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.