Reading Practice Intensive - Day 9

 Connected Learners Share - this is one of the cornerstones of The Manaiakalani Programme. Day 9 of RPI was focused on Share | Tohatoha.

Blogging is the primary space for our young learners to share. As a facilitator this is the core work in terms 2 & 3 to set up blogs, roll the blogs out to learners and teaching them the skills of blogging and how to comment on other learner's blogs.

Class sites and blogs are the primary way that reading can be made visible. Blogs are how learners can participate in communities and share their learning to connect with peers, teachers, whānau/aiga and the wider world. Blogs offer the opportunity for visibility, feedback and reflection, collaboration & whānau engagement. Class practices for blogging need to be established and this is how facilitators support schools.

Giving feedback was a section of today that will give teachers ways to provide descriptive feedback. Feedback can be given in so many ways in a digital environment and these were covered today. But the descriptive feedback is critical to connecting the learning intention and providing feedforward.

Our local cluster has school blogging and these blog can be followed here.

Reading Practice Intensive - Days 7 & 8

 Day 7: Thinking in Reading

Today we covered the area of thinking in reading, using higher order thinking to access the deeper meaning in texts so that learners are going beyond the literal meaning of texts.

Learners need to be engaged in extended discussions to dive into texts and use critical literacies to explore texts collaboratively with other learners. Extended discussion protocols need to be set up to provide a framework for learners to engage with each other and discuss texts. 

Whilst extended discussion would be part of group work when with the teacher in the instruction part of the lesson, responding to texts is a place where learners are able to display their understanding of texts in many ways.  

We covered Bloom's Taxonomy (2001) as a framework for higher order thinking and the types of tasks and questions that would stretch readers into these higher orders.