Peer Assessment in a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway
Overview
All Glow and no action? “Can GLOW be used as a purposeful learning and teaching tool to increase participation and attainment levels in Literacy? Using the same stimulus, how do the findings compare between two Primary Six classes in Dumfries and Galloway with different socio-economic catchment areas?”
click to enlarge
These were the title and the original aims of Lindsay Sim and Barbara Chierici’s Probationer Mini-Research Project running in the year 2008/2009. Literacy had been a focus on the School Improvement Plans at both Calside and Hecklegirth Primary Schools and therefore was an ideal curricular area to develop. Literacy was also a very important area identified on Dumfries and Galloway’s Service Improvement Plan. Staff development and cluster days had targeted this and Lindsay and Barbara believed the introduction of Glow, could be used as a stimulus to enhance literacy at both schools. It was very important to the project that Literacy was initially identified before Lindsay and Barbara decided to use Glow. Glow was identified as the best way the teachers could see of introducing a collaborative element to the project. They wanted more collaboration than the teachers simply staying in touch; they wanted the pupils to be able to collaborate with each other. Glow provided this purposeful link for both the pupils and the teachers. The teachers were keen that Glow could allow them to focus on the main aims in Dumfries and Galloway of
“attainment, achievement and participation”.
In a series of Cookbooks we will look at the work Lindsay and Barbara undertook for the project and the Glow Group they built to facilitate this.
In this cookbook, we will find out:
• What the P6 Literacy Project Glow Group looks like
• How Lindsay and Barbara used the Glow tools to facilitate peer assessment
• What they feel the impact of peer assessment within the project has been
Context
click to enlarge
Glow had only just been introduced to the schools in Dumfries and Galloway and Lindsay and Barbara thought it was something they could develop with their classes and use for their own CPD at the same time. They wanted to use Glow as a learning and teaching tool to help improve literacy in their schools. For the pupils, the excitement was very much about using Glow and with the pupils the teachers played on this and played down their main aim of improving literacy. They knew, through the pupils’ motivation for the tasks, that literacy skills were definitely being improved as part of the project. The first phase of the project centred on writing with the focus shifting in the second phase to reading, listening and talking.
Please visit the Cookbook All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway for more detailed background to and context of the Project.
Before Lindsay and Barbara introduced Glow to the two classes they used a traffic light system to survey their pupils about whether they would like to take part in a Burns Poetry competition being run within the authority. They were shocked by the results which they believed was an accurate measure of the pupils’ enthusiasm for literacy. Across the 2 primary 6 classes only 26% said they would like to take part, 60% said they wouldn’t like to and 14% weren’t sure.
Collaboration
click to enlarge
To introduce the pupils to Glow they took a space topic and began some joint work. They matched each pupil from one school up with a pupil in the other school and they had access to their “e-buddy’s” email address. However, most of the time they used the discussion web part in Glow to communicate. They initially were set the target of talking about things they had learned in the space project and getting to know their e-buddy. This was deliberately kept very informal by Barbara and Lindsay to start with. Both teachers uploaded some photographs of what they were doing in the space topic and also put some web links to information and games there for the pupils to access. The teachers also put up discussion starters to get the pupils going. This gave them prompts to inform their discussions with each other. This was their taster of Glow and the teachers believed this really captured the pupils’ interest.
Barbara comments on this, “they were so excited to have another P6 pupil to make contact with in another town.”
Poetry sneaks in!
click to enlarge
With the teachers having in mind that their objective was the Burns Poetry competition they started to introduce this through the ‘back door’ by getting them to write poems about space. They began to introduce different types of poetry format with Cinquain, Haiku and Tanka, metaphor and simile. In order to improve the strength of their link with their e-buddy the teachers asked them to publish their poem on Glow and to peer assess each other’s work. The pupils were then asked again about entering the Burns Poetry competition and told that this would be done in collaboration with their e-buddy. This time, only a short while after first being asked the numbers were completely different with almost 100% saying that they were keen to take part.
click here to enlarge
Building upon the way they had learned to work with each other, the teachers began to get them working on poems for the competition. This was going to be the end of the project but Lindsay and Barbara thought it worked so well and that the pupils had enjoyed it so much that they decided to extend it. Both Lindsay and Barbara could see that literacy levels in their classes were definitely improving through this process. They felt that the level of participation and enthusiasm they were experiencing from the pupils warranted the continuation of the project.
Project Extension
For the continuation of the project the teachers decided to take the focus away from writing and onto other aspects of literacy. They decided they would use the novel Wheels by Catherine MacPhail as the focus for the next section of the project. Initially they took a Writer’s Craft approach to this, stopping at the same point and asking the pupils to write the continuation of the next part of the story. The pupils would upload this onto Glow and then take part in further peer assessment with their e-buddies, adding another stage of the story and peer assessing this backwards and forwards.
Peer Assessment in Different Languages
click to enlarge
In Lindsay’s class there were 6 Polish pupils, 2 of whom needed a lot of support with their English which made the peer assessment aspects of the project more of a challenge. Barbara’s pupils who were paired with the Polish pupils were presented with work to peer assess which had been done in Polish. Without consulting with Barbara, the pupils took the Polish work and copied it straight into an online translator. They then worked on their feedback in English, copying it into the Polish translator to return to Lindsay’s pupils in their own language. The Polish pupils were amazed that the other pupils had put this much work into it.
