Manaiakalani RPI Day 9: Sharing (Final RPI Session)

 Today's session was the final RPI (Reading Practice Intensive) session for the year. The focus was on ‘Sharing’. Throughout the past 9 sessions we have received multiple opportunities to enhance our practice when it comes to planning, creating and delivering a robust, interesting and multi-layered reading programme for our students. Naomi, Georgie, Toni and Vicki have been amazing at walking us through the RPI sessions which have been pretty intense at times.

In regards to the focus on ‘Sharing’, we were reminded about the importance of student voice and how student blogs were a platform where students could share evidence of their learning, and share their authentic voice. Student blogs capture a record of student learning over time and is a great way for whanau to see and connect with what their children are learning at school.

Research also found that blogging frequency impacts on student learning. So this is something to keep in mind when encouraging students to post their learning on their blog. In our team of year 5 & 6 learners, one of our teachers (Ms Parrant) creates a holiday blogging programme for our students. We will be encouraging as many students as we can to continue blogging throughout the next holidays.

Once again we were reminded that we needed to design learning with the end in mind. This includes planning for ambitious outcomes, planning to use diverse texts, teaching learners to think critically and designing rich ‘Create’ experiences.

We reflected on how feedback needed to be useful and practical for students and how we needed to plan time for this to happen regularly. Regular feedback to children is important. As teachers we need to organise a system to do this, so that it’s useful for our students but does not create too much extra work for teachers. Upon reflection, I provide lots of oral feedback (usually on the spot)  for students and need to work on providing more written feedback on student work or on their blogs.

Tracking student workflow is something that I need to improve. I often have a spreadsheet where students can add the link to their learning tasks, but I have not always been consistent with monitoring this.

One of the final things that we talked about today was the importance of involving whanau when it comes to reading. This is something that I have been mindful of in my own class this year. The students in my literacy group are reading below their expected level, so it was important that whanau could be involved where possible.

I have tried to connect with as many parents as possible to encourage them to help their child read more at home. Even though my students are in year 6, I have a large group of students (15) who take book bags home with notebooks for parents to sign each time they read at home. I also encouraged parents to complete a google survey related to their child's reading during the last parent interviews.

I really like the following image below as this has been my inquiry focus this term which was to improve student engagement and achievement in literacy. It is about working with learners to establish an authentic audience for their learning outcomes. This is the whole purpose of the 'Share' part of our 'Learn, Create, Share' pedagogy.

Students need to see the purpose of posting their learning on their blog. The Holiday Blogging Summer Learning facilitators ensure that students receive comments each time they post on their blog. My goal is to use the Teacher Dashboard feature where the Edublog posts are visible to help me to leave comments on work that has been recently published. Another goal is to post constructive feedback more regularly on student blogs.

Finally, upon completing the Manaiakalani RPI programme I need to consider how to implement the ideas, resources and tools that I have learnt to enhance my reading programme. The image below is a reminder that effective planning is essential to ensure that there are multiple opportunities for students to develop their vocabulary skills, critical thinking skills, student voice, reading strategies and more. This means that there needs to be careful layering across the reading model.

I am very grateful to have been selected to be part of the Manaiakalani RPI programme even though I didn't really know what I was getting into. Thank you to our facilitators, special guest speakers, mentors and colleagues. I look forward to putting many of these new ideas and resources into practice as part of my reading programme.

Manaiakalani RPI (Reading Practice Intensive) #8 - Creating

 Today, in session 8 of the RPI session, we discussed the importance of creativity in education. Dorothy Burt reminded us of the significance of the "Create" section of our Manaiakalani "Learn, Create, Share" pedagogy. She shared the consistent message from former students that creativity in their school experience has shaped who they are as people today.

Being given the opportunity to use digital technology to expand their creative opportunities goes beyond traditional arts such as weaving, art, and painting. It also builds their knowledge of other creative tasks, such as creating an amazing website. Creativity is important because of its strong links to achievement outcomes.

We were reminded that learners who have the opportunity to create are more likely to be engaged. 

Despite the importance of creativity in the classroom, there are often barriers to its implementation, such as time and resources. Today’s RPI session provided opportunities to view and use ideas and resources to enable more creativity in our literacy classes. A.I. apps and online programmes such as Canva can be utilised as part of our literacy programmes. I used an A.I. app to create a neat image based on a poem.

We looked at ‘tighter’ to ‘looser’ ways to design and use create tasks. This enables students to be creative within a reasonable timeframe, while allowing them some room for creativity. When I reflect back on what has been happening in my own classroom lately, I have not provided enough create opportunities for students which is disappointing. 

