PLC Inquiry Cycle

For Excellence in Teaching and Learning

Diagnose Prioritise and Set Goals

Students writing one year Students at level to six Students below level: Students writing one year and above:
and above: months above:
1. No adjectives. LI - I am learning to use noun groups.
1. Using 1-word descriptions 1. No noun descriptions.
for actions and nouns. SC - I can use 2 or more adjectives to describe at least 3 nouns.
2.1-2 adjectives.
2. Stating emotions not
LI - I am learning to ‘show don’t tell’.
showing they were scared
etc. SC - I can explain a character’s emotions by explaining what the character’s
Evaluate body, face and voice are doing.
To support the students to write their narrative about water we are each going to print
out pictures of different settings and characters that the students are writing about to
support their vocabulary use. Students at level to six months above:
We looked into the definitions of simple and compound sentences. We will be
LI - I am learning to ‘show don’t tell’.
modelling simple and compound sentences over this week to review ‘parts of speech’
and how a sentence is constructed and expanded. SC - I can explain a character’s emotions by explaining what the character’s
body, face and voice are doing with adjectives.
Students below level: We have found that many of these students are beginning to
think about adding adjectives and some are adding 1 or 2 throughout their text. These
students need explicit reminders to go back add these adjectives and the support of LI - I am learning to use noun groups.
anchor charts. Some of these students were supported with visuals to support their
writing - some students found these to be helpful though some students didn’t use SC - I can use 2 adjectives to describe at least 2 nouns.
them as effectively as they could. These students are more aware of specific
vocabulary and this has been clear through an increase in Tier 2 words such as Students below level:
‘impolitely, captured, horrified’ and ‘shrieked’.
We will next time model how an image can help our writing to teach these students to LI - I am learning to use adjectives.
use materials/resources around them.
SC - I can use adjectives to describe three nouns.
The main progress that these students have made was around moving their ideas from
the plan to add more detail in their text and are able to implement the correct
structure of a narrative using the seven steps structure.
Students at level to six months above: We have found that the main development for
these students has been around structure and these students ‘tightening tension’
through the pebble, rock and boulder. The development of their problem was
descriptive and built tension. Most of these students included at least 2 noun groups in
their text or more that described the nouns in detail using the correct sentence
structure. The Tier 2 language used was relevant to the story and the noun. These
students are beginning to use show don’t tell to describe emotion though it is not as
frequent throughout the text.
Students writing one year and above: We have found that these students are
confidently using Tier 2 language throughout their text and are using some noun
groups, though we have found that the inclusion of these descriptions fade throughout
the text and are not as prevalent. The structure of the story, particularly the ending is
significantly better including their use of tightening tension and show don’t tell.
We will continue to encourage editing with these students to add more descriptions
and make improvements after writing.
We also found that across each class the strengths of students were different even
after having specific focusses, we will look at creating a level modelled piece for poetry
which are currently teaching. This will help to have consistency across classes and have
common discussion points for lessons.

Implement and Monitor Develop and Plan

Teacher to implement focus groups into Writing sessions, focusing on the groups’
differentiated LI and SC. Teacher to support students to achieve the SC.
Create anchor charts:
 Showing how nouns can be described - age, size, shape, surface and colour.
 Identifying words that describe a character’s personality and appearance.
 Describing the appearance and mood of a setting.
Use anchor charts when modelling teacher writing to explicitly show how to add noun
groups.
Model editing to add additional words and changing words from basic adjectives to
more specific synonyms.
TESMC: Explicitly teach the structure of a narrative through deconstruction.
Students will deconstruct story graphs for familiar texts, such as fairy tales.
Once students grasp an understanding of the different parts of a narrative
and are able to identify their purpose, they will begin to reconstruct simple,
familiar deconstructed texts.
TESMC: Breaking down the text features in a piece of narrative writing and
specifically identifying the different parts, such as nouns, verbs and
adjectives. Look at texts that use noun groups and highlight the noun and
the adjectives in sentences.
NAPLAN Guide: We will use the vocabulary marking guide to gauge the
expectations of students. We will also use this to moderate writing samples
along with the ‘Vic Curriculum I Can Statements.’