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.