I enjoyed creating the one shot movie for a book review because it modelled how my students could do it. It also fits in nicely with our theme around the Manaiakalani Film Festival coming up next term. Fiona Grant also shared a template for Tik Tok inspired themes and backgrounds.

The range of opportunities for choice when designing ‘create’ tasks for students has re-inspired me because of today’s session which was a much needed wake up call. I am most grateful for all the cool ideas from our RPI tutors (Naomi, Georgie and Toni) and the message from Dorothy around the importance of ‘Create’ and how this can be implemented more effectively in the classroom without taking up too much teacher planning time. 

For the next couple of weeks I will be implementing some of these interesting create tasks with my students and with teachers in my team. 

Manaiakalani RPI Day 7 - Thinking

The main focus from our RPI session today was around critical literacy and critical thinking. We were reminded that in order to be effective in the 21st century, we need ‘to be able to exhibit a range of functional and critical thinking skills related to information, media and technology.’

Dorothy talked about the importance of teaching our students to understand what a smart digital citizen looks like and to have the skills to be able to think critically about information from online media and online texts. The Manaiakalani CyberSmart challenges are a resource that can help to address this issue.

There is definitely a need for our students to develop their literal, interpretive and evaluative skills. It was a reminder to keep extending our students' knowledge and thinking skills beyond the literal level. I will be using the template shared to practice visualising and interpreting. I intend to spend the next couple of weeks focusing on deconstructing figurative language.

I think that careful planning is necessary so that the critical literacy skills that we would like our students to develop are intentionally taught as part of a reading programme. Rather than simply asking a couple of challenging questions related to the text during a guided reading lesson, students should be required to focus more closely at the text via high level follow up tasks. The digital modelling book is useful and I have begun using it with a group in my class.

We looked at another example of a task board and I paid more attention to the pre-reading activities. I had been using a task board for the past few weeks with a reading group, but my pre-reading activities had not been included yet. This is something that I will focus on in the next couple of weeks. I will also focus more on planning for extended discussions. 

Manaiakalani Reading Practice Intensive Day 6: Vocabulary

 Today's focus for RPI was based around teaching vocabulary. This is an area that needs to be implemented much more thoroughly as part of my literacy programme. I think that I place too much of an emphasis on the comprehension and understanding of the text for students. It would be helpful to focus on incorporating more word work or vocabulary practice with my students. A graph that was shared today reminded me of the vocabulary deficit of many of our students when they enter school. 

The following is an example of a guided reading follow up task. Even though I feel that I do incorporate some word work into the guided reading follow up activities for students, I need to provide more opportunities for children to practise saying words out loud and recording themselves so that they can hear what they are saying and listen to whether it sounds right. I also need to provide more opportunities for students to practise vocabulary activities. 

We heard about using word walls/displays in class. I do have word walls, but I am not making good use of them. I aim to do a better job of utilising my word walls next term. 

I actually really enjoyed the word play activities and will add this to my literacy planning for next term. I enjoyed the activity of pairing up with another teacher to work through some vocabulary activities. We also had the opportunity to create a follow on task based on a text for next term. I think that it’s great that we get a head start on this and start thinking about how we will implement the new learning about vocabulary with our students. 

Next term my goal is to be more explicit and intentional about teaching morphology, phonemes, spelling and growing word consciousness. Here are some of my thoughts from today as to how I plan to do this. 

Manaiakalani RPI - Day 5

 Today was Day 5 of the Manaiakalani RPI

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

I was reminded that making learning visible is so important. In Team 4 (Year 4 - 6 students) we have a shared site where all students have access to their learning tasks for literacy, numeracy and other subjects. This allows greater self efficacy for our students who can access their learning, anytime, anyplace and anywhere. 

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

I learnt that I needed to keep working on improving my literacy timetable and to stay consistent when seeing groups of students.  I also realised that I needed to use some of the apps more effectively e.g. EPIC. I had been using EPIC as a free choice for reading tasks, rather than utilising the resources on EPIC more effectively and assigning reading to my students. There are many resources that relate to other curriculum areas on the site.

I also signed up my literacy class today for Literacy Planet which is another useful app. I could also make better use of the tracking sheets to monitor student completion of work. 

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

The writing practice and examples to inspire writing for students was excellent. I appreciated the practical lessons around how to use text to inspire narrative writing. The time spent on collaborating with my break out group to find texts that might inspire different sentence starters for writing was useful. 

