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.