Reading Practice Intensive - Day 1

Today was an exciting day. I am participating in The Manaiakalani Programme's Reading Practice Intensive (RPI). Being a facilitator I have heard how the Manaiakalani Research Team have been developing this programme, so it is with great anticipation that I connected online this morning to start our 9 weekly sessions.

Delivered online, this is a pilot for the RPI programme that will be available for teachers across all clusters in 2023. Being online means that teachers need to have been through Digital Fluency Intensive (DFI) so they can cope with the environment as well as the apps used in the RPI such as Google Slides, Sheets, Google Forms, Jamboard, Blogging - for professional reflections and of course Google Meet.

One of the outcomes of the RPI is to develop a "common practice model".  This is stated in the MoE Literacy Strategy but there is no detail around this yet. The Manaiakalani Programme has decided not to wait for the MoE and is driving this work for our schools and clusters across the nation.

Because this is a pilot I will not be sharing any resources used in the 9 weeks. Our participation in the pilot is to be a critical friend and provide feedback as well as adding in our experience and resources we have.

The group of educators that are in the pilot are a powerhouse of practitioners! It is a privilege to be working with them.Our first task was to introduce ourselves in a digital bubble. Here is a copy of my slide I used as my introduction.

I really honed in on the purpose of the RPI as I'm sure there will be many questions from Principals about it and why they should send teachers to the RPI.

This is an online programme to build capability for teachers to do the 5 things really well with integrity and fidelity to the programme. And the 5 things are below. We have heard about these from the Research Teams at our cluster Research Reflections. These valued reading outcomes will be covered in the 9 weeks.

This programme will be PLD of "9 injections to get the reading vaccine" as Russell Burt so sagely put it. Russell also talked about implementation integrity and that this PLD is mapped backwards from the students so the teacher does what the students need.

Good reading teachers can get accelerated progress in one year. And they need to aim for 1.5 times faster than average student for 3 years to embed change. Sustaining the acceleration is critical for students to "catch up". The big question is "How we can support the schools so it will happen?" 

So who is this PLD suitable for? It is suitable for Beginning Teachers are obviously a target group with the poor pre-service training that they receive. Teachers changing levels would benefit form this PLD. The initial RPI is for teachers with year 4- 8 classes. It may be an older teacher who could know this stuff but keep going on with embedded old practices as a coping mechanism. 

Schools will have to commit Time and supervision/mentoring to make the change.  The RPI will be over 3 terms with 3 weeks between each session. This allows the participants to carry out the strategies introduced in the sessions.