Reading Practice Intensive - Day 3

Day 3 - Text Selection

Another full on day of professional learning! Great to start the day with some reflection on our "homework" tasks as I got some great ideas to take back to school for our mahi on Extended Discussions from my breakout group.  Loved the idea of Accountable Talk based on an enlarged picture (for students to study) and the students having the discussion stems ("I noticed...", "I agree...", etc) to really focus on getting the talk (discussion) flowing.  I also enjoyed seeing everyone's slide decks and will make time to look at these in-depth during the holiday break.

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

Today Dorothy talked about print text vs digital texts.  I found this interesting as recently I have read  online about recent research showing that "using devices has been shown in some studies to contribute to some kids becoming short sighted; particularly if they use devices for long periods of time without interruption." [Charity finds shocking number of New Zealand children with eyesight issues, optometrist blames screens - Grace Thomas - Newshub - 29/12/2023]. Another online article "found that the reading comprehension skills of children who read printed text were six times better when compared to children who read the same content on a digital screen. ['New research shows kids learn better from books over screens" NewstalkZB 17/12/2023].  I guess with everything in life there needs to be a balance but it is something to certainly keep in mind.

Some thought provoking learning about reading in a digital world - reading apps, tools and approaches.  What do we use? What don't we use enough? What about AI? Do we use the technology available to its' full potential? How can we work smarter not harder?  How can we use digital tools to support reading? Tools like - voice typing, Google Keep, transcripts from YouTube, Screencast to develop oral fluency, and assigning tasks using comment function.

Accountability (which I will come to again at the end) also made me think about my students learning.

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

Going over Rudine Sims Bishop's concept of 'Windows, Mirrors and Sliding Glass Doors" was good.  I knew a little about the concept from being involved in the Manaiakalani Reading Observations and also our cluster data feedback sessions.  But it makes a lot more sense to me know, especially how "mirrors" can give students a false sense of what the real world is actually like.  I love this quote from the end of the Youtube clip we watched "I mean it's not just children who have been underrepresented and marginalized who need these books. It's also the children who always find their mirrors in the books and, therefore, get an exaggerated sense of their own self-worth and a false sense of what the world is like because it's becoming more and more colourful and diverse as time goes on." [Rudine Sims Bishop - Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors]

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

Accountability came up in discussion several times today - how to I track what my students are doing? How could a Mahi Tracker (spreadsheet) where students link their completed work, or record how many chapters of their library book they read today, etc so I can see all this information in one place without having to open Hapara and checking work has been organised into their Reading folder on their Drive, and just relying on a high trust model that they are infact reading their library book during silent reading time.  Sure, this will take time to set up and for students to learn "how" to do this but they do need to be accountable for their own learning.  

I'm thinking now about how we group our students for reading.  The last two weeks of this term my students are in mixed groups reading, learning and (hopefully) performing plays to each other.  I have mixed my Blue/Level 9 readers in among my Emerald/Level 25 readers but I have never thought to do this for "normal" instructional lessons.  I really enjoyed watching the Flea in the Glass Jar Experiment Youtube clip (which I have seen before) and thought about my lower readers when I watched it today.  Am I limiting their ability to have rich extended discussions when they are just with their group of four?  How can I group my students according to the gaps in their learning (from my assessment data) and have a group focusing on Summarising and another group focusing on Inferring? 

I gained a lot from our work on the The Three-Tiers of Vocabulary Framework. 7000 words in Tier 1 (a third grader likely knows about 8000 words). A literate person would know Tiers 1 and 2.  We need to ensure we teach Tier 3, which makes sense when learning the specialised subject matter.

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

Things to share with my team and the wider staff: Smart chips (something I didn't know about at all), Screencast (and how to do this on a chrome book and a Mac book), using ChatGPT to modify a texts reading level,  the 3 tiers of vocabulary, and probably more that has slipped my full brain at the moment!

I also got a nice little "to purchase" list for the school library today!

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.

Reading Practice Intensive - 2024 - Day 1

 

Day 1: Reading is Core

Today I began 3 terms of professional learning and development about Reading. What a huge day - pleased I worked from home so I wasn't able to be interrupted because I am feeling a little brain dead now!

I have enjoyed the opportunity for discussions not only in our bigger Google Meet but also in my smaller group with Georgie, Kelsey, Wayne, Fiona, Jo and Mel throughout the day.

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

One of the quotes that Dorothy Burt shared with us this morning resonated with me because of the connection between Reading and wider life outcomes.

