What might an hour a day of mathematics look like?

 This blog post follows on from my one of yesterday about literacy.

Understanding the Science of Learning and understanding neurodiversity remain as important for maths and all other areas of the curriculum as they are for literacy.  In reality it is teacher knowledge and the way they can breathe this knowledge and 'flair' that make the difference.  

While a 'programme' or 'approach' can help guide practice, teacher knowledge remains paramount, so just because it is so important I will reiterate, it is not time that matters, but the quality with which this teaching is done.  In order to make this a reality, rather than just mandating a length of time we need to spend on maths and literacy, significant time, PLD and resourcing needs to come forth from our government, I await this with baited breath.  

Not only this, significant support needs to be provided to teachers in classrooms to be able to enable them to assist ALL learners, the classrooms of today, look very different to how they looked even five years ago, and massively different from ten years ago.  Sadly the resourcing being provided to assist our most vulnerable learners has stagnated, if not reduced over the years.  It is hard to enact a a rich teaching environment, based on best practice, that meets the needs of ALL learners, when you are spending a significant amount of your day assisting children to regulate or meeting their health needs because they do not meet the mystical threshold for support.

Our system is not currently meeting the needs of our most vulnerable learners and something needs to be done about this right now!

Ok, a bit off track, but it needs to be said, in order to ensure ALL children make progress in literacy and maths, robust supports need to be in place that enable us to teach and connect.

Back on track, so what does an hour of mathematics look like in my largely Year 2 classroom.  Firstly, mathematics and literacy are everywhere, but maths is just so easy to find.  Maths is about patterns, relationships, connections and language.  Finding this through play is easy, so if we are only talking about time, it could probably be said that children spend most of their day engaging in some sort of activity or thought that could be classified as mathematics.  I could probably say the same about literacy, but this post is about how I am specifically and explicitly teaching maths over the day.

For those with my scope and sequence and for those that follow my number agent group, it is possibly really obvious how I do this.  For the intent of this post, I will presume you don't follow that group.  However I do encourage you to join this group on facebook, as I share a huge amount of my daily practice via this group.

It is important I note that if you have read my literacy post, you will note how this is seemingly broken up into small chunks.  This is an approach that works well, I call it bite sized learning, I find it allows time to review, teach and practice, is just the right length of time for my little people and reduces that cognitive load as we are being really specific and I am deliberately targeting my teaching rather than allowing myself to go off track.  This approach also works extremely well in my class that is based on a pedagogy of play and developmentally aware practice.  I find as the year goes on, the time we can spend does increase, but initially I like to keep it to ten minutes (this does not count the time taken to get them ready for the task.). As we venture more into problem solving, sessions will be more like 20, however this session is broken up, so the time that I spend explicitly teaching would be less than ten minutes.  

I should probably say something I neglected to say in my previous post. Like anyone I have children that find it difficult to sit with the class, or do exactly what we are doing at the time.  I don't see this as 'mis-behaviour' I allow them to do what they need to do.  If this means they continue playing near us, all good, if it means they sit on the couch and watch, all good, if it means they come for part of the time but them walk out of the class to reset, all good.  I want to meet every child where they are right now and this means being guided by their cues.  

So how does a normal day look - (Times for example only and not every day will include all of these things, there just is not time)

*Scope and sequence session - we will either break this into two parts, or one, dependent on the length of time needed to cover the session.  I will also break one session into parts over the week or even two weeks if that is more important, to allow for review and practice.  (Ten minutes per session) x 2 sessions

*Math talk - usually part of each session is some sort of visual image for math talk.  This can take anything from ten -fifteen minutes, dependent on how much children share.  There is a lot of peer to peer talk here and some talks include the use of materials. (Ten - 15 minutes per session)

*Math videos, songs and games - these are interspersed throughout the day, usually we will spend about five - ten minutes on one or all of these.  (15 minutes interspersed over the day)

*Problem solving - we start problem solving with story based problems based on the children and their lives.  These sessions initially are very teacher directed and explicit.  Children do have material and will also draw ideas, but there is close teacher direction here initially until children have the foundations for greater independence. (Ten minutes)

*Portal Problem Solving - this starts when we are over halfway through the scope and sequence and replaces the problem solving mentioned above.  You can find more out about this in my number agent group.  It includes review, explicit teaching, scaffolding, independent problem solving, sharing and revisiting.  (20 minutes)

*Finding math in our daily play, lots of sharing via our journal will include lots of mathematical thought.  

