Gems from first CoL Meeting

COL Inquiry - Mia Szymanik, Year 6 Teacher,  PES School 2018

Gems from first CoL Meeting

What’s the Big Idea for 2018 ?

“Language in Abundance”, Language Acquisition, development, Transfer and sustaining across school
levels and curriculum domains.

Language in abundance environments ‘drip’ with language availability

and attention, where noticing and relevant use of words allow for

deeper, wider, more specific and precise, context appropriate

language expression…leading to knowing at deeper and broader

levels. Dr. Jannie Van Hees

What is MY responsibility as a COL teacher:

Conduct a mean as inquiry at your level/s in your subject/s

Language in Abundance is the lens

Share it really well

Help each other

Visit online/offline, debate, discuss, challenge, suggest

Russell spoke about how some year 2s didn’t know the concept of a rectangle, and he spoke to a teacher

whos high school students didn’t understand the word texture. This lack of vocab and understanding of

words and concepts is really holding our tamariki back.

Knowing at a deeper and broader level is how you get merit in NCEA. In other words, children need have

be able to not only use a broad range of language but understand the concepts and meaning behind these. 

Language in abundance is your LENS for your inquiry for 2018. 

Rebecca Jesson - Meta Analysis of Inquiries

Teacher practice knowledge is the most powerful knowledge these is, however not everybody gets to

access what is in your head’s easily. How can we use the power of inquiries to feed into what we know

in terms of the research?

 We could use meta-analysis techniques to bring all your studies together, so for we for example,

found that the ways that you worked on NOTICING words, then interrogate this data to see the effect

it has on the students. 

All Inquiry Cycles are intended to:

Address persistent learning challenges

Develop teacher knowledge

Transfer researched approaches into practice in classrooms - researchers can be rubbish at this …

researchers don’t always have an idea of the day-to-day concepts that work in a ‘real-life’ classroom.

You can contribute to what researchers understand - you are trying to get out the applied understanding

about what works in your practice. ULTIMATELY it’s about improving instruction for the tamariki

Improve instruction

Tailor approaches to need

Evaluate the effect of changes - what madeit work, how well did it work, where did it work best?

WHAT IS A META-ANALYSIS

It uses all your inquiries, as individual studies, and combines them, a STUDY of studies. 

Do something that you think is going to make a difference. 

Collect evidence about what we did

Gather effects about what happened for the kids

We need to have something qualitative about how learners engage.. All built into the inquiry framework. 

Language Acquisition & Development as the Inquiry Lens into your subject/level

Dr Jannie van Hees

What LANGUAGE offers a person’s Learning

How Learning offers LANGUAGE CAPABILITY

How much does it matter that language is available? This isn’t a programme, language in abundance

is exactly what it means. ‘Drippingly’ available language. There are conditions that have to be in place.

It isn’t a matter of JUST surrounding children in language. 

I have taken the context of making a simple kite. There are 4 different clips - with MORE or LESS

spoken or written language available.

LEARNING CONDITIONS MAKE A DIFFERENCE

 KNOWLEDGE MAKES A DIFFERENCE - we gain knowledge through WORDS - both written and

spoken. 

Word grow our cognition and knowledge base. Words matter hugely. 

SCENARIO ONE: making a kite - condition: no spoken or written language available.

Basically this was a video with no written words or spoken language of a kite being made. For many of

our children they would struggle with this as they may not know the words for the materials used, they

may not necessarily be able to tell others how to make the kite. There is no context or explanation around

what a kite is. There are no words, nothing to tease out or expand on. 

SCENARIO TWO: making a kite - condition: Written and spoken language 

This video showed a lady giving us instructions on how to make a kite. There were spoken words and

written words, we could slow this video down or pause it to hear the words again or re-read words. There

was some technical language (inches/cm) children need to understand and ‘see’ these concepts in their

head to understand what they mean and to be able to, in the end, correctly make the kite. 

WHAT DOES LANGUAGE OFFER A PERSON?

We often use YouTube language, that has academic and technical language, however we don’t slow

down to look at the words, these are what carry the meaning behind the video. We don’t always slow

down enough to really dig into the meaning of these words. 

HOW MIGHT THIS ‘language in abundance’ work…

We absolutely know this is the rich pickings for them. 

Responding to the message and meaning of what children are saying .. Getting away from all the

‘put your hand up’ .. setting up safe environments to set up the ‘abundance of language, everyone's

contribution is a valuable contribution’

Jannie - always astounded by thinking in children’s brains ig you an get it out. Honour the thinking

and EFFORTS of everyone.

No one should have an inkling that what they have said isn’t as good as someone else's .. everyone 

Talking ALOUD is ALLOWED!

Vocab will not carry if we aren’t in the dialogue of MEANING MAKING.

We don’t have enough voices in the classroom. Seniors should listen to National Radio, BBC, this is

LANGUAGE IN ABUNDANCE.

Jannie was saying how, since listening to National Radio at the age of 14, she KNOWS that this has

allowed her language to FLOURISH.

Are we reading aloud to kids enough? How are you encouraging the love of reading?

I sure have a lot of think about. Jannie is a genius. As a good reader,

and someone who grew up as a complete chatter box of a child, I

sometimes forget that not everyone has has the privilege of the

abundance of language I have been exposed to. As a teacher it is my

job to fill this ‘vocab gap’ for my children. I will be looking at lifting

achievement in maths for my Inquiry this year. I really believe that

the lack of understanding around many concepts in mathematics

comes from  a lack of knowledge of mathematical vocabulary,
hopefully  doing this will ultimately help me on my journey to
lifting achievement for my tamariki.

I am excited to take all these amazing ideas Jannie has shared today

and use them in my classroom this year.