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.