RPI: Day 3 - Text Selection

 Day 3 of RPI kicked off with Dorothy covering what reading in a digital world looks like for us teachers, as well as students. One of the parts we covered was around the use of reading apps. I am so glad Dorothy said it out loud as it needed to be said - but reading apps are NOT a substitute for instructional reading sessions with an actual teacher. Instead, by using the built in affordances provided by most of these apps, they can be used as an independent timetabled reading task. Making good use of, and sharing with students the dashboard data provided in most reading apps ensures that it also doesn't just become busy work.

One work on I took away from Dorothy's segment was to sign up to more toolkits to ensure I am making the most of the digital affordances provided by the Chromebooks in class. 

Using appropriate texts: Mirrors, Windows and Sliding doors

I had come across and been exposed to the kaupapa of ensuring students could see themselves in texts, as well as opening their world views and experiences through text, but I hadn't heard of the 'sliding doors' part. Having a diverse set of texts to choose from, ensures texts could go both ways where they could see both mirrors and windows, but also stepping in and out of the different worlds as written by Rudine Sims Bishop.

One real useful segment we covered today was the use of text sets. We had covered this last year as a team but this time I fully understood the 'why' behind each text we were choosing. I originally selected texts based purely on theme. Today we learnt about a ramp text - which was a middle ground text the whole class/group could cognitively access easily. This could be used as a springboard into the 'anchor' text which is a main/meaty text you wanted the group to focus on. From here you'd also attache a poem, video, graphic text or poster to go with to provide extra information and support the main anchor text.

I am looking forward to completing my own text set for ANZAC for week 1 of next term. I am also going to try out the Kakapo group taskboard provided in todays session on one of my groups.

CoL: Profiling - Part 1

This year, after discussions with our Senior Management Team and my team leader, I've decided to focus my inquiry on reading. This will hopefully align with what I am also learning about in the Reading Practice Intensive (RPI) being run every 3rd week.

My identified/priority learners I have chosen are: 9 students all with a current reading age of 8.5 years. 

Out of the nine, only 3 are students I had previously taught last year. The following are my priority groups responses to our reading survey results I carried out as part of our RPI course in getting to know our learners through a 'reader' lens. 

Here are a few results from the reading survey:

Here are my priority learners PAT scores:

My next blog post will have more about students reading behaviours gathered from the reading survey.

RPI: Day 2 - Know your learners as readers

 Today's RPI covered a lot! Thankfully I have been exposed to most of this through my team leader as we had a trial implementation of mahi tracker, the task board and also the spreadsheet to help keep track of our students learning.

One of the things I was reminded of was the power of our literacy cycles we had a while back. Dorothy shared and reminded us of some of the really awesome pedagogy that took place and where Learn, Create, Share originated from. This cycle was close to what I started with some 10 years ago when I first started in Manaiakalani community.

Something I've picked up from todays session would be that despite my students being lower level readers, I still need to expose them to skills and more complex texts (and text types if they are available at a lower reading level) due to what they will face in high school. I am referring to CAA - Common Assessment Activities. It will definitely be worth my time to do some backwards mapping as explained in todays session and adapt it accordingly for my 6-9 year old readers in Years 7/8.

Learning Intentions: I completed a few of my first years of teaching unpacking and studying Michael Absolum's 'Clarity in the Classroom' text. Even after all that, I still find myself struggling at times to word LI's and Success Criteria. What I took from today was to remember to remove the content from it and focus rather on the reading behaviour/strategy you want students to learn.

One take away I'll be sharing with my team would be: Aratohu Kaiako - great spread and types of questions in the 5 categories that each test will tell us. A great guide I’d never seen before. I actually need to see more about this as I had it in my note taking but didn't link the slides.

Overall, a great day of intense learning and I will definitely be using the planning sheet to link with the Phases rather than the old learning progressions.