Reading Practice Intensive - Session Three (Text Selection)

Texts are the foundation by which we form a love of reading, and both forms of texts have a really important part to play in our reading  journeys,

What are we going to give them to read that will boost both their cognitive sides, and their emotive sides? What will engage them academically, and what will they enjoy reading?

Windows/Mirrors: Looking at texts which not only allow children to experience the world through the eyes of others, but also to use texts in which students can see “themselves”; a reflection of themselves in the texts. This allows students to form stronger connections to the characters.

Window texts will expand their perspectives on the wider world through the eyes of others, and to experience things that they might not get the opportunity to experience in their own lives.

Learner selected texts are also incredibly important, it removes our own biases and centricity of our ideas as teachers. It is something that we have to be really conscious of, in particular when teaching children from the wide variety of backgrounds that we have in our classrooms.

Choosing texts at the appropriate level helps us to accelerate students. Focusing on texts which lie in the “Instructional” level will help children to reach that “Zone of Proximal Development” which accelerates their learning, and pushes them to take on more challenging texts as their comprehension increases.

Grouping

In our classes we use levelled grouping, basing our groups on their reading ages, however there are limitations to this, mainly that we’re limiting our students' opportunities to perspectives of children at a similar level, but not the ones of others.

If we use grouping with students at multiple levels, we give students the opportunity to talk about texts more deeply; the vocabulary, and comprehension is not the goal, rather to use the texts to generate ideas, and discuss those ideas with one another. Within these groups it is important for us to have contextual knowledge to help them make sense of the ideas, and to make connections between the text, and their own understandings and experiences.

We watched a video called “Flea in a Glass Jar” - a flea is raised in a glass jar, and is limited in his jumping by the lid on the jar, once the lid is removed the flea is still unable to jump higher than where the lid was. This metaphor is important as we ensure that our children are not in a “glass jar”. We need to constantly assess what will work best for them, and ensure that we don’t limit them by keeping them in the same groups all year, and not extending them.

Text Selection

In this session we discussed how to select texts for our students, and there are a lot of things to take into account;

• Student’s reading levels
• Prior knowledge
• Vocabulary
• Themes and ideas that are important and relevant to them.
• Skills and strategies we want to work on
• Student interests
• Text types which cover a range of modes.

Different ways of reading

It is important for our students to be given many different opportunities to read, however independent reading, while important, is not the only way of approaching content with our students. There is;

Reading to students & Shared reading; a great opportunity to model different comprehension and decoding strategies with students

Paired reading; a great way to generate discussions amongst students who are reading a common texts, having them share their ideas with one another helps them to gain an understanding of other people’s perspectives.

Summary

Today’s learning has really driven home some important points regarding how we select texts, or students select texts and what it’s importance is in regards to engaging students, and helping to extend and support them in their learning. If we can help students to read texts which have mirrors, and windows to extend their understanding of the world, and to engage them with texts that can allow them to apply their strategies in a way which keeps them interested and engaged with their learning.

Reflections

It has been awesome today reinforcing that some of the strategies that I have already implemented in my teaching are ones which help extend our students. Moving forward I would like to improve on;

Using different types of groups (flexi-groups) can expose students to a wider variety of insights, opinions, and experiences. It also helps to improve their own self efficacy because they don't feel constrained by their levelled grouping. Sometimes the levelled grouping, especially if they don’t feel there is room to move they can become discouraged, and feel less confident in their own reading abilities and feel like they are not making adequate progress (even though they might be)

Explicit teaching of comprehension and decoding strategies is something I need to put more work into - it is easy for me to start heading towards more complex analysis type of strategies with students because of my own secondary  teaching background, but making sure to slow down, and model some of the strategies that I may already be assuming the students feel confident with, when they may be struggling.

Incorporating different reading opportunities for students is something I hope to do more of, in particular paired reading, and shared reading, as it gives more opportunity for discussion, this will lend itself well to my inquiry which is focused on expressing and sharing opinions orally in group discussions.

Reading Practice Intensive - Session Two

 Kaupapa and Shared Pedagogy (Valued Reading Outcomes)

Learn Create Share originally grew out of a common literacy practice model in the form of a literacy cycle, and the incorporation of digital technology into their learning practices. Technology was able to hook students who were disengaged with reading in particular by offering a wide range of creative opportunities based on the texts they were reading. Students knew they got to DO something with their learning.

A big part of this is helping students to create “communities of learning” something that was in practice with teachers, but had not yet been considered with students. This took form for Manaiakalani as a podcast called “Korero Pt England” in which students could reflect, and review the texts they had read, and gained a lot of traction, making it into podcast charts (ESOL students listened to it because it was at a level that was appropriate for their level of literacy).

Collecting Assessment Data - Using formative and summative assessments to evaluate our learning practices 

- Tracking our data and goals

- Use the NZC

- Using assessment tools.

Teacher Workbook

We have been given a copy of a spreadsheet in which we can collect, examine, and analyse the data we gather on our children over the years. These assessments for us are the STAR tests, PAT Reading (Scale Scores and Stanines), and Running Records (PM + Probes)

We did a Deep Dive into PAT: Reading Data, and the different reports that this test can provide us.

By examining our class, and analysing the data to identify gaps in their knowledge we can approach the next steps task in order to fill those gaps.

This is a time consuming process, however it is crucial in order to understand the more specific elements of literacy that our students need acceleration in to achieve at or above the national norms.

This teacher workbook functions well as an “one stop shop” for all of our reading practices, from data, to reflection, to planning. I think it will allow a more streamlined approach to planning without having to manage umpteen different sheets, and docs, and to be able to see more clearly what our next steps are when preparing and planning learning.

Learning Intentions and Achievement Objectives

One of the clear outcomes to student success is setting clear learning intentions by which students understand what they are trying to achieve, and what they should be able to achieve by the end of the unit.

