Session 10

 

In this session I look to give my students a assessment that will test their vocabulary knowledge in Gagana Samoa. Now this Assessment will cover the Target Vocabulary they indicated they didn't understand and also sentences or phrases that have deep meaning to it. This will assess and measure whether the students acquired the understanding after they completed the flipped tasks and teacher teacher tasks. This would also give me an indication of how effective my planning of my programme design was or not lol. I definitely saw some awesome gems during the participation of students. Students will have the opportunity to explain their understanding using Gagana Samoa or English. The purpose of this assessment is not to test the spelling or sentence structure of the language rather the understanding of the phrase and target vocabulary.  in this case completion of task hold small significance. Once this Assessment is completed I will look to analyse and evaluate the data. Fingers crossed Majority of the students understand what I have been teaching. 

Next steps will be to design a programme that consists of 6 sessions which will complete my final cycle. The focus will be on identifying for myself how teaching for transfer is identified, and bring fourth clarity around how do we know the 2 way transfer is happening. Reading Cummins, (2005) he argues the point of the transfer being identified in 5 ways: 

There are five types of transfer:

1. Transfer of conceptual elements – e.g. understanding the concept of the water cycle.

2. Transfer of metacognitive and metalinguistic strategies – e.g. graphic organisers, mnemonic devices, learning vocabulary

3. Transfer of paralinguistic features – e.g. gestures to aid communication

4. Transfer of specific linguistic elements – e.g. knowing the meaning of photo in photosynthesis

5. Transfer of phonological awareness – e.g. knowing each word is made up of individual sounds

After identifying this in the literature I have decided to design my last cycle catering to these 5 types of transfers. Now because I have 6 sessions left I will design a programme that will target all 5 types of transfer. I just need to figure out what my topic would be.

Oral Presentation Today

 

i had seconds thoughts about this assignment because I was thinking man have I done enough to actually present well in from of Herbert. Then I thought to myself wait a minute I have actually done quite a bit. Some would probably say more than others. I am pretty hard on myself when it comes to academics, because lets just say its not my passion lol but I do it because its my calling. I have students who I am going to be teaching next year when I am back in class and I want to use the knowledge I have acquired to to support student achievement in a bilingual education pathway. 

This assignment is a learning conversation to see where my thinking is at in terms of my project purpose and also to see what I have done so far and discuss what needs to be done next. I found it to be a very useful conversation because I needed to hear it from Herbert whether I am on the right track and whether or not my project has merit to pass my Masters qualification. Now in a way I was surprised I answered every question and answered it well. Now this is me just having high expectations of my learning. I realised that I spoke a lot because I knew my why! together with what I have done already it serves to be a good base for discussion. 

If I can remember correctly the questions I need to continue to think hard about was how UDL and Flipped Learning Aligns or doesn't align with bilingual pedagogies?

Why did I pick UDL and Flipped Learning approaches? 

What are my next steps? 

The BIG questions was about the Literature: I cant remember what he said but it was important. I think that this is the big portion of the project which is why its strongly emphasised. Now I think its about reading the literature and comparing it against other literature. 

But when I get the video recording of my conversation I will post here. Saves me from writing it all up lol

Session 8&9

 

Session 8 and 9 was a continuation of the last session. This week went kind of different because there were some students away on a sports trip. Now this didn't stop me from carrying on with the students I did have. I only the girls first which meant that when the boys come back I will have to repeat the same flipped task and teacher task because the students dont have access at home to complete the flipped task. 

Throughout the start of this project students would do the flipped task in the session before teacher provides the actual teacher task. It was very pleasing to see the students engage in talanoa about the Gagana Samoa Phrases. English was allowed to be used as well in these sessions to promoted trans-languaging. The students reading the phrases in Gagana Samoa and when explaining they would use English. a few students could do both. 

the writing output for this activity was really good. I enjoyed reading their responses in Gagana Samoa this tells me that they are soaking up the context in our sessions each week. The tasks that I created definitely reassures me the importance of activating prior knowledge and giving opportunities for students to talanoa about the language being used. 

A lot of the phrases we metaphoric and target vocabulary were explored with they students. I noticed students were so good at code switching which means they were switching back and forth when explaining their thinking. 

Where to from here? Well next steps will be to use my teaching skills in order to actually identify how this transfer is happening when is it actually happen. 

Going to pick a different topic and use this topic to deliver the content for the last 6 sessions going in to term 4. I might use a dual language book if I can find one that suits the year 7&8 level. 

Principal Talk

 

It was good to catch up with my principal today, Sonia Johnston. We had a good conversation about where I am at with my project, and we shared some good thoughts and ideas to think about. These were the take always I couldn't stop thinking about after our conversation. 

-  We spoke about teaching for transfer and the importance of this Bilingual pedagogy. There was a discussion she had with a high school teacher who has an inquiry relating to student's with strong Gagana Samoa but lacking the competence in the English level especially for the NCEA LEVEL. 

- This brought about the connections that teachers need to support our senior students with in terms of teaching identifying this transfer of skills, when and how but also getting the students to make these connections with using their skills in their first language and second language if that makes sense lol 

- We talked about teaching for transfer being a longed researched pedagogy however we feel that its the skill of the teacher to support students with making this transfer happen/the connection happen in Gagana Samoa and in English. 

- Because research states the the skills are transferrable as stated by (Cummins, 2008, McCaffery, 2015) They call this a two way transfer. 

The sessions I have done already, has there been any connection made or transfer made amongst or between students? 

how do you know? can they use it through a variety of inputs??? These are my thoughts so far i dont know if these thoughts connect though.

Session 7

 

So Today's session had mixed feelings, in terms task delivery and how confidence I was in implementing the Skills Flow Task with the students. two students out of the 9 looked very tired today. They confirmed they had extra family events outside of school last night which finished really late. So i encouraged these students to stay strong for me during this block because really in my head I need the data lol. 

The feeling in the room was good as usual but it was more towards my own feelings about the task I prepared. Usually the skills flow task uses a text that kind of has a storyline that happens in chronological order but I flipped it and instead of using a story I used their formal Gagana Samoa speeches. I took phrases and vocabulary from their speeches they did not understand and use this instead. I found images that represent these phrases and called out each phrase and students had to number the picture from 1-6 based on the phrases I called out. The task outcome was about meaning and understanding of these phrases not so much completing the task which has little priority. 

I started with a flipped task and I use a before and after vocabulary grid which was solely to see what there prior knowledge of these words were vs the initial meanings. Things I notice was the opportunity for students to talanoa and unpack their understanding this is such a powerful tool for students. When they have the opportunity to talanoa and connect their ideas with their peers. the UDL model talks about the different ways we can represent content this was evident in my prep today, I had visuals, I had phrases and words, but this leads me to say I need to use videos in the next lesson so that students have this also because UDL how confirms how important it is to have multiple means of representing content. This connects me to the also providing different levels of output. In this session i wanted to cover, speaking, writing, listening and reading at the same time. We only managed to do speaking today due to time restraints. The sharing part was awesome. hearing the students share their thoughts based on the context of the phrases and the images I provided really worked. They mentioned their own words to describe the meanings, so the input was reading the Gagana Samoa phrases and listening to the phrases out loud and the output was speaking through the sharing of their understanding. Very Powerful to see and witness students making connection to their Gagana Samoa Language. 

My thinking now is was their signs of translanguaging happening? 

what about teaching for transfer? 

Students did another google form to see how they thought the lesson went. This was their responses.

 

Just wondering now where to next? What content am I going to deliver? I feel thats enough time spent on the Speeches as long as we covered the parts they did not understand well we can look to use other ways of Learning Gagana Samoa.