Duration: 3:19
Konini School teacher, Vicki Pimenta shares her approach to using the literacy progressions and raising student achievement in reading. The literacy progressions are recorded by students and are accessible through QR codes in the classroom. Vicki found students are more confident in speaking about what they know and their next learning steps.
Michael Malins
Konini Primary School’s approach to assessment for learning started around the traditional mold where we looked primarily at quantitative data and we morphed from that further into qualitative data and how we can capture the learning of the child, driven by the child. So, an example of that in the junior school is the QR codes where the children are highly engaged using devices to capture where they are in their literacy learning progressions and then to record where they are moving to.
Student
Start from here and then you go from there for a star. What I want to do is, I want to go to the first gold star.
Vicki Pimenta
We decided this year for our team inquiry that we wanted to raise student achievement in reading by including student voice and encouraging the students to know where they were and what their next step was going to be and so we decided that we’d use QR codes to help them with this. We used the literacy progressions and broke it down into very small steps for each reading level and each colour and then we’ve created QR codes so the children can come and scan the code, listen to what they need to be doing, and find out what their next goal will be in reading. We introduced the QR codes first of all by putting them on display in every junior classroom and then talked about the children’s levels with them in their reading groups.
Student
We are going to practice reading our books and trying to do the same thing that’s on the QR code.
Vicki Pimenta
We sat together in the reading corner and we scanned it at the beginning of every reading lesson, practiced listening to it encouraging the children to have a go themselves, and then we’ve also put a copy of the QR codes in our reading modelling books. So, at the beginning of each of our guided reading sessions we refer back to them. We see what we can do, what we still need to practice, and where we are going to be going next. So, today we are going to be looking here at this QR code that you were just looking at in the reading corner. What does this one say Keira? Can you read this one in a big voice?
Student
I can predict that I will, what will happen next.
Vicki Pimenta
So, now that the students are familiar with the codes, in our Tumble one of the activities is that the children will come to the reading corner with their box of books that are at their level, and they will scan the codes for where they are at today and also scan to where they are going next, and they talk about those independently and have little conversations, set their own individual goals about where they would like to reach, and then when they come and work with me for the guided reading we continue that conversation.
Student
I might want to do my best job to jump to purple and then gold.
Vicki Pimenta
I think the thing we’ve noticed the most is that the children are more confident in speaking about where they are going to go next. Reading was always an area that we struggled to be able to do this with with student voice. Writing is more visible, children can see where they’ve missed pieces out, or where they need to put a fullstop. Whereas for reading it’s quite hard to know what you need to do to get to that next level. So, I think this has really helped them understand their own learning journey, which in turn has definitely helped to see some improvement in how quickly some students are moving through the reading levels.