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.

 

Questions we can ask about writing

As teachers , here are some questions we can ask about the way we teach writing.

Writing is a complex task, involving ideas, language, words, spelling and transcribing or selecting letters. We need to teach all of these skills – and eventually students need to be able to do all of these, within the one task, to become writers.

Overall guidelines

• Do you have time scheduled for an independent writing block every day?
• Are your students using a pencil or alternative writing tool that allows them to focus on the cognitive aspects of writing e.g. alphabet board, flip chart, keyboard, eye gaze system, iPad and app, computer, pen or pencil?
• Does their writing tool include access to all 26 letters of the alphabet?
• Do your students have real reasons for writing? (and remember – writing never involves copying and tracing; writing involves thinking of ideas, language, words AND transcribing)
• Do you model writing to your classroom each time before you ask them to write?
• Do you have a time for writer’s chair so that students can share their writing with others?

• For emergent students
• Are you giving your students lot of opportunities to learn the function of writing without focusing on the form e.g. following through on notes handed to you, writing yourself reminders and then using them, writing a morning message?
• Do they have daily opportunities to write without standards using a writing tool with access to all 26 letters?
• When they have finished writing do you say “now let me show you how I would write it” and model writing rather than interrupting them during the writing task or putting demands on their writing?
• Are you offering them a range of writing tasks, such as writing about personal experiences, high interest topics, classroom topics, letter writing, signing in?
• Are you following through on writing tasks e.g. posting letters?
• Do you have a daily or weekly shared writing activity, such as predictable chart writing?

Writing (with an alphabet chart, teacher scribes)

💚Student signing in→

For conventional students

• Do you focus your modelling of writing on different aspects of the writing task each day e.g. using the word wall, using capitals, using punctuation, thinking of ideas, thinking of your audience in planning writing, using different sorts of vocabulary, etc.?
• Are you modelling aspects of writing for a while before you expect your students to start using them?
• Are you including free writing so that students learn to self-select in this block?
• Have you done a chart of topics “we all know about” with your class as ideas for free writing?
• Are you using the prompt “tell me more about that” to get students to extend their writing?
• Are you teaching students to edit writing, starting with teaching them to edit your writing and then transitioning to their own?
• Are you using editing checklists as students start self-editing e.g. “do my sentences have capitals and punctuation, do all my sentences relate to the topic”?
• Are you encouraging your students to publish?

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.