Ngaire and Jason Teaching as Inquiry. Term 4, 2014

For our teaching as inquiry, we focused on the engagement of lower level writers. Our whole team, trialled a writing programme based around student choice with writing. We had varied results, but overall saw some improvement with our target group.


Reflection after our data gathering:

The data would indicate that student led writing is much preferred by the target students.

As teachers we have observed increased levels of engagement from the majority of the target students. However, a couple of students with high learning needs have not really demonstrated much improvement. Both of these students have recently had extensive eye examinations and been prescribed specialised lenses. The reports for these students have indicated major difficulties when writing, which they hope lenses will help correct. These students also have poor short term memories, often struggling to remember day to day what they are writing about.

We have used a teacher aide to work with more able students in order to focus on the target group.

We have really enjoyed the student led writing, but feel that we still need a balance of genre/ structure/ guided writing as well.We would look at refining this for the future and at other ways we can integrate student choice into the writing programme.