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.