Professional Learning Group (PLG) 2019 - Critical Literacy

 This year our Uru Mānuka cluster came together to work with leaders in our Professional Learning Group Our topic was Critical Literacy and I enjoyed working with my leader, Alby, who is also a teacher at HHS. It was great to be able to use some of the information from Dr Susan Sandretto who came to give a talk to us at HHS earlier this year. 

Here was the brief from our first session together: 

Purpose: together the PLC will build deep understanding of the inquiry process, assessment for learning and the topic of inquiry. Together we will develop and expand effective teaching and learning practice across the cluster to accelerate or raise learning in your chosen areas. 

Critical Literacy - wide subject area; cross level grouping (NE-high school) 

• Use Google+ 

Overarching Question: can deliberately engaging students in how to /explicitly teaching students how to…  Build critical literacy Accelerate or raise student achievement against norms?

^ create your own inquiry question, which option to focus on

Key Questions:  How would you define explain Critical Literacy? Looking at different perspectives and opinions, different sources, legitimate sources, biased sources, what can you trust online, how do you know? How does this tie in to what we are reading and interpreting in our world? Moreso ‘critical thinking’ (ex. Safe surfing, Wikipedia, research skills etc.) What does it look like in your classroom currently? Discussion based, lots of scaffolding, sentence starters, more so cybersmarts and safe surfing and navigating… would like to get more into sources etc. especially with Year 8’s going into Y9 as this is a Term 1 topic for Eng How are students responding to it? Those with more PK or life experience in that subject area or discussion area thrive, those who need to see things from another point of view have more ‘lightbulb’ moments. Not self sufficient with this yet.  What evidence do you have that it is working/not working?

Below is my final inquiry project; I have taken out any personal information regarding my 3 target students, including my final Canva poster which shows my specific findings. I hope you will still find the information relevant and interesting to read.