“Reading ability has a considerable impact on both educational attainment and wider life outcomes. Research finds robust associations between reading ability and educational success, and reading enjoyment and reading behaviour appear to be key mechanisms in this relationship.”

(Mulcahy et al, 2022)

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

I enjoyed looking at what makes a good reader - looking at the skills, attributes and characteristics that a good reader has. Both word knowledge and world knowledge are highly correlated to reading success. I am looking forward to collecting information about my students as readers, being able to have a holistic look at each reader as a person.

“Gathering student voice is a vital part of teaching. It gives us a clear picture of where our students are at, what they're thinking and what we need to do to allow our learners to make their individual connections to the learning.”

Robyn Anderson,

Panmure Bridge School 2022

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

I am excited to gather student voice from my Reading class (will plan for this next week) and then be able to use this within my programme.

I will also investigate some things I can incorporate into my programme with our regular Library visits (which we do during our Reading lessons).

As a staff we have already begun to introduce Ground Rules for Talk (see poster below) so I will continue to focus on this with my Reading class. It was great to see these in action in the video shown (Danni Stone at Point England). I will try the Toss & Talk game with my class - I think they would enjoy this.

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

I will be sharing a lot with my other two team members. Rather than just survey my Reading class (who I may only have for this term) I will survey our whole Year 3 and 4 hub (73 students). I think the data will be beneficial to the whole team not just me.

There were also several ideas that I could implement in our Library - having senior students read to younger students at lunch times - some ideas to get the Library used more during break times while also developing tuakana-teina throughout the school.

Dr Naomi Rosedale - Student Design for Learning - Uru Manuka Leaders of Learning

 

Today with the Uru Manuka Leaders of Learning we had a Google Meet with Dr Naomi Rosedale about student design for learning.

What is a DLO?

We had a discussion in pairs about the definition of a DLO.  How does a student digital learning object compare to a teacher created digital learning object? 

These are the definitions we came up with.

The definition from research:

..." digital entity or content object using ‘different media modalities (and often interactivity) to represent data, information, reality, concepts and ideas...designed to afford educational reuse." (Churchill 2007 Pg 484)

The re-use part is important - it can teach others, extend learning for others (like a game or a simulation).

This was really interesting. 85% of DLOs are slideshows, 6% are screencastify, 4% video, 2% are animations. Do students get socialised into using slideshows because they see teachers using them (all the time) - we need to promote other things and teach them how to use other tools.

We talked about the five modes of communication - visual, aural, gestural, spatial, linguistic - and the combination of these is multimodal.

Student Created DLO definition: a process wherein students learn as they design for the learning of others (eg designing for teaching and knowledge building), and as a reusable digital entity (or object) designed with the affordances of different media modalities (eg. textual, audio, visual, spatial, kinaesthetic).

Rosedale, Jesson & McNaughton, 2019

Reflection on this...

Student design for learning part - wherein students learn as they design for the learning of others (eg designing for teaching and knowledge building)...

Potential for learning from - ...a reusable digital entity …. designed with the affordances of different media modalities (eg. textual, audio, visula, spatial, kinaesthetic).

Often student created DLO are all the same - using a template or too much teacher direction

How can we use a rubric to nudge the expectations of a DLO. Rubric needs to include design features which will improve the DLO - the features will help others learn when they watch the DLO.

What does student design for learning mean or what does student multimodal learning mean?

Students consider the audience that they are creating their DLO for with the specific purpose of teaching someone else what they have learnt so that the audience can learn from it too. Part of considering the audience is thinking about the best tool for the job and how to make it engaging for their audience - with sight, sound, and motion.

Soundbite

Does recording your voice have positive effects on learning in the classroom?  Over time children will become more confident and better with talking on their DLO.  Will it improve oral language?

Things to consider - MAPIC

Great session - lots of thought provoking content!

Session Nine: Revision

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

Ubiquitous (tricky to say but very important) learning was our main focus today from Dorothy.

A positive to come out of the Covid lockdown for my Year 5/6 students is that there is a sudden realisation that learning can happen at home - as if it an amazing suggestion!

This is truely mind blowing for me as when I was involved in the introduction of the Maniakalani Outreach journey at South Hornby School 5 years ago this was one of the biggest pluses for our students. Back then we had a lot of students who continued with their learning outside the 9-3 time zone but it doesn't seem to be the case now (as I have just moved back to the Year 5/6 age group).

