Jess Coad from St Mary's School shares how they are increasing engagement motivation and engagement through self directed learning.

Our goal/ area of need;At St Mary’s one of our main goals of our inquiry this year is to raise our students’ achievement in reading by increasing their motivation and engagement.

How to achieve this;

We have set out to achieve this through integrating as many learning areas aspossible together through our group novels, gathering and using more student voice and having more hands on tasks and activities to do in the student’s SDL (Student Directed Learning) as well as in their literacy groups with the teachers. We have had 5 novels going within our team and each has its own SDL google doc full of tasks made to relate to it each fortnight. The students have a range of buddy and individual tasks to achieve over that time.

Some examples of the hands on activities the students have been up to are;

• For the novel ‘Holes’ the students conducted experiments with thermometers, water, different colours of paper and the sun to determine which colour attracted more sunlight and increased the temperature of the water and therefore would be the best colour uniform for the camp boys to wear while they work digging holes. (covering AO’s from the Sciences, Social Sciences, Health and Literacy sections of the NZC)
• The ‘Holes’ group also made ‘Sploosh’ (see picture above). The recipe comes from the book and is a way of preserving peaches that one of the main characters did in the book. (covering AO’s from the Technology, Literacy and Sciences sections of the NZC)
• The ‘Grandpa’s Great Escape’ group have been making model aeroplanes to learn the parts of them. (Covering AO’s from the Technology, Literacy, Social Sciences and Sciences sections of the NZC)
• The ‘Charlotte’s Web’ group in their learning of how webs are made and what their purpose is, weaved spiders and webs from pipe-cleaners creating a window art display. (Covering AO’s from the Arts, Literacy and Sciences sections of the NZC)

These are just a few examples of ways we have tried to add in ‘hands-on’ activities into our novel studies units.

We have also been surveying our students through google forms, as well as in person in large and smaller groups to get their ideas about how, and about what, they’d like to be learning. We are still working on developing more ways to add in more student agency and have them take more control over where their learning leads.

So what?

So far we have noticed through our teacher observations and the tracking and feedback/feedforward of their SDL work, that engagement is up. They are completing more work than they were before which is giving us a lot clearer understanding of where they are all at in their comprehension of what they are reading. We need to further develop our incorporation of the students ideas and adding more student agency in developing our units and programmes.

Jess Coad is the within school leader at St Mary's School