Reading Practice Intensive - Day 3

Today's theme is "Text Selection". This is where the rubber hits the road! Choosing texts for the reading programme has to take in so many considerations that are all equaly important like hooking students into reading, pitch texts at an appropriate level, build a wide reading programme, stretch student's reading diet, as well as how does Learning Create Share work with all of this?

Dorothy Burt talked in the Connecting with Manaiakalani section about the Manaiakalani Kaupapa and Shared Pedagogy in the Context of Reading. Part of her talk was about print text and digital tet. And how there is no versus between them! I have lamented the media wars lately about this v's that. We all need to be good teachers of reading, not deliverers of a certain programme, or a manager of an online programme.

Dorothy also covered digital tools to support reading and that we don't have to look far in our Google App Suite to find these tools. Voice typing in Docs can be used to support fluency - DFI covers this very nicely! Smart Chips in Docs is a great way to create Cloze activites. We can grab text from digital sources to repurpose so we can use it with our students which means we should never be devoid of material for our reading programme. And now on our Chromebooks we have Screen Cast with transcripts! Oh la la! This is such a great way for students to build oral fluency and check their transcript against the original text. Now to spread the good word to the teachers I work with.

One section of the day was on grouping learners. Teachers are very familiaar with ability grouping and probably this is the default mode for many classes. Mixed ability grouping needs to be built into a reading programme for many reasons. Research was cited which is interesting to read. 

Over the years I have seen many students swtich off reading because they are in the "low" group. It does not matter which way a teacher lists groups or names them, the studnets always can tell you which is the top group and which is the bottom group in the class. When studnets are stygmatised this has a huge influence on their attitide.

In regards to mixed ability grouping we were shown a video that has an analogy in it that really hits the mark. I won't divulge any details because of our NDC. This video really makes you think about high expectations and planning for ambitious outcomes. This is one of the elements of Designing Learning with the End in Mind.

Lots of us have worked with T-Shaped Literacy and the use of text sets. This was explored today. I always marvel at the range of material we have at our finger tips. Diving into Journal Surf in our bubble groups helped us explore texts and types of texts. Other great resources were shared like Ura Mānuka's "Love Reading" site and The Reading Tribe. Wow - such rich material!

I do quake at the way teachers do not know about resource hubs like Science Hub and Instructional Series on TKI. So this RPI is going to be great for teachers to find out about and explore these resources. 

The wider reading programme was a big section of today with us looking at independent reading, shared reading, novel studies and paired reading. Strategies and suitable texts were covered today. This is a great leg-up for beginning teachers. And there was a mantra in all of this - don't flog each chapter of a longer text or make studnets write in a boog log every day - those are the best ways to kill reading ejoyment. But here has to be some sort of accountability sturcture buitl in. Once again there was a bank of ideas being built up for teachers to use. 

Once again the day was intense and we are now seeing the coherence across the days. Today we used the knowledge of our readers in text selection from days 1 & 2. And as we are working through the sesisons feedback is sought about how the design fits, what adjustments need to be made and is there anything missing. We have the opportunity to provide feedback via a shared doc as well as a personal doc that is only shared with the research team. Such good systems and highly workable.