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

I will share the literacy apps with my colleagues. Some are using them already, but I intend to have a discussion with my team about using them more effectively. I will also share the ideas around using texts that the students read during literacy to inspire writing if the teachers in my team are not already doing so.

Manaiakalani Reading Practice Intensive (RPI) Day 3

 Today’s focus in RPI for Day 3 was based on Text Selection. 

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

First we heard from Dorothy Burt who talked about the Manaiakalani Kaupapa and Pedagogy. She explained the importance of selecting from a wide range of both print text and digital text. Integrating the use of digital apps opens a world of learning opportunities to improve literacy skills for students. For example, using the voice typing app is a good way for readers to hear themselves talk and read aloud everyday. They can practice reading aloud to  improve their enunciation of words and their oral fluency. 

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

We looked a little closer at the RPI workbook to plan ahead for one of our literacy groups. The focus on ‘coverage’ of multimodal text types, differentiated reading e.g. independent, paired and shared reading etc, as well as a focus on T-shaped literacy and text sets for groups was helpful. The RPI workbook provided one example of how to plan across a term to ensure that enough coverage of different text types was happening. 

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

I thought that the RPI workbook was useful for planning for a rich learning programme in literacy. In a busy term, the detailed planning overview with links to resources will help when thinking about planning to meet student learning needs and ensuring that there is coverage from a wide range of different texts and text types. 

I also learnt that we need to avoid limiting our learners and allow them to extend themselves where possible. It makes sense that students should learn how to read within the zone of proximal development i.e. read texts that are not too difficult or too easy, but it also makes sense that students need to be challenged by reading more difficult texts and work with others who share the same interests. 

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

I think that the emphasis on multiple opportunities to read and the digital resources available to suit all learners was fantastic. Children’s interests need to be taken into account and cannot always be teacher directed which happens more than it should. The digital resources need to be shared with whānau/aiga. I think that some of the tips from the workshop should be simplified (summarised) and shared with parents on our class site.

Manaiakalani Reading Practice Intensive - Day 2

 In today's workshop the focus was around knowing your learners as readers. 

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

I learnt that taking into consideration the interests of the students is really important when designing a reading programme, even for the students who are struggling. The reading survey is a great way to capture the interests and attitudes towards reading of the students. A careful analysis of the PAT Reading data to identify common areas where there are gaps in learning  is good practice. Another interesting thing that I learnt was the importance of assessment and the impact of effect sizes on student learning e.g. the larger the effect size, the greater the impact in a positive way it was for students overall.

 

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

To keep looking at new ways of designing the reading programme for students so that tasks are aimed more specifically at addressing student needs in a way that is engaging and interesting. The reading task board was a good example of a resource or template that could be used.

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

That success criteria can be co-constructed, even with the low ability readers, but to also keep in mind that it needs to be teacher directed to stay on track. 

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

Share with colleagues: ideas for designing reading e.g. the taskboard. Using the reading survey and how to analyse PAT data more effectively when creating the next steps for learners. 

Inquiry Plan - Literacy Focus 2023

 

This year for my inquiry I want to continue to focus on literacy. I am concerned about the low reading levels of at least half my literacy class who are all in Year 6 this year. The reading levels range from 5 to 8 years. I want to focus on increasing student engagement in reading while improving reading levels and achievement in literacy. 

My Inquiry Question is: How can I raise students engagement and achievement in literacy?

Manaiakalani Reading Practice Intensive - Day 1

Focus for the day: Reading is Core to Learning

Reflections:

There were some good reminders of the kaupapa and pedagogy of the Manaiakalani reading programme. We looked at what makes a good reader. We were also reminded that effective teaching is important for accelerated learning. We need to know who our learners are and what their needs are. A class survey to find out informal information e.g. student interests is important as we tend to focus on what the data tells us e.g. reading age and PAT scores.

Reading Pillars of Practice: This exercise was useful. I identified areas where I needed to focus more on e.g. I need to spend more time planning for Vocabulary as well as Comprehension. I need to look at how I can engage whanau more, especially with the lower literacy group.

To be used with my learners: the class reading survey to check informal information about my students interests and attitudes towards reading etc. Establishing the ground rules for group talk was interesting. Something that I might do a little differently is to provide a little more student choice during reading sessions e.g. task selection.

What I intend to share with others: Whanau - encourage whanau to make reading a focus at home e.g. share learning goals. Colleagues - share information gained from reading practice intensive.