As Lindsay says, “I think that made them feel really included in the project.”
It drove them to really think and extend their understanding of English to be able to return the favour. This was a huge achievement for them. At this point the teachers literally stood back as the pupils directed themselves through the learning. Barbara felt that this was demonstrating the four capacities of Curriculum for Excellence just in this one activity.
Ingredients
In order to set up the Glow Group in the first place Lindsay and Barbara attended Glow 1,2 and 3, twilight sessions run by Dumfries and Galloway Glow Support team.
What did the teachers need to do within Glow to allow the pupils to collaborate with each other?
• A local authority level Glow Group for the P6 Literacy Project
• Administrator membership for the 2 teachers involved
• Contributor membership for the P6 pupils
• A document library for uploading poems
• A poetry discussions web part
• Document web part with Writers’ Craft Task stories uploaded and commented on
Recipe
The videos below are part of a virtual tour by Barbara Cherichi and Lindsay Sim of the P6 Literacy Project collaborative Group. The videos which then follow take you through how to recreate some of the elements in Lindsay and Barbara’s Glow Group. Details are:
The Noticeboard Tour (1:29)
Tour of the Wheels, Meet Zone and Voki Pages (3:46)
Tour of the Document Library and Discussion Board (3:30)
Changing the Page names and closing web parts (2:58)
Moving your web parts to another page (1:49)
Creating folders in a document library (2:38)
Error: Required parameter “filename” is missing!
Using a Discussion Board and a Document Library to peer assess (1:43)
Using a Documents web part to peer assess (2:32)
Impact
Barbara and Lindsay
Both Barbara and Lindsay were very keen that their project was viewed as a Literacy project and not as an ICT project as other teachers might tend to view it.
They noted that the level of writing was definitely improving as part of the project:
Lindsay Sim, “I think when it’s that external person […] giving them that feedback and ways which they can improve that they were just falling over themselves to actually improve it. Then they were desperate for more feedback to come back, thinking, look, I’ve taken on your advice and improved it, what do you think now?”
What the teachers also found interesting is that the pupils took the collaboration outwith the school, often logging on from home and speaking to each other, contributing to the discussions and even coming up with poems at home. None of this process and the decisions the pupils were making was being directed by the teachers.
Barbara also felt that using Glow, for the teachers was so much easier than having to consult 32 different jotters for the pupils’ work.
“It’s good for teachers as well because you’ve got everything on the site. Glow makes it much easier for us as practioners.”
“Their literacy skills developed immensely, not to mention their ICT skills. [They were learning] things they could not do before.” Lindsay Sim.
click to enlarge
Lindsay and Barbara were asked to present on their project at the Probationers Conference in Dumfries and Galloway. It was almost unheard of to bring pupils along to this event and they had never been anywhere like this with hundreds of people there to hear what they had to say. The pupils were able to take questions from the audience about their learning. They took the whole thing in their stride and this speaks well of the confident learners they had been encouraged to become as part of the whole collaborative project.
Lindsay uses Glow with her current class in her new school, Newington Primary, in Annan. However, she feels what really drove forward the use of Glow and literacy gains for the pupils at Hecklegirth and Calside was the collaborative nature of the project. They feel that participation and attainment in all areas of literacy was improved for their pupils. All pupils participated fully in the project.
Lindsay notices that, “going back to our original aims of attainment, achievement and participation, we can categorically say that every child had achieved those 3 basic aims. I don’t think it would have been anywhere near as successful if we’d just done it individually and there wasn’t that collaboration and correspondence between us and the pupils.”
Barbara adds to this, “the children were motivated because of their e-buddies… We might have stopped at the end of the first phase if we were doing it on our own [without Glow].”
In the poetry competition two of Barbara’s pupils came second and third and had their entries published in a book about the competition.
Their Glow Group is also frequently used in Glow training and support sessions in Dumfries and Galloway.
The project ran in the 2008/2009 year and was whilst Barbara was at Calside and Lindsay was at Hecklegirth. Lindsay is now at Newington Primary, Annan and Barbara is at St Andrew’s RC Primary School, Dumfries.
The next section has various video clips where Lindsay and Barbara talk about various aspects of the set-up and impact of the project.
How the project came about (3:18)
Setting up the first part of the project (4:37)
Lindsay and Barbara speak about Poetry and Peer Assessment (6:33)
Extending the project to another phase (1:51)
Summing up the project (1:57)
Lindsay sums up the project for us,
“I think it was not that we did the poetry competition and not that we did [the novel] Wheels, it’s that we did it through Glow that we’ve got these results [where the pupils describe their literacy skills as being enhanced]. If we had done this without the technology side we wouldn’t have these results, at all. It just shows how literacy and ICT can work together as a purposeful learning and teaching tool.”
Links to the other Cookbooks on the Project will be placed here as these Cookbooks are completed.
Click here if you wish to visit the Cookbook containing more background information for the Project – All Glow and No Action? Background to a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway
Click here if you wish to visit the Cookbook containing more information on the use of Vokis in the Project - All Glow and No Action? Pt 3 Vokis in a P6 Joint Literacy Project in Dumfries and Galloway
Identified Experiences and Outcomes –
Through their involvement in the P6 Literacy Project Glow Group, the pupils have been actively engaging with a range of Curriculum for Excellence Experiences and Outcomes. Although they are placed as tags to this Cookbook you will find expanded information in the Background Cookbook for the project.