RPI Session 3: Text Selection

 Session 3: Text Selection

Connecting with Manaiakalani

With text and all its varieties, including digital text of multiple sources, digital text is the way to go! In the classroom, digital texts rely heavily on the digital fluency of the teacher in the classroom. When we are talking about text, we need to focus on the digital. Digital apps are great for helping students to engage in reading and literacy and they engage students in their own curiosities and could provide high ceilings and fill gaps. However, they do NOT replace the direct teaching that a teacher is able to provide in the life of a student. Think about Learner Selected Texts and having students record what it was they were engaging with either on a Google Form or a Jamboard. Also, remember to use digital copies of the text for students to collaboratively engage with using highlight tools and comments (ie as a question in the comments and then highlight the answer). 

A great reminder to have students actively engage with a digital copy of the text to comment/highlight according to the desired learning outcomes. This is something that I have successfully used in my literacy teaching with older students, and I am very thankful for the reminder to try to use this method with my Year 4 students during the upcoming term.

Choosing Appropriate Texts

Just like “getting to know our learners,”choosing appropriate texts also moves through the Pillars of Practice. In Manaiakalani, According to Rudine Sims Bishop (Ohio University), students need to engage in three types of texts: 

1. Mirror Texts: A reflection of myself in the text

2. Window Texts: Expand thinking into topics outside immediate world

3. Sliding Doors: Allow ALL students to enter into the world providing a colourful view of the world through literature

In Manaiakalani, learners' selected texts are so important to allow students the opportunity to go through the sliding glass doors into world that they want to engage with. 

We acknowledge that our students begin school with a 30 Million word gap so we are always looking for ways to extend the vocabulary of our students across all topics.

The word gap is real in my classroom this year. I am contantly trying to encourage my students to orally share and to engage with new (and often higher level) vocabulary. I would love great opportunities to provide our students with PM books that better mirror their own lives and I tend to use the stories that I know allow for conversations to occur. 

Flexible Grouping

Mixed ability grouping is a flexible response the main idea is that kids come together and work (with teacher support). Must always be responsive to what our learners need for their learning level.  Leveled reading is when we are directly providing texts that have language and vocabulary at a level that those students can engage with. Mixed ability texts are accessible for all students (could use audio/video of story). Always be thinking about the text and learning intentions. There are times when texts can be used across ability groups depending on your learning intention for that text and the students accessibility of that text’s topic. 

Choosing Texts

When choosing texts, it is important to consider the following: 

• Give yourself enough time to ask questions of a mentor or others before the weekend if needed

• Make sure you have a clear understanding of what your learners need to learn next

• Think about what might engage your learners

Everything builds off the foundation of tier 1, which consists of everyday words. It is only through print (books/academic content) that you are able to achieve tier 2 understanding. Tier 3 is academic specific terminology. This is one way to think about acquiring vocabulary. We want to be sure that we are selecting texts that provide an avenue for students to move into and be exposed to tier 2 words. 

Text Sets

When selecting texts we need to be aware of various text types (long, non-fiction, short story, novel) as well as multimodal texts (themed video, non-fiction, poetry, fiction). When looking for themes in a book, think about what changes or learnings a character has made in a story (ie helping, working together).  What are the roles of the sidekicks? What are the relationships between the main character and the sidekicks? 

Skill Builder: Summarising

This needs to be explicitly taught by sharing description, exemplars and modelling/thinking aloud. 

Record yourself reading a portion of the story, and then summarise what you have read (or answer questions) while still recording. A summary needs to be condensed in your own words. Model getting rid of the non-essential/important information. 

Reading Wider

Reading to students: Choose a novel (or longer text) that you have already read so you have an idea of when to stop reading and discuss at certain points. Make reading fun…change voices, show your excitement for the story and model what a good reader does. Only read for 10ish minutes. 

Shared Reading: All students have the opportunity to access the text (easily linked to writing). 

Paired Reading: Students are reading to each other aloud. These can be books from book boxes, reading shelves, books that have been used for shared reading. 

Thinking about my own reading programme this term, I would really like to bring into my classroom a greater focus on reading to students. I find that when I get moving into the teaching aspect of the classroom this is generally the easiest thing to leave out simply due to lack of time or getting sidetracked by other issues that arise in the classroom. Students are often given opportunities to read to others and I hope to grow this further next term by having some Year 5 students visit our classroom each day for my students to read to.  Our Team 3 Reading Challenge has provided a great buzz across our team and many of our students are all reading independently whenever they have a chance to complete their chapter book and get a book on our special sharing wall in the corridor. 

