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.