In our Inquiry group sharing session today it was interesting to listen to Kent talking about his inquiry as it resonated with my thoughts and experiences. He was sharing about how there was a disconnect
between having great higher order thinking reading tasks set for the children, and what they then produced. This is what I have also noticed - that tasks I have thought involved quite a lot of thought and creativity have ended up being finished with minimal depth. We have both had the realisation that what was lacking was the scaffolding needed to support them in these tasks.
Added to this is a continued difficulty some of my more abled students  have had being able to demonstrate a deeper comprehension of texts. Because of this I had decided that while continuing to set follow-up tasks that would hopefully engage the children and have some depth to them, I wanted my main focus to be trying a more systematic approach to developing comprehension strategies in their instructional group work.  So far the approach I have been using  (developed by Hilton Ayrey) is highlighting misconceptions in their understandings that I hadn't expected. Unfortunately as this approach takes up more teacher time for each instructional reading group, it has meant that it is unrealistic to be able to then spending even more time supporting the students in being able to undertake the follow-up tasks more satisfactorily. Dilemma.
Something that Kent has been trialling is have better supports online, such as audio files with instructions that the children can replay again and again so they are clear about what to do. Another key factor is having more checkpoints along the way so the children are needing to be more accountable with what work they are doing.
This is an area I would like to keep working on in conjunction with my instructional group focus on comprehension.