***My release teacher focuses in on other strands during her Wednesdays and Fridays.  The portal is used to deliver more strand based problems, while mine tend to focus on number.

What I am hoping to show with this post and my post prior to this one, is demonstrate just how much literacy and maths already happens in a classroom.  As I said in my previous post, our days a fluid, I do not have a timetable, we write down our must do, want to do and could do in our scrapbook.  We simply them tick off items done and write down the things not done for the next day.  Just like any classroom, every day is different and often if I have spent only a little time on maths the day before, I will make sure I spend more the next day.  This all evens up over the week.

What is important to me, is not only that children are receiving quality explicit teaching, but that they have ample time to develop social, emotional skills, to make friends, to play, to develop and share their interests and pursue their own passions, as with literacy, children will often link their play to what we have been learning and keep exploring these ideas.  

When it comes down to it, time is irrelevant, as my Std 4 teacher told me, quality over quantity (this was in relation to writing, and as you can see, it is a message I still struggle with.)

What we need is a system that resources us, supports us and provides us with the means to ensure that this quality is happening in every classroom.  As I said before, I await with baited breath.

An hour a day of literacy, what's so new about that?

 You'd have to be living under a rock to have not heard about the 'new' requirement of the current government to ensure literacy and maths are taught for an hour a day each.  

I don't know if you are anything like me, but when this policy was announced, it conjured up images of children sitting 'doing' literacy for exactly an hour.  I know that this is not the intention of the policy, but it certainly is how some seem to be interpreting it.  Let's get it straight, you would be hard pressed to find a classroom not doing an hour of literacy a day, but what we don't want is people focused on the length of time, instead we want them focused on quality teaching.

The policy itself feels like a 'soundbite' something to please voters, I guess we will have to wait and see what substance of understanding and resourcing comes with this policy, but while we are waiting, let me share how my 'hour' of literacy and 'hour' of maths might look on a day to day basis, in a junior class that embraces a pedagogy of play.  

Before I do this I need to make a few  things clear.  Doing something for longer, does not necessarily mean I am doing it better and every teacher needs to understand more about the Science of Learning.  Such as, the gradual release model, the self-teaching hypothesis, cognitive load theory, Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, what learning is and how we get learning into long term memory, why we need a scope and sequence, repeated practice, what is Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 support and what explicit teaching is etc.  

Rather than go on here, I will direct you to Olwyn Johnstons facebook group, where she very succinctly explains these things and so much more.

The Kiwi Reading Doctor 

I also firmly believe that every teacher needs to understand Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Dyspraxia, DLD, ADHD, ASD and be able to use these understandings to shape approaches that will not only ensure success for these children, but all children.  Having a degree of trauma informed practice training is also of immense benefit to teachers.

It would seem to be a priority for this government, if wanting teachers to truly teach literacy and mathematics successfully to all children, that they would provide the resourcing and training for all teachers to be well versed in these understandings.  Again, doing something for longer, without making a change to practice, will make absolutely no difference whatsoever.  

I have blogged a bit about the features of my literacy programme and these things of course morph and change over the year as children progress, below is a very simple breakdown of how things may look.  What is important to remember, is that I am constantly noticing, recognising and responding tweaking my approaches to cater for the needs I am seeing.  I have a Year 2 class, with a few older Year 1 children.

Crucial to all of these is review, review is always built into the start of every session.  Also crucial is maintaining an lovely perky,  with what I am wanting them to learn, made explicit and not hidden inside lots of talk.

Please note the times are simply to demonstrate that over the day, just how much learning is literacy specific.  It is also important to understand that via play, children are often also developing skills that they then bring into our structured sessions.

- Whole class literacy session (inclusive of phonological, reviewing sounds, learning a new sound, spelling sounds, spelling words, reading words, heart word spelling and reading, dictated sentence/s, reading sentences.).This session is broken into two parts if needed over the day, at the start I aim for sitting for not longer than ten minutes.  Sessions in total would be 15-20 minutes.  These sessions also contain songs and movement throughout and are presented in slideshow form.  This is considered Tier 1, I always have 3-4 children that I am then working individually working with in Tier 2.

