of need. That particular child was able to read aloud a decodable text word by word with an emphasis on one-to-one matching. Whilst limited, there was some intonation and expression. He seemed to show an understanding of the full stop.

So what we now need to do is use your teacher judgment to decide whether the child continues to practise in that particular area of the continuum or is this child ready to move up and to become more familiar with decodable phrasing of two words at a time and paying more attention to expression. There are two parts to understanding text. Part A relates to foundation through to the end of level 1. You then move on to part B, which is level 1 through to the end of level 8. We're looking at part A here and we can identify the processes of reading that this child has been able to demonstrate through the recording includes one-to-one correspondence by pointing to the words. There is some phonic knowledge there.

We had CVC words being decoded, CVVC words and CVCC words being decoded. We also could tell that he was tracking from left to right and using a return sweep. We weren't able to determine if he could make predictions at this point, but we were able to determine that he was able to pause and appeal for support when needed and he did sound out when necessary when self-correcting. He was able to use the sentence boundary punctuation as there was a clear pause between sentences. Therefore, based on this, we can move to the next progression box and we can highlight some of the areas that we can begin to look at defining a reading goal based on the information that we now have.

Now, in this learning progression we see how a student can become increasingly proficient at using letter-sound relationships and visual knowledge for code breaking. Phonic knowledge and word recognition are among the range of resources students use as they read increasingly complex texts. For this particular recording that we were viewing, the evidence was the child being able to use single-letter graphemes and blend common phonemes in order to read VC and CVC words.

For this student, blends and long and short vowels as well as common double letters could potentially be an area for explicit teaching or perhaps it's one of their next reading goals. The next progression column has a wide range of skills that the student needs to work on, so it would be entirely appropriate here to only focus on particular areas and allow fluidity between these progression points.

Okay, so we're going to take the progression indicators that we've identified and apply them to the Victorian curriculum. You can link these progressions to the Victorian-English curriculum directly or you can use what I'm applying here today, the "I can" statements for reading. These statements have been designed to make it easier for teachers to conference with students about their learning goals.

The "I can" statements for reading and writing can be found at the end of this presentation on the resource page. We link the progressions to the "I can" statements that suit this particular set of observations and as you become more efficient in using this method, you can begin to set reading tasks and readers that will assist you to develop students' skills, in particular areas of the progression that are outlined in these continuums.

So what we have now is four "I can" statements derived from the Victorian curriculum that we are able to use to target teaching and to create reading goals for a particular student at a particular point of need. At Rosanna Golf Links Primary School students have been asked to upload images of responses to the text that they are reading remotely during independent reading time. Students are encouraged to record their thinking and any questions or ideas that they've formulated throughout their reading. This particular task was around a non-fiction text that was virtually read via a virtual reading platform to the student.

So once the text was read, the student has been able to demonstrate their capacity to comprehend the text and we will use this information to plot some of the skills along the understanding text continuum. Here we see that they were able to pose questions that were relevant and they were also able to combine their prior knowledge about a topic and make predictions. In addition, they've demonstrated that they have understood some of the knowledge that they have learnt and built upon their existing understanding of a topic.

So based on the progressions for understanding text, the next step is to determine if this student is ready to move along the learning continuum. Teacher judgment is also important and teachers may determine that a student needs to be able to continue to practise a particular skill before moving them along.

Similarly, a teacher can move some of the learning across to the next progression and hold a student back for some of it. The progression points are fluid in nature and allow for flexibility. So whilst this student was able to display an understanding of a text being read by adults, further evidence may be required. Once again, we can use the Victorian curriculum and the "I can" statements to complement the Literacy Learning Progressions, or rather the progressions complement the Victoria curriculum, and establish for us the student B's points of need when planning and teaching comprehension.

So these are the "I can" statements that have been drawn out and, in particular, " I can use comprehension strategies to understand and discuss texts listened to, viewed or read independently" and "I can identify some differences between imaginative and informative texts ". That concludes recording 2a, "Identifying a Student's Point of Need ".

Recording 2b will now help you to further clarify the reading goals you set with your students based on the information and the process that you've learnt here today. Practical examples of putting goals into practice in a remote workshop model will really assist you in the delivery of a high-quality differentiated curriculum in the remote learning environment. I wish you all the best of luck in your remote teaching journey and thank you for joining me here today at Bastow.