I. General Information
School Name: William Konkin Elementary School
School District: SD#91 Nechako Lakes
Inquiry Team Members: Karie Evans: kevans@sd91.bc.ca, Shawnese Trottier: strottier@sd91.bc.ca, Colleen West: cwest@sd91.bc.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: kevans@sd91.bc.ca
II. Inquiry Project Information
Type of Inquiry: Numeracy & Literacy Project
Grade Levels Addressed Through Inquiry: Primary (K-3), Intermediate (4-7)
Curricular Areas Addressed: Language Arts – Reading
Focus Addressed: Literacy
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? We will implement approaches to literacy that incorporate multi-sensory and kinesthetic learning and involves Indigenous staff members in the literacy lessons.
III. Spirals of Inquiry Details
Scanning: Over recent years, we have observed an increased number of students in our school who need an approach that addresses learning disabilities such as “dyslexia,” and “dysgraphia”. The interventions and general instructional strategies that had some success in the past were not as effective anymore. From long past practices, some teachers remember more success with learning tasks that involve multi-sensory approaches. The reading levels of all students, and especially those in the primary grades, have remained consistently low. Excitement, encouragement and focus on literacy as a school was not sufficient to see gains in reading levels. Educators were using various programs and program components with little cohesion from division to division. Classroom teachers of each division were the teachers of literacy and no one else.
Focus: We were hoping for more learners to see significant gains in reading ability and skills, at the same time increasing their confidence as readers. We were also hoping that they would enjoy this process and see it as fun.
Hunch: We felt that whole class approaches to literacy instruction were not able to target specific skills for struggling readers in the same way that individualized and targeted teaching of very small groups could. We also had a hunch that our Indigenous learners need to work with more Indigenous teachers on a regular basis in all aspects of their schooling, not just Indigenous language and culture.
New Professional Learning: Involving our Indigenous Ed staff directly in literacy learning provided role models for Indigenous learners, while at the same time still valuing the first language that is also being taught. The Nedut’en Teacher, Jordan and the Indigenous Education advocates, Rhoda and Geraldine received training to be literacy intervention supports. They infused their language, community relationships, and ways of being into our literacy intervention programs and provided meaningful living examples of the importance of literacy for all people.
We will implement approaches to literacy that incorporate multi-sensory and kinesthetic learning. Based on recommendations and training from our district psychologist, Stephanie Lindstrom, we are a pilot school in our district for Structured Literacy learning through the Indigenous Education Department.
Classroom teachers from K-3 also agreed to implement the UFLI Literacy program in their class-wide teaching and began to do so as their teacher collaboration rolled out.
Taking Action: In addition to phonics, decoding, and encoding, our literacy tasks involve constructivist, hands-on learning, and kinesthetic learning. The learner may build words, draw their letters and words as they sound them out, create letters and words with many substances in addition to the expected pencil and paper, or move their body in specific ways that correspond to specific language learning, to trigger long-term memory and create new neural pathways.
Students wrote on windows, paper, or vertical white boards. They used sensory objects such as sensory mats (and have choice in what feels best to them) where they reinforced learning by drawing the sound of the letter(s) they were learning. They tracked with two fingers instead of one, as this has shown to be more memory reinforcing to the brain. They built letter sounds and moved their bodies and had fun.
Checking:
- We used letter names and sounds data for five Indigenous Kindergarten learners.
- We used phoneme, sight words, and PM benchmark data for learners in the primary grades who were part of blitz, including 11 Indigenous learners.
- We are overwhelmingly pleased by our results. We improved the number of learners reading at grade level by 30% for the first time in the past several years.
- The team is thrilled with the data, and we have shared the specific data sets with our board of trustees, senior leadership, and anyone else who will listen.
Reflections/Advice: We plan to continue to use these tools in literacy. My advice would be to be patient. It takes time to develop real and lasting change. Some of the years we have tried things we had unremarkable results. But we persevered in creating and maintaining a culture of inquiry. Sometimes the results of an inquiry are disappointing. We learned from those results. These results are not just encouraging, but exhilarating. It took four years to get to exhilarating.