-Handwriting, we teach this separately as well as focusing on formation within our literacy session.  We used Casey as a bridge from our juniors and then tag these to working on the formation of the graphemes, also easily linked to the phoneme as a nice review.  We found last year that an explicit focus on handwriting really made a massive difference to our class.  This is about 10 minutes.

-Writing, to start the year, we are heavily focused on speech to print and use a lot of dictated sentences and word chaining.  This is done within our literacy sessions, but we also take it out of these sessions as well as a stand alone.  10 minutes

-Writing - bridging from oral language we start with colourful semantics, coming up with ideas and creating a full sentence.  All out loud to start with and can be linked to representing in visual form.  We also do talk from images and use these to make up sentences.  Initially I will scribe sentences, and gradually children become independent enough in spelling and formation to do this successfully.  10 minutes (slowly over the year children will begin to write more independently, either based on the knowledge building the ideas we are exploring, or simply because they have a story to tell)

-Writing, along with the colourful semantics and sentence building, we also work our way through the Syntax project lessons, I do modify them slightly for my needs.  10-15 minutes

-Fluency/ Performance - each two-three weeks we have a text, children are learning out loud.  I do try to link it to our knowledge building, but sometimes these stand alone as a poem or rhyme.  We learn a couple of lines a day, until we have the whole text known, we work on actions and our expression.  Each day we practice to commit it to memory, we then perform it, either for another class, or to be videoed for sharing. 5 minutes

- Buddy Reading- Fluency- Repeated Reading - children have a buddy, chosen for a variety of reasons, but generally at a level that they can support one another.  The text that they are reading changes according to need.  It may be a word ladder, based on the sounds we are learning, it could be the poem that we are learning for our performance (once we know it quite well), it could be our decodable sentences from our literacy sessions or it can be a text that they can both read with one another's support, sometimes it is a mixture of these things.  The key is repeated reading, so the text remains the same for the week, or sometimes more. 5-10 minutes

- Decodable stories - as you will have seen, if you have read my other posts, is that I write semi-decodable stories for my children, with their input.  These stories include the code they know, but also elements they do not.  Each day we read a section together, discuss the text and children illustrate that part.  These get more complex over the year. 15 minutes ( some of this is the children drawing their pictures)

- Knowledge building, we always have an area of knowledge that we are developing, over the days I will read non-fiction texts, share videos, share images, share podcasts to listen to.  Children will respond in a variety of ways, and over the year, they will start writing factual sentences.  Can't really pin a time on this as it happens in pockets over the day and week and is often inspired by play.

-Storytelling, I use a lot of storytelling, puppets often feature, but stories come from my life, places, history, anything really.  At times over the year, we will use talk for writing as well. Can't pin a time on this.

- Chapter book reading - I always have a book I am reading the class, children love listening to this and love talking about what is happening in the story.  I try to read one or two chapters a day.  Generally while we are eating lunch, or at the end of the day. 10 minutes.

- Review based games - I try to intermingle over the week games that review the sounds we are learning, generally in the form bingo type games that are quick and easy to set up.  5 - 10 minutes

There is absolutely no way this all happens every day, highlighted in orange are the things I like to get to daily when possible. It is important to note, that often writing is an intermingling of the things noted above and it is worth following my number agent group on facebook to see what these actually look like.

Play is intermingled throughout our sessions and of course our knowledge building is linked to our learning in other curriculum areas and often drama is used as a tool for learning to that links strongly to literacy.  Of course it is not always possible to fit what I want to fit in and this is not intended to be a reflection of the other things that are included in our day, this post is just about literacy and I will do another about maths.  

Our days are fluid and we do not have a timetable, we simply write down in our A4 daily book what we 'must do' 'want to do' and would 'like to do' things we do not get to, are written down for the next day.  Again, quality over quantity.  

We also have an individual goal setting system with children that we are constantly working on with individual children in the moments we have free, this ensures that I know where I need to pinpoint support.  

The reality is classrooms and schools are busy places, we have so many demands on our time and so much to fit in, what is most important, is that what we teach, we teach it well and give our children  (all of our children) the best possible chance of really learning.

By the way, I have not mentioned the time it actually takes to get young children ready to start in our sessions (I know junior teachers know what I am talking about) I think it often takes us longer to get set up, then to take part in the session itself.

