Reading Practice Intensive - Session Five

 

Session Five has arrived in a hurry! It barely feels like a week since we were last together, but it's always a welcome  opportunity to take off my teaching hat, and to put my learning hat on.

Today we focused on Planning a Reading Program - thinking deliberately about all the little choices we make as teachers when we teach reading, not just what texts we are teaching, but to also consider how we deliver those texts to our students in a way which is engaging, interesting, but most importantly effective in getting our students to better understand what they are reading.

As teachers we it can sometimes be overwhelming trying to incorporate every thing that we know we should be doing into our lessons - if we had 35 hours in a day there would still be more to try and pack in there. So how do we manage this with only 4-6 hours with which to teach in a school day? The answer is a simple word. Planning.

It's a word I dreaded in my early years of teaching, and one that self-admittedly I still have a lot of room to improve on.

In this session we broke down what effective planning in a reading program looks like; for teachers, and for students planning removes a lot of the uncertainty, and anxiety around "what comes next?". Clear and effective planning means students, and the teacher can focus on the things that are really important;

1. Spending time with my students - coming from a high school teaching background I often have to remind myself that not everything can be done by students independently, and that a lot of the most valuable learning takes place in conferencing with students, prior to reading, and post reading. Prior to reading to help them draw connections between their own lives, and what we are learning about in the texts.

2. Making connections - nothing we learn, create or share exists within a vacuum. Giving students the opportunity to make connections, not just between the text, and their own lives, but to make cross-curricular connections too. Being able to integrate reading and writing into different subject areas means that we don't just read or write for the sake of mileage, we are using it as a tool for learning.

3. Teaching specific skills or strategies through explicit acts of teaching. Learning can happen through osmosis, but it is ineffectual in comparison to the explicit teaching of skills. Inference, for example, may be something that some students can do with ease, for others, it can be a mystery how people can figure things out, seemingly without clues. But the clues are there, and helping them to see those clues needs to be done deliberately.

 So, what did I learn from all this; well, first, I need to make deliberate plans to conference with my groups in order be more time-efficient. Conferencing with each group in my reading class is at least twice per week is going to be my goal to begin with, and limiting the time I spend with each group will also be managed more strictly. I am a blabbermouth, and if I am not careful, some of my carefully planned teaching can go out of the window because my students ask me an interesting question, and 40 minutes later we've managed to go down 4 or 5 different tangents.

What did I learn, that I can use with my learners? Well a lot, but there were two elements to todays learning that I took the most away from. 

First - utilising tools that are free, and readily available does not make me a lazy teacher. There are so many AWESOME resources out there, that are fun, and engaging for the students. Use them, and encourage the kids to use them outside of the classroom to foster a sense of accomplishment, pride, and self-efficacy in their ability to complete tasks independently.

Secondly was the Reading like a Writer, Writing like a Reader activity is something I am definitely going to borrow for my students. The task asks students to read the opening for a story, and to write their own story using style elements from the read text.

It is a wonderful way of exposing students to a much wider variety of text types that they may not have ever experimented with before. For students in my Year 6 class, this is incredibly important; they are being exposed to a wider range of texts than they have in their past years, and will be challenged to take on different styles of writing in the future. Preparing them for this means finding ways of supporting them and scaffolding them is critical.

Can't wait for the next session!

MIT 2023 - KPMG Hui #2

Another early morning start, I tried asking my partner for a ride into the city to save myself a couple bucks, but her unintelligible groans gave me a pretty clear indication that I should find my own way in. 

I arrive early, and myself and Matt tap away on our laptops until the rest of the crew arrived. I think we'd both had a rough week of Fantasy so thought it best to leave that subject alone, and we trot over to the KPMG offices. A massive thank you, as always to Justine for hosting us so wonderfully, but for her helpful input, and advice. We begin our day reflecting on our project so far in the WWW session. This is such a great crew, and looking at their work, I am blown away at their creativity, and the innovative ideas they've come up with. I can't wait to see where we all end up. Sharing ideas in a setting like this has now become such an awesome experience, I feel privileged to be able to share ideas, and have them help me to craft and hone my own.

We presented our prototype testing - I was nervous for my testing, there were a lot of moving parts in my prototype design, from audio clips on Youtube, to response validations, with multiple questions, and large chunks of my own narrative writing (don't get me started on how nervous that part makes me) for my students to give me feedback on.  The testing started with a flop. My Youtube videos had not been properly categorized, and were unable to be viewed on our student's devices. Once that was sorted the testing was great fun to see, the kids were super encouraging, but I think that's more a reflection of how awesome they are, instead of how awesome the prototype was. 

Each quiz ended with an opportunity for the kids to give me feedback, and I used that to help guide me in the process. For example; 49% of the students used the clarifications guide in the prototype, and a further 28% didn't need to use it. Other's found it confusing, and not useful. In further testing I will investigate how to make the clarification guide more useable.

Here are the results from the student feedback;

And here are my reflections on that round of testing

Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers - Project Update

As part of the Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers program this year we were asked to identify a problem that we felt was important to address in our classrooms. I identified a focus, and it was that I felt there were students in my class who had a really strong grasp on numeracy, but were limited in performing to the level that they were capable of because they were hindered by their literacy, particularly the comprehension of word problems in math tests like PAT.

The vocabulary can be tricky, the questions lack context, and let's be honest, the scenarios are somehow both weird, and boring. I don't want my kids thinking that math is boring, and I certainly don't want them thinking that reading is either.

My original thought was, unfortunately, deficit minded, and didn't focus on how I could reframe the problem towards building a solution. Alongside my fellow MIT colleagues we spent a wonderful weekend in Omaha breaking each others ideas down, and building them back up towards a forward thinking solution. If you would like to read more about this process check out this blog post about our Omaha Hui

As part of this process we developed a "How might we" statement to help us focus our intentions, and set our minds on the solution.

"How might we support students to unpack maths problems which contain unfamiliar language?"

I returned home inspired, and motivated to create - the first story entitled "Jacob's Village Life"  was trialed in the final week of term across a wide range of Year 5 & 6 students at Pt England School. The prototype was built using Google Forms - this allowed me to seperate the story into sections, to add images, and an accompanying audio track for students to follow along as they read, and hyperlinks to a set of clarification slides to help the unpack the operative words in the questions. See the example below.

At the end of the prototype story the students were asked to give feedback, and while it gave me some things to work on, the elements which were of highest importance to me functioned how I wanted them to - the clarifications helped close to 50% of the students, with close to 30% not needing them at all, and the students wanted more, and the text was interesting, and Forms was easy to navigate for our students. Further investigation into what made the Clarifications confusing for the 18% of students is needed, and is part of the next steps in the process.

I am currently in the process of adding texts to what will eventually be a library of texts with new releases, coming out regularly, covering a range of math, and reading levels to give access to as many students as possible, and extending the clarification slides to include a wider variety of vocabulary words, and math terminology. 

Follow along with this journey as our students explore, and hopefully, become great MathVenturers!