Reading Practice Intensive - Day 2

Day 2 - Know Your Learners as Readers

Naomi summed the day up towards the end - the first two days are about "Lighting a fire and keeping that fire lit while we keep going!"

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

We began Day 2 with a very insightful session with Dorothy Burt talking about the Manaiakalani "hook" being about need to hook / entice / reel in students if they are reluctant readers.  We learnt about them awesome things from the birth of Learn Create Share - Literacy Circles and Korero Point England podcasting initiative.  (Blog link and Site link)

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

I really enjoyed learning more about assessment today, talking about formative and summative assessment, what types of assessment we currently do at our schools.  I currently do not share assessment results with my students (I have in the past) and it was good to have a reminder that assessment should be collaborative if students are part of the journey they will make more progress.

When we first looked at the Teacher Workbook tracking spreadsheet my stress levels rose slightly! But now a few hours later I am looking forward to really diving deep into our Year 4 PAT Reading Comprehension data, as well as the Reader Survey results for (what will be) my target group.  Then it will be great to use this assessment to really inform my planning!

It was good to go through the basics of looking at the PAT results (item score, for example) and how to read what information this gives you.  This is something I will go over with my team at next week's team meeting.  I also did not know that there were activities on ARBs that would support PAT gaps.

The green band shows how learners scored, and the percentage who got this question correct above it. The red triangle is the national norm, with the percentage who got it correct as the norm.

Individual learners reports show how they answered each question.  The dotted horizontal line is their stanine and scale score.

Key for what the different dots mean.

Discussing the difference between AOs (Achievement Objectives), LIs (Learning Intentions) and SC (Success Criteria) was good, especially how they connect and that success criteria should be co-constructed with students (which I usually do).

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

I would like to look into doing a bit of podcasting with my learners - either getting students to record themselves reading texts aloud or for students to interview each other about texts that they have read.  I have already discussed this with Sarah (leader of our Year 5-6 hub) and how we could make this work at our kura.  This also resonated with me as only yesterday, at my Leaders of Learning day, we were discussing the correlation between reading at conversational speed and comprehension.

Currently the students in my hub enjoy reading and listening to ebooks on Epic.  I would like to look into other such websites that offer this type of thing for free.

I want to spend some time to really dive deep into my PAT Reading Comprehension data and analyse individual questions so I can make some decisions about how I can up-skill my students to be able to answer these questions correctly.  On initial glance our Year 4 students have gaps in the following questions:

Question 2   - 44.19% answered correctly - Narrative text

Question 13 - 40.48% answered correctly - Narrative text

Question 16 - 42.86% answered correctly - Explanation text

Question 17 - 38.10% answered correctly - Explanation text

Question 18 - 38.10% answered correctly - Explanation text

Question 19 - 23.80% answered correctly - Explanation text

Question 22 - 38.10% answered correctly - Procedural text

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

I will be sharing numerous content with my team (as explained above) and also reporting back to the Senior Leadership team when we meet next week.  I am also grateful that I have a colleague also taking part in the Reading Practice Intensive so that we can discuss how we found the session today and what our personal next steps are and any things we could do together - it is great to have a sounding board to throw ideas around.

Another full on day of learning - feeling enthused but also wishing for more hours in a day! Feeling a bit mind-blown!

Term 1 Reader Profile Survey

This week I analysed the results of a reading survey on my Year 3 and Year 4 learners.  

The first key observation was the reading skills actually involved in completing the survey - many students needed assistance with reading the questions or needed an adult to ask them (interview style) the questions one-to-one.  I know I was ambitious trying to capture the viewpoint of my whole hub but I only ended up getting 55 out of 76 to do it. (And I'm not even going to mention the nightmare of discovering that when the students tried to do it on iPads they ended up editing someone else's as they were doing it at the same time!)

Students in my hub are a mixture of Year 4 students that were in my Year 3/4 hub last year, and Year 3 and Year 4 students who have moved up from the Year 2/3 hub.  I knew that they had different experiences with how Reading is delivered and taught at school.  I was surprised that 35% of students didn't like Reading at school.  I think this is a bit sad, and wonder what we as teachers can do to change their perceptions.

I was pleased to see that 71% of students are currently reading a book for enjoyment.  I did assume this may be higher -we regularly visit the school library regularly and have lots of opportunities where students silent read.  Do I assume the others just have a chapter book in their crate that they don't read or that they are not enjoying reading the book they currently have out from the library?

I was also pleased that 80% of students think that reading can make them smarter and help them to relax.  

I was a bit shocked in the number of students that had a card for the public library.  The Hornby public library is literally within our school zone and less than a 10 minute walk from our school.  During Covid times the "library bus" came to visit us (although a bit irregularly) and we got a lot of our students signed up with library cards at the time.  This cohort of students would possibly have not quite started school.  It is a real shame that such a free, community resource is not valued and utilised more by our families.  Does this also reflect on our student's parents as readers themselves?

The variety of types of books students enjoy reading was pretty much as I thought, and reflects perhaps what teachers read to their classes for our "Feed & Read" each day.  Common answers - chapter books, funny books, scary books and picture books.

Further results if you are interested are here:

So now what?

I am looking forward to diving deeper into what I can do as a teacher to change these survey results for the positive.  I have some ideas already (promote silent reading, book selling popular authors to really hook these kids into wanting to read certain titles, exploring the library to capture the interest in books other than chapter books or picture books).  I am more exciting to get into this professional learning and be able to share it with my wider team.