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!
I really enjoyed reading your post, as always :) Love the reflective attitude toward planning - an activity we can approach with a groan, but when done well actually saves us heaps of time in the long run.
ReplyDeleteI was also really interested in your thoughts on the difference between primary and secondary in terms of independent activities. I would say that the thing that makes us teachers, rather than organisers or facilitators, is the actual teaching we do, spending time with kids helping them to learn something new. If they are able to do that completely independently, perhaps the learning wasn't ambitious enough?
I do look forward to seeing what you do with the reading like a writer, writing like a reader activity. Your response to text activities are usually so detailed and engaging as it is, so I am going to enjoy seeing how you push the boat out on this one, too!