End of year reflections

 

For my inquiry I did my research on:

How can we overcome barriers to collaborative practice in a special school setting to help improve learner outcomes.

• I began doing research on collaboration in a special school setting.

• I couldn’t find any New Zealand research on collaboration in special schools.

• All the research I found was done overseas and was centred around Mainstream and Special needs teachers working together.

About Sommerville

• I am going to share some stats to explain how complex our set up is at Sommerville.

• We support students with their learning between the ages of 5 and 21. 

• We have a staff of around 250

• Our base school in Panmure is our ‘Mothership’. 

• At our Bhengazi and Tripoli road sites, we have over twenty classes. 

• We have around 18 satellite classes in local primary, intermediate and secondary schools from Glendowie through to Owairoa in Howick.

• Sommerville has a specialist service comprising of Physiotherapists, Occupational Therapists, Speech and Language Therapist, Behaviour Specialists, Vision and hearing advisors and a personal development councillor.

• We also have an amazing team of outreach teachers who support around 45 students in 28 different schools in the Eastern suburb of Auckland.

• At the beginning of the year, I collected data from staff around their collaboration when planning, teaching, working with other teachers, specialists and their support staff. 

• Staff had a fairly good understanding of what collaboration is and was in agreement that it is beneficial.

• At Sommerville, we work across many different sites, so collaboration across sites and in pathways can look different. 

• One thing we were able to gauge from the feedback is that most staff are keen on collaborating and willing to work as a team. 

• Many welcomed the opportunity to learn from others.

We were fortunate to have Chris Bradbeer from Stonefields share some insight into collaboration, here are some take-home points 

• Teachers often think they are collaborating, when they are not.

• Collaboration is a more intense and sophisticated approach than what we can achieve by ourselves.

• If we want to achieve effective team teaching, we need to be using the same language.

• We need to pre-empt what the little stresses will be and make arrangements and allowances.

• It's beneficial to learn from colleagues and recognise their strengths and skills. 

• There is no point trying to collaborate if people aren't interested in developing these skills.

Data Collection

While Covid restrictions hindered the work I planned on doing around improving teacher collaboration, I did manage to visit a few classes, set up jam board, arrange google meets during the lockdown and I was also able to send out surveys. As much as I would have liked to collect qualitative data that didn’t happen as planned.

I did collect some quantitative data around the barriers that staff face. 

I summed this up as :

• Time

• Travel

• Transport

• Traffic

• Timetable

• Trust

Collaborating with other special schools.

I work very closely with a range of teachers from all the other special schools in Auckland. I was able to organise a few online meetings with staff and send out surveys to them as well.

It was very interesting to see that they faced the exact same barriers that we did.

• Rogers  4 Stages of diffusion of innovation theory says that in every society like every school, there are those that are willing to try new things.  Early adopters are quick to try something new before anyone else while laggards are the last to try something and may not try it at all. 

• When it comes to collaboration, think about where you fit on this chart?

• Are you an Early adopter where you want to work with others and learn

• Or are you a laggard and will continue doing things the way you always did and not want to extend your knowledge?

In conclusion

Collaboration improves the way we work together and problem solve. This leads to more innovation, efficient processes, increased success, and improved communication. Through listening to and learning from each other, we can help each other reach our goals.

 

Colourful Semantics

What is Colourful Semantics?

Hypotheses - 3  

If I use the Colourful Semantics program to motivate students, will this then help them to form a sentence independently.

My students struggled to understand the parts of a sentence. I began teaching what WHO, DOING WHAT , WHERE means using The Colourful Semantics programme. We worked on many examples.
I began to use this program when one of my emergent students was really struggling to construct a simple sentence. He wasn’t able to recall events from the weekend, had no idea of subject and verb. This program uses visual supports which helped the student. I spent a few weeks teaching what WHO, DOING WHAT MEANS. 

Colourful semantics is an approach created by Alison Bryan. It is aimed at helping children to develop their grammar but it is rooted in the meaning of words (semantics).

Colourful semantics reassembles sentences by cutting them up into their thematic roles and then colour codes them.

The approach has 4 key colour coded stages. There are further stages for adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions and negatives.

1.     WHO – Orange

2.     WHAT DOING – Yellow

3.     WHAT – Green

4.     WHERE – Blue

The approach helps children to organise their sentences into key levels. The approach is used in stages and helps children develop language and vocabulary in addition to grammatical structure. It can be used to help children who are starting to develop language and have limited vocabulary to confident talkers who struggle to organise the grammatical content of their sentences.

Who can use Colourful Semantics?

The approach can be used with children with a range of Speech, Language and Communication Needs including:

·       Specific Language Impairment

·       Developmental Delay or Disorder

·       Autistic Spectrum Condition

·       Down Syndrome

·       Literacy difficulties

Why use Colourful Semantics?

There are a range of benefits to using this approach, including but not limited to;

·       Encouraging wider vocabulary

·       Making sentences longer

·       Helps children to answer questions or generate responses to questions

·       Developing use of nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives

·       Improves story telling skills

·       Can be transferred to written sentences and written language comprehension

·       Can be carried out individually or in small groups

After explicitly teaching my student to use this program, the next few examples are of students at different levels

This is one of my student's work sample using Colourful semantics, just with visuals

In this example, the student isn't writing independently, so  I wrote what the student said and modeled what needed to be done. 

This student is writing with support. Using colorful semantics to help her construct her sentence,this is what she wrote. 

All three examples show students using Colourful Semantics, but at their individual level.

Will this work for my other students?

Investigation of handwriting vs device

Hypothesis 2-Handwriting VS device

I will look at if I simply use a device as a motivator to do writing, then will this be enough for my students to form a simple sentence, or would other skills need to be taught.

This is a writing sample of one of my Yr 8 students who has language delays and is not motivated write. I wanted to see how she constructs a simple sentence using pictures as prompts.

This is what she wrote.

She said I hate writing, I want to use the computer. She was given the same activity and she was allowed to use the computer. This is her independent writing. 

Over the next few weeks, we worked on punctuation and verbs.  We also worked on forming simple sentences, understanding the parts to a sentence. I assumed she knew this, but it had to be taught. We also used an editing checklist. She was encouraged to spell check. 

This was her writing sample thereafter.

There needed to be explicit teaching of these skills in order for her to succeed. She was very excited to see no red lines and that her writing "looked right".

My teaching as inquiry

My blog is based on improving writing of students with special needs. 
Enjoy the journey....

All of the students I work with have Neuorodevelopmental disorders, some of whom have complex communication needs and/or relatively limited experiences of generating language, writing presents many challenges. To develop writing skills they need to learn to generate an idea, to think about language, think about the words, the spelling, controlling their writing tool ,etc.