I wonder why that is? Is it because there are too many other things that our students are doing on their devices out of school hours that the suggestion that they could continue with their learning seems completely outrageous to them. It was only as we returned after Covid lockdown that their was a mindshift in the students as they realised that they could continue with their learning outside of school hours. I will continue to promote this as the year goes on.

The school day may be 9am-3pm but technology has made it possible for students to learn outside of the school day, and rewindable learning can help with this. The use of learning sites and screencastify clips can direct learning when students are at home.

The benefits are now able to be proven with data from the Summer Learning Journey. Students who participate in the Summer Learning Journey do not fall back in Reading and Writing as much as their peers.

These school holidays the Uru Manuka Cluster are trying a Winter Learning Journey. We want to use the shift and momentum from the Covid lockdown to keep the ubiquitous learning going over the break.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

I loved our DFI Demo Slam that we concluded our 9 week DFI journey with. Lots of new things to explore. It was great to do this on the last week of term so I can see what I can add to my programme when planning for the new term. I have already had a play with the Freddie Meter, although I may need to keep practising to improve my score!

I am interested to find out more about the Online Practicum, being an Associate Teacher in an online world.

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

One of the new tools I will use straight away with my learners is Auto Draw. I am really excited to see what they think of it, especially my students who are not very confident at drawing. Here is a screencastify to show how simple it is to use.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

I did not sit my Google exam today - I plan to sit it in the first week of the holidays when I am in the right head space and well rested after this mammoth term.

We were asked to reflect on these 3 questions relating to our Covid lockdown experience:

• What are you most proud of (in your own teaching)? I was really proud of how our whole staff, students and families coped with online learning. Some of the students we least expected absolutely excelled in an online learning environment. I loved how we were able to continue to use our schoolwide reward system during lockdown as well. We were fortunate that we had spent the weekend prior to the announcement to get ready just in case. Many of my colleagues in higher decile schools were not as ready as we were, and this is thanks mainly to being a Manaiakalani Outreach school.

• What do you regret? It may seem silly but my biggest regret was not taking home one of our flash teacher (office) chairs from our learning space. Within a week my back was killing me from sitting at the dinning room table. So I did a bit of a MacGyver and made a standing table with the ironing board and a plastic crate. That did the trick until my back got used to my new normal.

• What will you be taking forward into the new "era" of schooling? I am really promoting the ubiquitous learning and I have a few students who have continued post lockdown with their learning after school or in the weekend. Our blogging has sadly slowed down again too so I am making a conscious effort to include time for this in my planning. I also think it is really important that a lot of our Junior school teachers continue to use digital tools now that we are back in the school setting. They did such an amazing job during lockdown and underwent huge personal learning about digital tools and technology, and I want to encourage them to continue with this.

Session Eight: Computational Thinking

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

Today Dorothy talked about the "Empowered" aspect of the Manaiakalani kaupapa. Technology is not just a tool - it is a tool that can change lives. This made us think about the Covid Lockdown and how students were disempowered if they didn't have technology and connectivity. Technology should be transforming the way we learn.

The word empowered is favoured to use rather than agency. The word agency has bad connotations for some families. Factors to considered when thinking about - yearly family income (money is empowering), health, housing, etc.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Kerry ran a session introducing us to computational thinking and Hangarau Matihiko. It is all about building confidence in the future in an online world - when and where to use a specific digital technology for a task, and being able to create their own digital technologies solutions.

We looked at the two new areas to the technologies curriculum.

We looked at the Design And Developing Digital Outcomes, and Computational Thinking (Programme fundamentals and elements of programming). Don't let the technical jargon be off putting but we need to use these words with the students so they are exposed prior to this getting more difficult in high school.

Computational Thinking - Progress Outcomes decoded for learners - this is really good as it has everything in "kid speak" and it is simple to follow.

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

Coding - absolutely loved our sessions looking a coding today. Great to have the time to explore and play on different coding websites, like Lightbots, Studio.Code, Kodable. I have now added a sub-page to our team learning site with different coding links for the students.

This is some of my exploring on Lightbots:

Went to a session on Scratch with Latham. I have never used Scratch before, and am now thinking about how I can incorporate coding into my programme.

This is what I created on Scratch.

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What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Gerhard ran a session this morning about the future of technology and what it means for our tamariki, and we looked at what the 10 breakthrough technologies are. We did a little activity on Moral Machine - a platform for gathering human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, like self driving cars. We had some moral dilemmas and had to decide whether passengers or pedestrians would be killed. Here are my results.

Let's hope they don't use my results for any important decisions.

Looking forward to many hours sitting with my students working through some of the new coding websites I have added to our learning site.