Reading Practice Intensive - Session Nine (Final Day)

Session Nine: Sharing Reading

Sharing about Reading

Students sharing their work allows them the opportunity to create connections and to establish authentic audiences in their digital spaces that can build their understanding, and raise their achievement. 

Allowing students the time and the space to work on their blogs, to visit, and leave thoughtful, positive, and helpful comments on the work of their peers is something that I need to implement more deliberately in the timetable, as well as ensuring that they are sharing and reflecting on the work that they are doing on their own blogs.

Participating in Reading Communities

What does participation in a reading community mean? In the new curriculum we have an emphasis on participation in a reading community, but what does it mean? It means allowing students an opportunity to for students to share their ideas, and opinions on the texts they have been reading, and make recommendations to others about the texts they have found interesting or enjoyed. By doing this we give students the opportunity, not only to reflect on their own reading and learning, but also to take on board what other like-minded students have read, and what they might like to read next. Sharing is also an important part of formative assessment as it gives us opportunities to check out how children are learning as they progress through the year. 

Making Reading Visible

Using the blog is critical in making reading visible, and allows for easy connections with others around what our students have been reading, as well as an opportunity for feedback from whanau, teachers, and other students.

We can use the blogs to reflect on learning, and create a record of learning over time, independent reading, and the reading/writing connection, and probably the most important element which is giving the students the opportunity for self-expression, and higher-order thinking.

Our schools take part in something called the Summer Learning Journey, a blogging challenge that takes place over the summer holidays, and we found that the students who took part in it improved their writing, not just formatively, but summatively through their results in e-Asttle writing assessments.

We also want to encourage students to share on their blogs more spontaneously, and not make it a chore, and we can do this by encouraging them to share their ideas, and experiences that take place outside of the classroom. If we can create value in sharing their ideas on their blogs we can continue to make it exciting, and engaging by giving them the opportunity to have their own voice, and by engaging, and commenting on each other's blogs we give them a great sense of importance to what they are sharing.

Feedback

Blogs, Google Docs/Slides, etc. give us as teachers such a valuable opportunity to give students feedback, particularly rewindable feedback that they can go back to in order to guide their next steps. Giving feedback is such an important part of teaching, and effective feedback evidently has a great impact on learners' progress, so how do we make sure that we are giving good feedback?

Good feedback follows three basic forms; Evaluative (making a judgment, usually summative), Descriptive (giving specific information about where they are at, and describing gaps), and Generative (feedforward, and guidance for improvement)

Collaboration

Collaboration is such an underrated tool in our teaching kete; their lives outside of school will frequently rely on them being able to collaborate with other people, and gives them such valuable opportunity to learn from others, and to help each other to overcome difficult challenges by relying on others, and being reliable in helping others. 

In school it can look like; listening/reading/responding to each other, discussing and co-constructing responses, commenting on each other’s blogs, peer feedback, and sharing texts that they’ve enjoyed. 

Scaffolding this collaborative/feedback opportunity can be important so they learn to give constructive feedback to each other, learn to take on feedback, and to learn from others in a positive way. 

Whanau Engagement

One of the things I have encountered in my conversations with many students over the years is that many of the students with lower reading levels share something in common - reading is not commonplace in their households; they don’t have people who read in their households; they don’t see people reading, they don’t have books in the home, and they are not encouraged to read in their spare time. One of the things I want to push for is encouraging students to shift that paradigm, if they are not having reading modeled to them, that they can model reading at home for others, whether that be parents or their siblings. 

Final Day

Today marked the final day of the Reading Program Intensive, and what a privilege it has been to be a part of it - I went into the program with a great sense of false confidence around my reading teaching practices and boy - did I get a reality check. Humbled and feeling slightly overwhelmed at the beginning, the program, alongside my wonderful mentor Mrs Nua, have scaffolded and supported me to reevaluate a lot of my practices and to view reading through a new lens. I originally came to PES as a secondary trained teacher of English, and for me, reading was focused on the analysis of texts, the ability to identify, and explain language features, and to break down texts to their foundation in order to “better understand” them. Moving to primary it became apparent that these skills were simply not the focus, and although it took me a while to get there, I feel reinvigorated as a teacher of the English language to find engaging and interesting ways to teach my students, not only how to read, but to get them reading to learn. The change from assessment-focused learning to learning skills, and strategies has been refreshing, and while summative and formative assessments are still a critical part of my teaching practice it feels great to explore a wider range of avenues through which we can build our students' skills, strategies, and to foster their love for reading inside the classroom, and out.

A massive thank you to our facilitators, Naomi, Georgie, and Toni - thank you for sharing your wisdom, and guidance with us - this has been an invaluable opportunity, and I hope I can maintain, sustain and implement everything you’ve taught me, and do all of your hard work justice. Nga mihi nui!

 

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.

Reading Practice Intensive - Session One

The Reading Practice Intensive is a program set up to guide teachers through the development of ideas and plans that will allow us , not only to be better teachers of reading for our students, but to have the tools we need to share, and help our fellow teachers through an area of learning that is hugely critical to the success of our students.

