Bothwell Elementary 23-24

Our Focus has been system over product as the students share their learning and understanding of how they learn to write. We have started this journey using The Spiral of Inquiry; scanning, focusing, developing our hunches, new professional learning, and taking action.  We have found by using The Spiral of Inquiry we are better able to notice and hear what the students are sharing about what their needs are as writers. 

As we moved through The Spirals of Inquiry we kept three questions at the front. One, what is going on for our learners? Two, how do we know? And three, why does this matter? We started our journey focusing on how the students at Bothwell were using writing and design processes to plan, develop, and create texts for a variety of purposes and audiences as all as communicate in sentences and paragprahpsh, applying conventions of Canadian spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Bringing in the Core Competency of Communication and taking time to listen to the students, we soon realized that our focus was not student driven. We had to shift our direction. 

We dove into the spirals, starting with scanning by developing student surveys, to get a snap shot on how the students viewed writing in general, and how they saw themselves as writers. When we reviewed and and began our focus, the question was where are are going to place our attention. Through our observations and discussions around the survey results and what we have been seeing we found that the students wanted to write more often, but they voiced they needed practice to organize thoughts, they wanted choice on topics so there was not pressure to "write something" and they asked for steps of the writing process to be broken down more clearly. The surprise for us was that the students shared they enjoyed writing but were wanting more direct teaching and examples to help guide them. 

Onto the next step in the spiral was developing a hunch. We soon realized that we had too many areas to focus on, we decided to narrow down our focus. From the student surveys, our reflections, and observations we moved the focus to developing more structured lessons on creative and formal writing with a hope that it would develop the students' confidence and ability in their writing. The students were now driving our inquiry. 

The new professional learning spiral step brought us to collaborating on lessons, encouraging more student reflections, providing samples to students. We also decided to have the students do the survey again, to see how they think their development in the writing process is going and where we need to go next. By using The Spiral of Inquiry model, we have found that we are able to grasp what the students are wanting in their learning, creating an authentic learning opportunity for all of us and them. The students were seeing that what they shared with us was meaningful to us and we focused on creating lessons from their input.

Examples of Teacher Reflections During the Process;

• Explicit instruction of concepts such as adjectives has increased student vocabulary, and ability to express themselves more precisely orally and create significantly more interesting written pieces.
• Students have increased their writing stamina using the Extreme Writing program and are now able to complete multi-page writing pieces.
• Students sometimes demonstrate frustration at not being able to complete a piece of writing when there are interruptions such as lunch, or other lessons to move onto. Need to consider how to approach this, especially when some students require significantly more or less time than others.
• Most students have improved their editing skills with explicit instructions.
• As student spelling and grammar has improved over the course of the year, they seem better able to complete writing pieces with greater independence.
• Students who struggle more with writing often know the language or "what they are supposed to do" when presented with a grammar worksheet but it is not always transferring to their writing. Need to continue to think about implementation and what are the best methods to better support students with this.

We want to continue with the Spiral of Inquiry model with the focus still on writing. We have already began to scan the results of the second surveys and teacher observations and have decided to continue to focus on what the students are wanting to help them develop their writing. 

We plan to continue the structure of using the Spirals of Inquiry to provide student voice into our student learning plan on writing. Our co-hort would like to continue next year so we will continue with two classes of primary and two classes of intermediate. We will collaborate on lessons and activities, developing strategies on how to best support the student writers. These lessons and activities will reflect what the students have expressed to us that will help them with their development; explicit instruction, more examples, a selection of topics, and providing more time in the creation of the writing pieces. 

Reflecting on the FSA results we see that overall the students are doing well in literacy, however we now know that they would like to continue to develop their writing. It will be exciting to see how our grade sixes and threes who were a part of the co-hort do in next year's FSAs.

We are excited to see how our focus develops overtime and looking forward to hearing from the students on how they feel about their growth. At each step of our journey, we will always have in mind three questions; What is going on for our learners? How do we know? And why does this matter. Always listening to the learners as we go to focus our learning. 

Intermediate

Primary