Active Exploration

PLC Name:

Active Exploration

PLC Members:

Heather and Vanessa

PLC Focus and Essential Question:  

Active Exploration Opportunities in Kindergarten Learning Environments:

“Does having a student’s artwork displayed publicly to a viewing audience affect their ability to sequentially retell the steps, using important details, that they took to create the piece and their reasoning behind artistic choices (including research or personal experiences)?”

Goals & Strategic Plan

Goal

Our fundamental goal for the purpose of this PLC is to improve literacy skills (oral, print, and visual) for all of our students, with a focus especially on students with limited pre-school experiences, ELL learners, special needs students etc.  By giving students a chance to explore their world through new experiences and materials, and engaging all students in personalized learning experiences, we know that we can increase vocabulary by sparking quality conversation through questioning and inquiry-based work.  Dickinson and Smith (1994) found that the quality of teacher-child conversations when children were 4 years old was related to their end-of-kindergarten receptive vocabulary levels (Neuman and Dickinson, eds., 2001, 269).  Our goal throughout the course of this project would be to create an environment that sparks and supports quality conversations and experiences.  We aim to have meaningful documented conversations as per Reggio Emilia and to connect that work to Miriam Teheran’s (and many others) philosophy that developing oral language is the foundation of all literacy learning.  Miriam Trehearne stated in her lecture, Improving Oral Language and Comprehension K-3, at the Calgary City Teachers’ Convention 2012 that “children from low SES backgrounds know 6000 fewer words upon starting school” when compared with their more affluent counterparts - and we will strive to close that gap however we can.

Creating a Space that Inspires Students to Talk

Forest Heights’ low socio-economic demographic affects our students, as well as our ability as a school to pursue projects and experiences that cost any substantial amount of money through parent fundraising efforts, school fees, etc.  It is for this reason that grant applications such as this one, and others in the school to support literacy, technology, and off-site experiences for classes, go a long way to supporting our students.

Oral language development is the foundation for all literacy learning, and talking is the single best way to develop oral language capacity (Trehearne, 2012). With this in mind we have designed a classroom research project that aims to enhance oral language development while integrating concepts from the Reggio Emilia approach and play-based approaches to learning. In short, we want to create a space that inspires our students to talk.

This year, we have structured our kindergarten program into a true team teaching environment where two teachers share all 45 students, including a variety of complex needs, in a full-day program. We operate out of two classrooms (Room 11 and Room 12) with an adjoining door in between. Room 11 is where we meet as a large group to do things like read-alouds and journal writing. During centre time we are able to really spread out into both of the classrooms to do independent choice activities like building, arts and crafts, dramatic play, light table, reading, and play dough. This system has worked very well for our students thus far, and as professionals we are looking to pursue ways in which we can further support oral language development in the future.

Our plan is to reinvent the space in Room 12 into a space that encompasses the comforts of home and that gives our students the inspiration and ability to start interesting conversations with their peers, teachers, and families. We have taken inspiration from one of the main tenets of the Reggio Emilia approach, which is to create an environment that acts as a ‘third teacher’. To us, this means that the environment is safe, organized, interesting, comfortable, imaginative, and inspiring (all of the things that we teachers aspire to be!). All too often when children engage in a conversation they rely on adults to steer the conversation, provide the inspiration, and decide the topic. If the environment is truly operating as another teacher it should be able to provide all of these things, so that children are supported in talking about interesting and personally relevant topics at all times of the day. In our book study of “Bringing Reggio Emilia Home”, the author, Louise Boyd Cadwell, emphasizes the important role that environment plays when she says, “...the environment is the best educator when it promotes complex, varied, sustained, and changing relationships between people, the world of experience, ideas, and the many ways of expressing ideas” (1997).

The Reggio Emilia approach lends itself well to our focus on oral language development because of the emphasis it puts on developing the voice and the point-of-view of the child. It is for this reason that we wish to bring in more aspects of the Reggio-approach while developing several distinct areas in our classroom where students can work and talk together, while playing and learning at their own level. The specific areas that we would like to create in our classroom are: the living room, the dining room, the art studio, the creative playroom, the exploration area, and the book nook. We believe that by carefully designing each of these spaces we can create a classroom culture of exploration, imagination, and engagement that will improve the oral language development of our students. A physical description of each of the spaces will be provided as well as justification for how each space will develop oral language capacity and its ties to Reggio Emilia.

