RPI Day 2: Reflections

This was a full-on day with a lot of new and newly refreshed reminders for teaching and learning literacy skills across the curriculum. We began with a discussion on the importance of Reading in general. I will need to take better notes to remember whose thoughts these are /were (apologies if I am using your words - please let me know to credit you appropriately).

"Once you become a reader - you are a reader for life from primary to secondary."

The Hook - sometimes it is the tech and graphics, sometimes it is the interaction with an outside authentic audience and sometimes it is the social part of reading, or the personal part of reading. 

I am curious about this. I think my own passion for reading was the personal aspect and the the curiosity of wanting to know more and do more. My earliest memories, after some phonics and old "Dick and Jane" word-levelled readers with my teacher, was reading aloud the signs as we drove places and wanting to know what they all said - store fronts, traffic, advertisements, it did not matter. I also knew that my mom was a reader. She read a lot of books all the time. Eventually, I loved the stories and different series of stories in our small school library, and local library - from the colorful and mischievous characters of Ramona the Pest , or Pippi Longstalking, eventually exhausting the mystery detective genres for kids like Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew and another I cannot recall. I also enjoyed the historical fiction or non-fiction including The Autobiogrphy of Anne Frank, the Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables series, as well as Louisa May Alcott's stories of Jo and her sisters. Eventually I also enjoyed the more "modern" tales of Judy Blume. Today, in our smaller groups discussing some of the data and genres of what students today are finding to be "great reads" here in New Zealand made me wonder if my students shared my love for variety in settings, characters, local and global, historical and modern. I am really looking forward to unpacking this further with my class and the RPI cohort. (Sneak Peak - My initial data collected from the students included big favourites in the genres of fantasy, horror, manga/graphic novels, some mythology and Harry Potter. )

Backmapping and Assessment with Naomi Rosedale

While I am familiar with back-mapping, I am glad we had the opportunity to have a closer look and sample a task from last year's new Literacy CAA exam - which students are meant to be ready for at some point in year 10, before heading off to senior assessment land. Having experienced this in a time-pressured setting as an adult, and one with more advanced skills than a year 10 student, I was surprised how many skills the student has to pull together to be successful on the Reading exam - reading 3 texts of different genres and purposes. While they are short texts it has made me realize the need to do even more close reading across the curriculum and use the common language triangle to explain or show the relationship between Text Type - Purpose - Audience. I will definitely be sharing my experience with my year 9 - 11 students. I think our Humanities department will have some good conversations as well.

I think this is on my mind as this is the assessment we have just worked through in my senior English Level 1 class.  My thinking is that if we introduce the ideas at year 10, some will remember a little and others may not, but it may be easier for students next year.  This is also an example of some of the cross-curricular literacy skills we are using every day, whether in Social Sciences, English classes, in discussing current events in general.  My hope is that the more often I do this, the greater chance my Social Sciences students will also improve their literacy skills. 

Task Boards and Ground Rules for Talk from RPI 1: 

 

Link to Class site Daily Planner

Image is also linked to the lesson I introduced the Ground Rules for Talk in my SOC 10 class this week.

It is interesting how soon we teachers can forget the lessons and reminders of our RPI day regarding Explicit Learning intentions.  It was a good refresher to remind myself, even an experienced teacher, to bring back the focus on the learning of skills or concepts, rather than the activity.  I noticed I had rushed the SOC 10 Task board and re-jigged it above to be a bit more specific to the Learning intentions.  It was close but I wanted to use a few more key vocabulary words with my year 10s to introduce the idea of Contexts being text types and also topics of study that we learn to develop our skills and understandings of concepts through.  

My starting point to the left for this week in HMT 9a.  and link here to my HMT Daily planner on my class site.