Below are the otes and reflections from our first session.

Overview

Acquiring content and practice which can impact disposition or attitudes towards reading to help students become independent, life-long readers.

Apply knowledge acquired from RPI and pass on that learning to our school.

Reflect on learning w/ mentor and organise 15 min observation (1 per session)

Critical for Manaiakalani teacher’s to accelerate learning in order to create an equitable future for our learners.

“Reading ability has a considerable impact on both educational attainment and wider life outcomes. Research finds robust connections between reading ability and educational success. Reading enjoyment and behaviour appear to be the key mechanisms in this relationship” (Mulcahy et al, 2022)

What characterises a good reader?

- Curiosity and hunger to learn more about topics they find engaging.

- Reads for enjoyment and for entertainment, as well as for learning purposes.

- Patience and focus to read for extended periods of time.

- Understanding of how to access and find texts.

- Strategies to make meaning  &  build their confidence (self-efficacy)  to tackle texts which can be challenging. Believing they are capable of carrying out an action to achieve a goal.

- Participate in communities of learning (classrooms, friends, family etc.) to add further learning related to texts through discussion and conversations

- Acquiring, using/applying the knowledge they gather through reading.

- Read a wide variety of texts which engage them with different ideas, and styles.

The use of forms can be critical in this respect as it allows teachers not only to gather data on their attitude towards reading but can also give us an indication of student interests, and self-efficacy when it comes to personal reading choices. This information can also be used by teachers to encourage students to try different texts, and to delve deeper into topics, subjects, or genres that they’re interested in in order to follow the T-Shaped literacy

Teachers as Readers

Teachers help students become readers when they understand the importance of reading for pleasure and are reading role-models.

This requires us to know our students, know the literature they’re reading and to share OUR enthusiasm for reading.

Reading Across the Curriculum

Reading & writing  are things that we do across a wide range of topics, not just something isolated to literacy lessons. (Finding a wide variety of texts/types of texts related to a topic area (T-Shaped Literacy))

Using the library as a valuable asset - used both in teaching context, but also a place for students to explore their own interests and learning areas through a variety of different learning opportunities and resources.

Making explicit connections between content/concepts and other contexts.

Students interpreting and analysing their own/their classes' reading behaviours  and attitudes (in a mathematical/statistical analysis context), not only allows us to teach/talk about literacy in a cross-curricular way, but can help students to feel encouraged, and enthusiastic about improving their reading aptitude and attitude because they take charge of their own learning.

Students encouraging other students, through things like Book Chains, seems to have a really positive effect on student’s attitude towards reading where it is not just something they are being made to do, but rather it’s a form of entertainment that they can share with their friends, like watching a cool new movie, or trying a new video game.

Giving student’s self-directed opportunities for follow up activities is a great way of engaging students with a text through a task that they find interesting/relevant to them and their lives (like TikTok profiles, or text conversations)

I think students encouraging others to read helps them to take the “personal” element out of it which could potentially be discouraging, and turns it into a larger picture of how to change achievement across the class.

A Discussion about Texts

There is a reinforcing reciprocal relationship between oral language influencing reading development, and reading influencing oral language development.

Opportunities to verbalise their ideas is a critical element of learning, but in order to do this we need to have clear, and explicitly taught ground rules around how to talk with one another in these contexts;

- Actively listen (includes not talking over others);

- Respectfully take part giving ideas, reasons and evidence; 

- Ask questions; Be inclusive. invite the participation of others (this is of particular importance when encouraging reciprocity with students);

- Stick to the topic;

- Look at other sides of the issue (e.g. fully informed to think critically & make best decisions)

We got into breakout groups of about 5 teachers, and it was interesting to see how some of the pitfalls that our students will experience were similar to the pitfalls that we encountered, in particular encouraging and inviting others to join the discussion. We need to make sure that we are listening to understand, not listening to respond.

How to grow good readers

Providing balanced book collections at all grade levels is vital to engagement during both reading instruction and self-selection. This work suggests that a balanced collection includes lots of informational titles and a variety of print materials. (Gambrell, n.d) 

Reflections:

What did I learn that increased my understanding of the kaupapa and pedagogy of the Manaiakalani Reading Programme?

It was great to be able to synthesis so may of the different practices I have been taught, and have used in my career as both a secondary English teacher, and as a primary teacher, and how many of these same strategies (self-reflection, explicit teaching of group talk, student choice) are relevant across all learning levels.

What did I learn that could improve my capability and confidence in teaching reading?

I begin the course very confident in my ability to teach reading, and feel reassured that many of the strategies I have put into practice are effective. 

What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

That including a variety of text types also includes variety in the type of texts they have available (both non-fiction and fiction). I will also be including more student-selected work options for post-reading activities t account for different interests, and learning styles.

What did I learn that could be shared within my wider community, with either colleagues, or whānau/aiga? 

That modelling reading is critically important,  firstly, it begins with reading at home, whether that be reading to kids, reading for enjoyment so that the kids can see, or even just having books in the house that are available for them to pick up, examine, and potentially enjoy.