Successfully Motivated and Purposefully Engaged

Yesterday, while I was strolling around the park with my dogs, podcast in my pocket as usual, I listened to the words of Carl Hendrick and his words really resonated with me.  They were not new to me, it is a message I have heard many times before, but for some reason this time they really resonated loudly with me.  Loudly enough that I just had to share my personal journey with the ideas of 'engagement' and 'motivation.'  For clarity I have posted the part of the transcript that contains the main part of the conversation I am referring to for reference at the end of this blog post, but you can also find the podcast here.

https://chalkandtalkpodcast.podbean.com/e/ep-22-mindsets-and-misconceptions-with-carl-hendrick/

So, motivation, it is such a widely used term. We speak about children being motivated learners and it being crucial that we employs strategies that will motivate students, hook them in to the learning.  Teachers are also heard to say, that a child just won't learn, because they are not motivated to do so.  In the past my beliefs did mirror these thoughts,  I mean, it makes sense doesn't it, if you are not motivated to learn, you simply won't bother.  

This brings up the image of an unmotivated child being passive, without inclination to try, that the fact they lack motivation is their fault.  

I still remember the target we set as a school from 2012-2014, all around motivation and engagement.  We saw children (boys in particular) struggling to engage in inquiry learning and showing a particular reluctance when it came to writing.  Our hypothesis at the time, was that their reluctance to engage was directly linked to their motivation to do so.  

Now, don't get me wrong, this review led us directly to Mantle of the Expert, which led us to dramatic inquiry, play, storytelling etc, all of which have become integral parts of who we are.  The process we employed did appear to engage children more, particularly boys, and perhaps had a marginal impact on their writing output and it certainly had a big impact on our enjoyment of teaching inquiry, but it could never have had the impact we truly wanted.  I think we completely misunderstood motivation and what it is that actually motivates us as human beings.

Looking at the idea of motivation now, after my ongoing journey into striving to learn more about the Science of Learning, I have a completely different take on what we did and how we can now use that lens (as we are currently) to directly ensure an impact on achievement and wellbeing.

When it comes down to it, being successful at something is just about the most motivating thing there is.  Even the smallest amount of success, appears to have huge impacts on motivation.  Therefore to get to motivation, we must be using teaching strategies in the classroom that allow this success.  Obviously this is where explicit, direct teaching come in, it is hard to be motivated to 'discover' something if you lack the basic foundations to do so. 

Basically being able to do something is a massive catalyst to want to do it again and vice versa, being unsuccessful, constantly struggling, is a massive reason children develop 'opting' out strategies.   This motivation doesn't only need to be thought of academically, but it can be viewed through a social/emotional lens as well.  If a child is successful in their play, if they get reward from what they are doing, they will seek to do it more often and deepen what they are doing.  If a child is able to develop the social skills to establish solid friendships, they will feel happier and be more motivated to widen this circle, be more accepting of others and in turn will develop further social skills.  On the other hand, being isolated or alone has an impact on everything for that child, it is very hard to be motivated to learn or take risks, if they feel unseen.   In fact the frustration and sadness they feel at being isolated, spills over into the classroom as they desperately try to communicate their unmet needs.

A couple of examples.  

We have all had them in our class, those children we perceive as being reluctant to read. We could motivate them by providing them with wonderful exciting stories around their interest (possibly work in the short term) or we could actually explicitly teach them the code they need to read.  People that say those 'decodable readers' are boring have obviously not witnessed a child reading one on their own for the first time.  Their face lights up, they want to share it with everyone, they read it over and over and over, because it really doesn't matter what it is about, the fact is they can read it!   When it comes down to it, the decodable readers are not intended to be of interest to you.  Now I am in no way advocating for not reading wonderful rich texts to children or providing them with wonderful books to look at, but nothing is more motivating to a reader, than being able to read.   This success creates the motivation to learn more.

Personally I have a rocky past with mathematics.  But I do remember one time of motivation in mathematics, I am unsure how old I was, perhaps 8 or 9.  Maths didn't make much sense to me and I often opted out, because I struggled.  It wouldn't have mattered how exciting the maths session was, I would never have been motivated.  However one day we were playing a game, the answer was zero, it was obvious, but for some reason I was the only one in the class that got it.  I was so proud, in that moment I felt successful, I was open to learning more.  If at that moment my teacher had noticed the difference in my face and body language, and perhaps used that moment as a bridge to helping me, I may have built on this success.  Instead, it is the one glimmer I remember from maths at school.  Sadly I don't even think they realised how much I was struggling, I wonder how much of that is true for children in our classrooms today?  

