Reading Across the Curriculum

At the end of term 1 we attended the Manaiakalani Teacher Only Day at Glen Taylor School.  The day was about exploring the topic of effective reading practice. The facilitators presented a workshop during the day and our Tairāwhiti team's work was about reading across the curriculum.

T-Shaped literacy is an "emerging research-practice hypothesis for literacy instruction" from the Woolf Fisher research team. This work has come from their many years of research on the Manaiakalani Programme. 

We wanted the participants to develop text sets for a topic or inquiry they will be doing in term 2, or to develop a text set for a resource they have already used. This was so they could use resources they have already at their finger tips and extend the text set to include multi-modal texts in a T-shaped literacy framework.

Getting the Talk Going in Reading

At the Manaiakalani Teacher Only Day at Glen Taylor School I participated in Robyn Anderson and Chantal Millward's workshop on "Getting the Talk Going in Reading". Robyn teaches year 7&8 and Chantal teaches New Entrants at Panmure Bridge School.

Their workshop was around the notion of how can we provide opportunities for our students to talk with each other while they are completing reading activities which helps them unpack the text by sharing their thinking and listening to the thoughts of others.

Over the years the Woolf Fisher team have presented provocations to us that emerge from data. One of them has been to generate collaboration and discussion between students rather than just between teacher and student as is usually observed in classes. 

Chantal asked how can we provide more talk in the junior school? She acknowledged that talk is prominent in junior classes but how could they emphasise and build on the talk they already do within the 4 elements of reading to, shared reading, guided reading and independent reading.

She did this by using 3 scaffold questions based around

• Opinion

• Comparison

• Identify

You will find links to her blog posts and class site about these in the presentation below.

Senior reading with Robyn Anderson covered adding modal verbs to the question stem to encourage deeper thinking. She uses dialogic conversations to dig into the more challenging texts that this age group read.

Of particular interest to me in among all this gold was the summarising exercise Robyn uses. Students have to negotiate in this task to use fewer words to co-construct a summary.

Manaiakalani Cluster Teacher Only Day

On the last day of term 1 we participated in the Manaiakalani Cluster Teacher Only Day held at Glen Taylor School.  

The keynote speaker was Dr Rae Si’ilata. She is the Associate Dean of Pasifika at the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education and Social Work. Her presentation had strong provocations around upholding the development of languages remembering that we have diverse cultures in our classrooms. She spoke about bringing their world into the classroom and allowing them to be them, to be successful as them. 

points of note...

• Biliteracy - we should be adding English not replacing student's heritage language
• build from oracy to literacy to open up the linguistic space - Education Gazette article here
• power sharing in the classroom critical - students have rich heritages and cultural capital that can enrich our classes - allow them to bring them into the class so we can learn from them which shows we value them

"The culture of the child cannot enter the classroom

until it has first entered the consciousness of the teacher."

The presentation is full of thought provoking material for us as teachers when teaching literacy. Here is a  link to Dr Rae Si’ilata's presentation. There is a lot to digest in this presentation and I liked the way she connected to the High Leverage Practises from Woolf Fisher's research for The Manaiakalani Programme.

Her is an article with a bio of Dr Rae Si’ilata in this Education Central article.

Decodable Texts

Recently I was invited to go to Sunshine Publications for a day to meet with editors with the view of making decodable texts available online.  We heard how the books are structured and about the deliberate choices of illustrations. The publication team wanted to listen to teachers and practitioners about what would be helpful in the digital versions. We had lots of time to talk and make suggestions so I hope they were helpful. Charlotte Gaston from Pt England School attended and will trial the digital versions with her class. 

Prior to going I spent some time researching decodable texts and how they fit into a reading programme. I was opened to the world of Structured Literacy, The Science of Reading and the battle between 3-cue reading, Reading Recovery and Structured Literacy. 

In my research I found Lifting Literacy Aotearoa and dived into this as it is in a New Zealand setting. Their manifesto made for interesting reading and has links to research. 

I had to get my head around a different way of teaching that would be needed with decodable texts. A phonics or code-based approach is used in the early years with the decodable books supporting the practice and generalisation of concepts and elements taught so they can experience success.

This is such a change to using natural language texts and the 3-cue approach that professional learning would be necessary to affect change in schools. It is also a decision that would need to be made school-wide and not done in isolated pockets. 

The Ministry of education have been rolling out Ready to Read Phonics Plus books to school since the end of March this year. Support resources are available for these series.

The Ministry of education has also been reviewing the Reading Recovery Programme. It is now known as Reading Recovery and Early Literacy Support. 

So from being invited to spend time at Sunshine Publications came a pathway of learning that I am still trying to make sense of and to understand what this means to teachers and learners.