One thing you may notice on my daily planner is that my previous slides were not as crowded as this type of task board as I aimed to have 1-2 slides per class. While I do like the layout and simplicity of linking all things on a single slide in this taskboard format as it allows you to view the week at a glance, I am also conscious of a few practical issues to consider:

1. For a Dyslexia friendly classroom -the recommendation is that we keep things simpler with visuals, key words and bullet points.  Not fill up a whole slide to crowd it.  (this is also the reason if you look at my past slides - I also try to use a diffferent colour background for each week with Term (T) Wk and Day at the top of each slide.
2. TV placement for projecting means it is harder to view this one as it is more crowded. 

Watch this space - I will keep up with this type of task board for another term and poll students to get further feedback. 

Assessment Data Tracker / Planner:  Introduced RPI day 2.  

This appears to be a massive endeavour and potentially a great help.  I need some more time to work through this and the possibilities for how it can me to target reading lessons more personally to individual students and groups. 

RPI: Catch Up - What Kind of Readers are We in Humanities 9A?

Never great to start a course with late homework, but it happens. (Apologies for some of the spacing issues .... It has been a while since I blogged too, and likely will be refreshing these skills as we go!

I have been looking forward to finally getting a chance to gather and analyse the data from my students to figure out the questions we were tasked in Week 1 of our RPI course. 

What Kind of Reader Are We? 

It has been great using and adapting the resources shared to use in my class, even the more "teacher talk" type ones like (click image below)....

Which led to impressive group and class discussion revealing my students actually do know a lot about reading already.  We were able to get to slide 5 and create our own list of characteristics of good readers.  Student Responses here - and no, I did not even change their phrasing!

  I was really proud of my highly dyslexic student who came up with the pithy statement, "you learn to read so that you can read to learn." Students know that he struggles a lot with writing and reading text, but orally, he does have a way with words and they thought that was a pretty cool way to say how "reading [was] core to learning." I also like to think of the last comment made regarding what good readers do and, "[Reading] with expression," might be connected to the time we spent this term playing with words, writing and reading poetry - through listening to songs and watching poetry reading tutorials, and other oral readings online. I am also pleased to see students included the reading to "practice" skills and "to enjoy." We had been spending a fair bit of time on different skills lately and I was a bit worried they might forget the enjoyment factor.

And then.... the Lurgies hit us hard staff and students! Classes decimated to less than half the size with repeated and various bugs. For 2 weeks we could not get back to regular class sizes until last week!

What did our Readers Survey say: 

The following results show students' perceptions with scores of 1-2 (Very Unlike and Unlike Me) and 3-4 (Like Me and Very Like Me)

It is interesting that in the first questions almost 2/3 of the class feel it is Very Unlike or Unlike them to read - whether for enjoyment or for school no matter what the text type. Yet, in the next question, almost half are reading currently for enjoyment. I have been observing some of my self-proclaimed "non-readers" this week in particular as we were finally gathering our last bits of data. Some of these students are ones who say they "struggle" and find reading hard, or it is just boring because they forget what they read and it takes them a long time. One student is highly dyslexic, one is using a blue vision guide to keep his eyes from jumping lines, a 3-4 more are ADD (so most of these self-proclaimed non-readers have learning challenges. However, I think (anecdotally) more than half of these particular "non-readers" have been "caught" (terrible word to use for reading) reading content in class that is related to our class lessons or off-topic. Four students, in particular, keep getting "distracted" and "going down the rabbit hole" Alice might say, as they start to research or look up other things online. Almost each time, these students started following a little White Rabbit with asking questions or wanting to find out a word, meaning, place or something else connected to the lesson or what they were reading. This made me wonder how much students self-reporting, and even teachers observing, underestimate how much "reading" students are engaged with. Evidence suggests reading mileage counts for a lot (with regards to skills, enjoyment and success - sorry no study to cite). I wonder if there is a way to track this in or out of classes to get more accurate data than self-reporting. Perhaps we need to redefine reading for the purposes of this data collection?

I am very interested to see what my students think of this data and more in our class discussions this week. Especially what they see as needs for our class to improve upon and how we may set goals. Watch this space. We are hoping to do this in class discussions this week. Today's lesson was a bit of a challenge - trying to model how to not only read a graph, but also create a generalization statement. Now in hindsight, I was trying to do a little too much, too fast, for year 9s. So I was not too successful today. Try again tomorrow with some adjusted planning.

