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.
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