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The FISO Improvement Cycle is at the heart of effective PLCs. By identifying a problem of practice and setting a SMART achievable goal we can work to increase teacher knowledge and capacity and improve student outcomes.
Writing
Writing
THE CAKE
How to begin an Inquiry Cycle?
Start with the 'cake'. This will be a large data set and may be a whole school focus that highlights a particular problem of practice or area for improvement in student growth. In this example the 'cake' was NAPLAN results that highlighted writing as a focus area or 'slice'.
THE SLICE
As a leadership PLC we realised that we did not have a whole school consistent approach to teaching writing. This meant that there wasn't consistency across the year levels and students and teachers did not have a common language to refer to. After some research and professional readings we decided to implement the 6+1 Traits of Writing across the school in an attempt to improve consistency, teacher capacity and student outcomes.
Once a whole school approach had been implemented we needed to find a way to monitor the impact and ensure teaching was effective in improving student outcomes across the school. We faced the following challenges:
- How would we ensure that the approach to writing was implemented consistently?
- How would we make sure that we were covering all curriculum areas whilst using the language of the traits?
- How would we create useful assessments to monitor student learning growth?
- What data would be effective and useful for us to analyse and monitor learning?
THE CRUMB
In PLCs teachers worked together to create a checklist style rubric using resources from the 6+1 Traits, James Ferguson and the Victorian Curriculum. We created a checklist for each text type across all year levels of the curriculum. Teachers used this checklist to assess student writing samples and highlight any areas of weakness or opportunities for growth. Whilst the checklist was useful the data was hard to interpret. This led us to our next challenge which was to find a way to collate the data we had collected into a useable and easy to interpret format.
THE CRUMB
The Year One PLC created a spreadsheet to collate all the data collected from the writing samples that students had created. We used the information from theses samples (cold writes) to focus in on what students needed to know about writing and created a lesson sequence based on the needs of the cohort specifically.
For the learning to be really focused we needed to drill down deeper into our 'crumb'. When looking at the results of our three focus traits (organisation, voice and conventions) we were able to draw these conclusions and target our teaching accordingly. -->
It was important for us as a teaching group to carefully monitor our consistency and ensure that we had a shared understanding of what we were teaching and assessing. We completed professional analysis of other writing samples and came up with a common understanding of what each of these criteria looked like. We also monitored student learning with weekly discussions and reflected on our lessons accordingly.
Results
Results
Once the teaching and learning cycle was complete students completed a post-test sample of writing. The post-test was completed under the same conditions as the pre test. We again as a team analysed the results and found the following outcomes:
Noticings:
- students had demonstrated growth in all areas of writing despite our main focus being three specific traits.
- the organisation of students' work had grown from 24%- 89% success rate
- voice showed the greatest improvement with an increase from 16% to 85%
- conventions increased from 25%- 56%
Wonderings:
- is there a way to use this Inquiry Cycle to track long term growth as well as short term?
Long Term Growth
Long Term Growth
What started as an Inquiry Cycle became our common practice for each writing unit that we taught. This meant that we were able to track long term growth. We chose the Conventions trait to track and monitored our effectiveness across each pre-test to see if students were retaining what they had learnt.
Whole School Implications
Whole School Implications
- Consistent whole school approach to teaching writing
- Increased teacher knowledge
- An effective and consistent method of assessment and data collection for writing
- Increased use of writing data and discussions
Year 3
Year 3
2018
Year 3
Year 3
2019
Year 5
Year 5
2018
Year 5
Year 5
2019
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