Resources

At the school level, our work this year will been supported by our PLC work in a small group with a total of two colleagues, with administrative support, focusing on Reggio Emilia and meaningful, personalized learning.  As well as bi-weekly meeting times to further this work as provided by our administration, we have been encouraged to take release time to visit other schools to see what they have done with their Reggio work. As part of our PLC work last year, we visited Capitol Hill School and were inspired by their school-wide initiatives based on creativity, inquiry, and personal learning.  Both teachers have included related goals in their Professional Growth Plans from last year and this year to continue our passionate work in this area.

Lastly, while our school funds are limited, we propose to use some of our classroom budget (as allocated by the school and Keeler Parent Council) to help support our project goals.  We are hoping to secure some additional funding from our ECE grant proposal.

We have already subscribed to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), which will hopefully spark some questions and ongoing conversations about our students’ work and next steps we can take to support them.

Data

In the course of a month, we would select 10 students to have their artwork displayed and presented to a viewing audience.  5 students would participate in a 3-week cycle of a conversation group with an adult regarding their creation.  The other 3 students would not be forewarned of their presentation to an unfamiliar audience, nor would they participate in the conversation group with a teacher during that cycle.  Rather, they would have their work selected later in the cycle to be presented.  In this way, 5 students would have the opportunity and practise to converse with others about their work, while the other 5 would not have that opportunity.  The following month, their roles would be reversed so that all students would still have the same opportunities throughout the school year (as is our professional obligation).  

Each of the 6 students would then have opportunities to discuss their artwork with their ‘audience’ (adults in the school, other grade students) during a ‘gallery show’.  Teachers will use a series of questions that they may ask each of the 6 students during the final ‘artist statement’ scribing session in week 4 of the cycle.  The prompts and questions asked will be:

• Tell me about it.
• Tell me about how you made it.
• Tell me where you got your ideas from.
• Tell me about the materials you used.
• Did you have any problems making this?
• How did you solve them?
• What do you like best about your artwork?

After each student's work has been scribed, the teachers will look at the volume of communication (word count), the use of sequential vocabulary (first, next, last, etc), and the use of descriptive words (smooth, bumpy, difficult, slippery, etc).  

Using this data, we will be able to compare students who don’t have the opportunity to commune with others about their work over a period of time, versus those that do.  We may also draw some conclusions in comparing a student’s ‘artist statements’ over a period of months, both having had the conversation group experiences and not.


Action Plan

PLC Actions (include whom and by when?)

What specific tasks do we need to accomplish by the end of the school year? Complete tasks outlined in our ECEC proposal, write an article for ECEC newsletter, move forward with reinventing spaces in our classroom, look at student data, anecdotal evidence, and recorded conversations.

What are our main tasks for the first month? Decide with group members how we will make student work the focus of our PLC work (i.e. how work will be shared, valued, built upon), clarify process with ECEC committee and try to get support monies in place in order to move forward (we have been trying for several months to clarify the process, find out how to acquire money to buy materials, etc.). If money come though we will move forward with selecting and purchasing materials.

What kind of timeline do we propose for the remainder of the tasks? Realistically speaking, by the time that the money is accessible to us and we have collected the necessary materials, the research component of our project will probably not start until after Winter Break. We will run the proposed research groups from apx. Jan-Apr and then start the writing of article for the ECEC newsletter (a requirement of the grant).

What data/work can we use/generate to monitor the impact of our actions on student learning and achievement?
We will utilize the data obtained through the Early Years Evaluation Teacher Assessment (EYE-TA) collected from this year and last year (2011-2012, 2012-2013). What we hope to see is that students who score low (indicated by a red or yellow flag) on the language section of the assessment at the beginning of the year will score “at grade level” by the end of the year (indicated by a green flag). Anecdotal data will also be collected through the use of video recording, teacher written reflection, and student reflection (scribed with adults) in order to document the language acquisition, learning, and skill development of this high needs population of students. We will compare the data from year to year in order to measure whether the changes we have made to support oral language development have indeed made a difference in students’ ability to express themselves orally.