Ultimately we would like students to be able to co-construct these Learning Intentions with our students in order for them to be self-evaluative, and assess their own outcomes, and success.

This session has given us a long to think about, as it’s an amalgamation of any different pieces of information, particularly how we can best utilise data to make informed decisions about our practice. Moving forward, I am going to look more closely at the gaps in my students' learning, as opposed to broadly trying to cover as much of the curriculum as possible, instead focusing on deliberate achievement objectives until the success criteria I / we have identified has been accomplished.

Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers - Part One

2-4rd March 2023 - Omaha Hui

First Night (02/03/23) : 

We arrived at a beautiful house in Omaha  around 6pm, and after some socialising and dinner we settled in to hear the introduction to the Manaiakalani Innovative teachers project from Dorothy Burt. In this presentation she outlined the reasons, the “why” of our project, and shared with us the stories of the innovators that contributed to the early days of Manaiakalani, the endeavourment  they showed in making changes and innovations that have lead to great success and engagement from, not only students, but teachers, academics, and philanthropists that have allowed Manaiakalani to flourish and achieve the success they have had over the years.

I felt inspired listening to the stories, in particular the ones from teachers who HAD to innovate in order to create equity for their students, and their communities. I feel a real privilege to be working under Russell and Dorothy Burt, who have demonstrated time, and time again, the willingness to think outside of the box, to work with entities outside of the traditional schooling system in order to make their schools a critical part of the community, whether that be their work in PNG, or the innovation that lead PES to become the first Google school in New Zealand, or to create a community internet system, not just for their school, but for the entire Tamaki community of schools.

 

The quote ““If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” by Isaac Newton is one that came up time, and time again during this presentation, and resonated with me in a really powerful way. I think it’s extremely important for us, as teachers, to understand how far we have come, and to understand our past in order to properly prepare for our student’s futures.

Full Day Meetings - 

Stage One (Empathy)

1. Role Playing - teachers were given roles to play as teachers of the imaginary Omaha Area School - each parent had a unique perspective, and situation that impacted what their beliefs were regarding the issues, and problems that the school had addressed (many of the problems raised were the ones we identified in our initial proposals). This exercise allowed us to connect with the problems from a variety of perspectives in order to focus on the Empathise stage of our design process.

2. Users Task - The next step in the design process is for us to be able to understand the perspectives of our students, as well as ourselves, and other teachers. By understanding the needs of teachers, and students we can more accurately direct the design process towards who needs it more; the students or the teachers. We answered the questions as both the teacher and the student;

• What does the user do?

• What does the user say?

• What does the user think? 

• What does the user feel?

For my project I  have determined that teachers are in need of a way for students to connect vocabulary that is unfamiliar to them, to strategies with which they are familiar. This will help them to solve worded maths problems with independence and therefore improve their self efficacy, and confidence when approaching these kinds of questions.

Stage Two (Define)

In this next stage of the process we were required to narrow down our idea for our project into a succinct sentence, answering the question “What is the problem that your user is experiencing?”. This was a tricky challenge that required us to distill the problem we had into a succinct and precise sentence, that outlined 

“______ (user) needs____________ because__________ (insight).”

My original statement read as follows; 

Mr X needs a way for students to connect unknown vocabulary with known mathematical strategies because it will help them to independently solve word problems in maths.

We presented our questions, and the feedback I got was that this statement made some big assumptions, that I believe relate back to the idea that correlation is not causation; that because this is a multifaceted problem it is presumptuous to say that this WILL in fact do anything to improve student progress in maths.

How might we? 

Once each teacher had presented their ideas we completed the next part of the task, which is to take on the feedback, and to change our statement and frame it more positively, instead of a X needs X statement it was phrased as “How might we…?”. 

My proposition read as follows; How might we support students to unpack maths problems which contain unfamiliar language?

By framing this in a more positive way, and phrasing it with an opportunistic sentence starter it also helped to further distil the question into a simple and concise proposition that I think will help to guide the next steps of this project in a clear direction.

Stage Three  (Ideate)

Crazy Eights

The next part of our idea exploration was the Crazy 8 task. This required us to come up with 8 different solutions or tools that might work for our problem. From simple to ridiculous we had to think carefully about how we wanted to solve this problem. 

Below you can see the original 8 ideas;

1. A Maths game by which students must show understanding of a concept or vocabulary to pass to the next level.

2. A help site by which students can identify what they are having difficulty with and can seek support through definitions, explanations, demonstrations and videos.

3. A storybook, choose-your-own-adventure style in which students must solve maths problems to find the next page in the story.

4. A tool where students can ask questions to other students using algorithm (number) questions to write their own word problems (showing both understanding of the numbers, and using words to add their own context.

5. Booklets, separated by topic with lots of information, and tasks for the students to complete.

6. A Youtube channel with engaging and interesting videos which can introduce and explain maths concepts to students.

7. A practical day cross-school where students can engage practically and apply their strategies to real life situations.

8. A variation of CHAT-GPT in which students can ask questions, for clarification and the AI will provide a definition, a demonstration or a video that shows what it looks like.

After we had come up with these 8 ideas we were asked to present, and explain what they were to the group.

Once we had presented we were given small stickers, and stamps and spent 15 minutes reflecting on the other members' projects, and placed the stickers/stamps on the ideas that resonated with us as being useful, and applicable. FInal step was for us to select one option from each of our group mates options that we thought was the best option.

This feedback was incredibly helpful as it allowed us to see more clearly the primary direction for our projects to head in. As you can see from my sheet above the Storybook option gathered the most stickers, followed by the Student-led questions. For future implementation student input will be incorporated, however for the time being I will pursue ways of creating a digital storybook that requires students to solve problems and answer questions to progress through