Success is the biggest motivator of all to achievement.  In fact, strategies like dramatic inquiry will work so much better with children that are motivated by success.  It becomes the perfect combination.

So what about our boy writers?  Those boys we set out to help?   Well if we had explicitly taught them the foundations of writing from the beginning, as we are now, the dramatic work we were doing at the time, would have contributed hugely to them having something to write about.  What I have found in the last few years is there is really no such thing as a 'reluctant' writer when they have the foundations to actually have the cognitive freedom to write.

Engagement is something I have given a lot of thought to as well.  People often look at a busy, happy class as being engaged.  We think we need to pull out all the bells and whistled to keep them engaged, but again, there is nothing more engaging then actually being able to successfully complete the task.

Take Number Agents for instance,  I got so wrapped up in creating the world that I completely missed the fact that some children (while the knew the world inside out) were missing the maths.  It is why I pulled Portal maths back to the bare bones, the important parts to build the world, but not too much 'fluff' to overshadow the maths.  It has been the perfect mix,  the children still love it as much as they loved full blown agency, but the difference is, they are ALL getting the maths out of it.

I hope that as an educational collective we can take a good look at engagement and motivation and realise the role that success plays, that there is in fact a magic bullet and that is actually explicitly teaching the skills they need whether it be academic, emotional or social and noticing, reflecting on and responding to the needs we see in front of us.  

We need to teach children and stop looking for the next bell or whistle to get their attention or keep them busy.

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Copied from podcast transcript

 [00:22:05] Anna Stokke: You wrote a blog post called “Five Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Teaching,” and I was hoping that we could talk about some of those things, I found that really helpful and interesting. And a big one I want to talk about is motivation. So you wrote that you wish you'd known that motivation doesn't always lead to achievement, but actually, achievement often leads to motivation. So, can you elaborate on that for us?

 

[00:22:33] Carl Hendrick: Yeah, I kind of came across this in two points. One was Graham Nuthall’s book The Hidden Lives of Learners, which is, I just would recommend to everybody. It's a really short book. I think it was the first time I encountered this idea that motivation and achievement, there's a sort of an inverse relationship to them.

 

Then there was a review by Daniel Muijs and and Reynolds wrote a book, a really great, another great book called, I think it's called Effective Teaching. It's a review of the literature. And I saw it there again. And then I started to read some studies on this and started to notice that students who achieve things, even in the short term, it tends to have this knock on effect to their motivation.

 

My theory is that we kind of have the causal arrow the wrong way around. I grew up in a system where you'd try to motivate kids either through intrinsic or extrinsic awards or an assembly or a prize or whatever it was. Whereas I started to notice that, in my own practice, that if you can get somebody to a place where they experience success, even in just a small way and use that as a kind of a lever to move things forward, I noticed that that was a very effective way of doing things. 

 

And that was really about explicit modelling of things, close feedback, and opportunities for practice. And again, it's one of those things that's very counterintuitive. It's one of these things that the more complex something is, the less it's going to fly with the public and with people in general because it takes explanation. That's one of those things, which I think is, it's a difficult thing to get your head around.

 

[00:24:07] Anna Stokke: I agree with this, and from teaching for many years, I've observed this as well. And I think, especially in math, which has a lot of applications, I think there's a lot of expectations that we're always supposed to be including applications when we're teaching. But often, the applications are really messy.

 

And I've observed that in fact when students are unhappy in class, it's not because I'm not giving applications, it's usually when they're lost or struggling with the material. Also, like, my students, the ones that have more difficulty with math, it's actually the application piece that they don't like that much.

 

I mean, I do motivate with applications. I just think that the idea that applications are going to cause students to like math more or be more motivated to do more math isn't necessarily correct. I think that when students feel success, that's when they feel motivated to do more because it makes them feel good. They feel like they're good at math.

 

[00:25:16] Carl Hendrick: Yeah, I think there's a lot of students who are going through the day feeling no success at all and not learning anything at all. They're just kind of going through the motions. Again, that’s where, I think, instruction and thinking about instructional design is so important.

Why I tried whole class teaching for literacy and why I think you should too!