Today - I tried to:

1. Review slides 1-4 we discussed and started well with in week 7. (Until all the Lurgies hit.) Some who were sick then, needed the quick review.
2. Introduce the Ground Rules for Talk - with the class doing a quick group chat and filling in the info for slide 3 on "Why these rules are important"
3. Model reading and creating general statements about what the data shows in slide 4 - sample from our class data.
4. Model with a second sample and set up for self/peer assessment tomorrow with the rest of our class data.

Needless to say, I need to remind myself, while I may be in a hurry to teach and practice these skills, the students are not ,and need more time - especially when introducing new contexts, new kinds of data reading, new skills,,,, Totally my fault that it did not succeed as well as I hoped considering we managed to get up to #3 and did not quite finish it.

Onward tomorrow, with a rejigged plan and hoping for more hands-on for students to talk while I circulate.

Some results I am hoping my students will be able to help set goals with are linked here -

Data Set 1:  HMT 9A:  RPI What Kind of Readers are We? Survey Results 

Data Set 2: Humanities 9A 2024 Term 2 Wks 6-8 Reading Habits and Behaviours

Thankfully it is a small class and the data set is easy to work out things like percentages with only 20 in the class.  However, it also means statistics are swayed a fair bit by the choice of a single student.  

Returning to my Professional Blog with the Manaiakalani Day 1 - Reading Practice Intensive Course

Apologies to my group for the delay.  I started this post and then “life happened” and did not get back to it in time to finish my thoughts as well as I had hoped.  

 Whew! Busy brain day today.  I love the challenge and the focus on reading skills particularly across the curriculum.  I am fortunate to have been trained in primary, and taught at both the primary and college level now in Canada and New Zealand.  Both have very similar literacy and English curricula as well as an emphaisis on competencies, which are based essesntially on the 21st century competencies (eg. creative and critical thinking, communication, managing self, ...) 

Today’s post is a bit more rambly (stream of consciousness) on things that have crossed my mind since the first RPI day. I should be able to focus my reflections more as move forward. 

Challenges I have been thinking about in recent years regarding the loss of overall engagement, efforts and building student skills towards ownership and independence with their learning. Anecdotally, I have observed tudent abilities to self-regulate or manage in class and group settings has declined significantly.  Of course this varies across class or community dynamics and other distractions / interruptions - especially post Covid.  From talking to my colleagues, back home in Canada last year, they have seen and experienced the same shift in student abilities to self- manage and engage in learning opportunities. This is one reason I was particularly interested in  the Reading Practice Intensive Course - to figure out things I am missing in my own practice to improve my practical pedagogy in the hopes of enabling greater success for my students. I am eager to improve upon increasing the wide-reading and reading mileage of students.  

I realise I miss having those informal conversations and sharing moments in class, and outside of class,  with students on a regular basis regarding their reading.  Recently it seems my conversations with students are more about why they are not reading, reading is boring, reading is hard, just don’t like reading, and specific reading skills they need to work on.  I am saddened so many students do not get the enjoyment out of reading that I always did when younger or say they do not read much out of school.  Toda’s conversations around sharing our reading, and also recommending titles to students reminded me how much I miss getting into thick juicy novels for my own escape rather than all the short varied texts I read daily.  This shift for me started after finishing my Masters at university while teaching - I put it down to reading fatigue at the time.  But it has been over 20 years now! Today,I wonder, if my own reading habits waning have been, or are, unconsciously affecting my pedagogy and practice.  I may be interested to see if I can improve upon this myself throughout the course.  I think I am making some progress as I have finished a short novel for fun and started another since our first day of RPI got me thinking.

On the more academic level,  I am glad we had some of the background and the research around reading with the data to look at and discuss.  I have found the amount of specific data and standardized data NZ collects to be a challenge philosophically for me as it was way more than I was used to collecting.  However, I have also gained an appreciation for how some of the data offers very specific details.  I am looking forward to the coming weeks.