Reading Practice Intensive - Session Seven

 Session Seven - Thinking 

Giving our students opportunities for higher level thinking; 

Critical thinking is one of, if not the most important element for our students to learn as they move into the real world - the ability to be discerning, and attentive to the content they are being bombarded with on a daily basis in the digital world. Moving beyond passively accepting the texts, and towards examining, evaluating, analysing, and critiquing the validity and credibility of what they are being presented with.

Thinking Frames 

All of these concepts are based on the idea that as we think more deeply about the texts we read, our thought processes become more abstract, and require some synthesising, and analysing multiple pieces of information, both from the text, and prior knowledge, in order to make sense of the more complex ideas in the text.

Analysis: Deconstructing by looking closely at the parts (language features) of the texts (i.e character’s actions, authors purpose, structure of the text, PAILS)

An example of one of the ways I can implement this in my own practice is the use of digital tools to annotate and highlight key parts of a text that relate to the language features we are examining - we think about the idea of zooming in (looking at specific parts/phrases/words) or zooming out (making connections between separate parts of the text)

Learners need planned, ongoing opportunities to understand and appreciate how language features are used for effect within, and across texts.

I have often referred back to an acronym that we used a lot when I was studying to be a teacher; PAILS (purpose, audience, ideas, language, and structure), and when we teach students a text it is easy to focus on the ideas, and the language, however it is critically important for us to be aware, as teachers, that some of the other features are not always apparent to our learners (i.e how structuring a piece of writing can accentuate which ideas are most important, or how a seemingly simple narrative can have underlying ideas that are only present when we consider the purpose the author had for writing the text)

By examining the language and structure of a text we open our eyes to a wider world in which a text does not exist in isolation, but rather is a reflection of the author, and the world that we live in; taking into consideration the biases, and underlying influences that go into each text that we read.

Critical Literacy

“A critical literate person is able to examine the power relationships inherent in language use, to recognize that language is not neutral and to confront their own values in the production and reception of language” (Luke, 2012).

In order to get our learners thinking more critically it is important to provide them with provocations that generate conversation, and discussion. It is important while we do this to take into account that provocations can inspire emotional responses and reactions from the learners, and while this is important, it is also important for us to create a safe space where they can share their ideas, not entirely free from judgment, but where they can discuss/argue about the topic, or idea in the provocation without directing it at each other.

We were asked to use the text that we brought (No Girls Allowed SLJ3) in order to create a provocation for our learners to discuss; one that challenges a Critical Literacy theme (ageism,, cultural differences, gender bias etc.), and to create a “counter-narrative” writing activity that reframes the situation in our text to challenge the idea. I came up with the ones below;

Provocation: “Do girls need to be protected more than boys?”

Counter-NarrativeWrite an extra passage in the story; the organisers of the tournament are scared of how good Riley is, and want to find a way to stop her from playing and showing up the boys.

Sythesising

When taught how to synthesise through multi-text reading, readers come to understand the importance of weighing up information and perspectives from different sources (including their own). This is why it is important for us to use multiple texts which focus on a larger theme or idea. Nothing exists in isolation, and so our ability to draw on multiple sources of information allows us to form more well-reasoned, and well-rounded points of view on the idea.

In summary - this session has been probably the one with content most familiar to me; critical thinking, and information literacy is a throwback to a lot of what we taught as English teachers in secondary school. It is really interesting finding, and identifying some of the issues that we can discuss with our students at a primary level,  as far as Critical Literacy goes, are relevant to our students, and other which I had not considered useable at this age level.

This term we are focusing a lot on perspective - both the characters in the narrative, and the authors' purpose, and a lot of the content this week is going to challenge me to approach these texts in a variety of different ways.

Addendum:

I believe this level of analysis is of critical importance as young people these days are more and more influenced by the "texts" that they are exposed to, whether that be visual texts like TikTok videos or the ads that bombard them every couple of seconds while watching their favourite steamer, or the dialogue in video games they play. These are all texts that require us to examine and analyse them with a critical eye, and if we are ignorant of these things then we can easily be taken for fools.

MIT 2023 - Site went live!

In the last block today the site went live, and I introduced it to Rooms 6,7,8 (all Year 6 classes) - there were some teething issues that arose like I needed to make sure that the site was not editable by everybody with the link - the students discovered this pretty quickly and a couple of them played around with the layout, so after a quick restore, and making sure all the new links were in place we started. A lot of the children chose to go for the easy MathVenture to start with, which I was not fussed about, I would like to see more of them go for the challenging texts, however, the tool is designed for self-selection, and students can progress through the difficulties at their own pace. 

One of the other issues that arose, that I was not able to diagnose on the spot was that some of the students found themselves unable to scroll down the page, while others were able to. I will have to figure out what was causing this issue and address it. 

The feedback from the students was overwhelmingly positive - they were excited to have more texts to take on, and I think what I will need is to find a time to regularly put out new ones - am thinking perhaps weekly, or fortnightly as I don’t want to over-promise and under deliver. I had a discussion with my team leader, who works with our lower-level literacy students, about the texts being more level-appropriate; she would like for the texts to be more readable, and perhaps shorter in length for the students at lower reading levels - we have students in our space who have reading ages of around 5-6 years of age, and even the easy texts were too long, and perhaps too difficult for them to make sense of and enjoy.

I will focus on the enjoyment element of it, as this is supposed to be engaging, and not a literacy-focused task - it is about unpacking the vocabulary. She also suggested that instead of having different word hyperlinks lead to the same page, and designed so that each hyperlink has a dedicated page of its own, for example, the “half” hyperlink leads to the same clarification as “share” rather than to a clarification of its own. She thought this would be a little confusing, I agree, however, I would also like for them to be able to see what other words can mean the same thing. Another comment was about having more images, and visual representation of the concepts to account for different learning styles. This will be time-consuming to set up, however, I can see real value in perhaps setting up separate clarification slides for each of the different difficulties, as the students taking on the easier challenges, and the students taking on the most difficult challenges are being linked to the same clarifications, some of which contain a great deal of writing on them. I still would like to limit each clarification to one slide per concept, as having to navigate through separate slides to find information can cause distractions and confusion, and take away from their flow as they move through the MathVenture. We have our MIT Online meets today, so perhaps I can use that to help with all of this.