 Last year I posted about dipping my toes into whole class teaching for literacy.  What provoked this move was a huge amount of frustration, in fact it is a frustration I still hear often from many teachers, particularly those in the junior - middle school.   I was feeling 'spread to thin' for want of a better word, with too many groups, trying so hard to meet a diverse range of needs by doing what I had always done... reading groups.   Even though I was well into my Science of Reading journey, I had still clung to my reading groups.  It is how I was taught to teach reading, it is how I had always managed it and I didn't know of any other approach.

By the end of 2022 I knew I just couldn't spend another year like this, rushing from group to group, not giving enough time and feeling frazzled by the end of the day.  I have shared a lot more here if you want to read it https://numberagents.blogspot.com/2023/04/whole-class-reading-my-experience-so-far.html

So in 2023 I embarked on whole class 'literacy' sessions.  Taught in bite sized, manageable amounts across the day.  These sessions included phonemic development, revision of sounds, teaching of new sound, formation, reading and spelling.  

These whole class sessions were not the be all and end all of my literacy approach and you can read much more about this in previous posts.

In Term 1 and 2 I wrote my own sessions, but then stumbled across UFLI Foundations.  I am a massive believer in not reinventing the wheel and these wonderful sessions provided a fantastic foundation for my own sessions and allowed me to tweak or add dependent on the need of my class.  

I found myself a little clunky at first, but found my stride and broke up the sessions into bite sized amounts over the day, as I had with my own plans.  

I have to admit, by not having reading groups at all and delivering the same session to the whole class, I did wonder if my children would make reasonable progress.  I wondered, would it be over the head of those that were still consolidating some of the previous sounds?  Would it give those that already had those sounds a challenge and move them on?  Was I doing a disservice to my children by not having targeted groups?  For background purposes, I teach Year 1/2.

(It is important to put in here, that if you have not read my other posts, I do provided Tier 2 support in my class for literacy and math and last year had about five or six children I was working with on and off throughout the year.)

What did I find?

It is also important to note here that this is my experience, what I found, based on the achievement of my class and does not count as 'research.'  

What I found is that children LOVED it.  No longer in groups, they were learning exactly the same thing as the child next to them, reading the same words, spelling the same words, writing the same sentences, reading the same text.  (I did not use the UFLI text, it is the only thing I didn't like, but wrote my own character based stories, with the children's help.). 

They loved the rhythm of the sessions, they knew what to expect, I guess there were no surprises.  UFLI is based on solid research theories, such as distributed review, repeated practice, gradual release, interleaved practice.  This meant there was a lot of scaffolding and lots of repetition.

When I got to the end of the year and looked at the results, there were many surprises too.  Every child had made great progress, those who required tier two had established a huge amount of automatic knowledge and it was embedded, being reflected in spelling assessments and writing assessments.  Many exceeded my expectations and actually established a lot of knowledge  beyond the 'stage' I would have previously had them reading on.  My records of reading, using fluency sentences, sequenced according to stages also showed excellent fluency.  What was most pleasing is that children had great strategies to solve unknown words in stages that they had not been working on yet.  

A lot of this progress can also probably be put down to our 'decodable' paper texts exposing them to parts of the code that had not yet been taught.

Throughout the year I really noticed a lot of self-teaching, children with good foundations, beginning to make connections between the known and the not yet known.

In previous years I would have 'assessed' children at the stage they had been reading at in our group, maybe a stage above....but what I found is that children ended the year status quo.  What I mean is those in the top groups, were still in the top groups, those in the bottom groups were still in the bottom groups, even though they had progress, there wasn't necessarily movement in groups.  Of course I reviewed my groups each term, and often midway through a term, but a child moving between groups was the exception rather than the rule.

With whole class teaching there was nothing for them to move between and what I found was that a significant number of children had made progress beyond what I may have expected at the beginning of the year.

Whole class literacy teaching also gave me time, it gave me time to work with my Tier two children, time to engage, time to observe, time to notice and respond.  

Don't get me wrong, there is a place for groups and our children that were 'ready' for it were doing some 'extra' reading with my co-teacher on her days, based on the more complex parts of the code we were starting to learn.  Kind of like the reverse of Tier 2.  We also do a lot of individual goal setting and support, so have a great handle on where they are at.

It certainly was not perfect this year, I tried a lot, I changed a lot, I learned a lot.  But I will not be going back to reading groups and if you are thinking about making a change in your approach to start the year, I urge you to give it a try!

BTW - I also teach maths whole class in the same way and provide Tier 2 support for those that need it.