RPI: T-Shaped Literacy

This week, as part of the RPI, we spent some time talking about T-Shaped Literacy and text sets. It was a great reminder for me to think about integrating into my literacy programme next term. While I have always known to do this, I don't think I've actively planned this way during the past few years due to the way Covid affected our learning environments. It was wonderful to listen to the snapshot for Dr Rebecca Jessen again on including themed text sets when reading with those on the colour wheel. 

 

Here is a snapshot of a T-Shaped text set that I put together for Anzac Day in my Year 4 classroom the first week back from our term holiday. 

RPI: Session 2 Know your Learners as Readers

 Connecting with Manaiakalani

We live in a very digital world. We need to acknowledge where our students come from and understand that reading is a very important part of that journey. We were future focused and the teachers designed the foundation of Manaiakalani around literacy. In order to access the whole curriculum, we needed to pour into all age levels and learning levels to make a concentrated difference in literacy. In the digital world, while we focused on what we were teaching, there needed to be a really strong and robust reason behind it. In the beginning, we had literacy cycles designed by the teachers and schools to effectively teach literacy. We now have the “Pillars of Practice” that we use to teach reading across Manaiakalani. It was easy to determine that the way to “hook” students into reading was to dangle the “hook” in front of them to become creative (sometimes on a digital platform). In the teaching and learning chunk, students were given an opportunity to create and then an opportunity to share their creation with others. Learn, Create, Share evolved very quickly after this. The PES podcast about what students were reading emerged from the teachers in 2005 realising that their students were not engaging in reading for enjoyment.

Have our kids had the end to end experience to read five chapter books purely for enjoyment? This seemed to be the magic number before students stopped caring about the podcast and started to care more about finishing and getting to their next reading adventure. 

Listening to Dorothy always provides me with such excitement to be part of the Manaiakalani story. Knowing where are students were, and where we are now provides so much insight into the little things that we can (and should) be doing in our Manaiakalani classrooms on a daily basis. 

Assessment 101

Formative and Summative assessments are both important in determining our students’ overall progress and next steps. What can we do with this data to determine the next steps for our students in the most effective way? Taking a measure (observation or formally) and how are we going to act on that measure and also how are we holding ourselves accountable to the shift that has been made. These can both be used at the end of the year to set formative goals moving forward.

 

 

Keeping Track of our Readers & Using Assessments to Appropriately Plan 

We were able to spend some time exploring the PAT Reading Comprehension results of our focus group. Using this data, I was able to determine that the students in my focus group all struggled with the poetry questions. As a result, I have decided to focus my next steps on poetry.  

The specific Learning Intentions that I am going to use are: 

-Draw conclusions and get meaning when reading

-Identify and discuss text features

-Interpret figure language

The success criteria for this that I have decided upon is:

-determine the main idea of a poem

-recognise similes and metaphors

-To be co-constructed by the students

Developing Assessment Capable Learners using Learning Intentions and Success Criteria.: 

I really enjoyed the short chalk talk session on Learning Intentions and Success Criteria. Sometimes, I am still struck with something that throws me a little bit after being trained, and spending the first eleven years of my teaching career, in a different country. Not to say I haven’t been using WALT’s (or Learning Intentions) while teaching here, but I don’t think it’s ever been something I have felt completely confident in creating myself. I think I have pulled bits and pieces together from teachers that I have collaborated with in the past, but since everyone has their own spin to things I’ve just never felt 100% confident that what I have used has been correct. Today’s session just filled in a few small gaps in my own understanding when having ambitious outcomes turned into grouped learning intentions that are worded well. It was really good to hear that they should be written more generically to help with embedded learning that is easily transferred. 

Today also clarified for me the purpose of success criteria in a lesson/learning task. I had to equate it to rubrics that I would have previously co-constructed with my class to score their writing or problem solving strategies.  When writing success criteria it is important to remember:

1. Always provide exemplars first

2. To think Aloud and have students add/critique the criteria

3. Students don’t know what they don’t know

4. If you know where you want them to end up with the SC, overemphasise those points when discussing the exemplar during the lesson

RPI: Ground Rules for Talk

During this session, I wanted to be sure that all my students understood the "Ground Rules for Talk" So, I launched this as a whole class interactive mat session beginning with an overview of the learning intentions and success criteria. First, I introduced to my class the concept of a "learning discussion." We had a chat about when we would have a learning discussion. Then, I went over each ground rule with adding an action for the students to do when saying it back to me. We had a lot of fun and I was really impressed to see how well the students remembered each ground rule when prompted with the action. I intend to make a video of my students reviewing the actions one day next week to share on my blog. 

Once we went over the ground rules, I met with my focus reading group and my RPI mentor came in to observe our time together. I really thought for our first go, the students did very well. I did find it challenging not to jump in and reiterate or ask questions, especially when there was an exceptionally long pause, but I know this is something that I am still working on. When we had a lull in our discussion, I encourage one of the students to ask a question and it was noted by my mentor that while students were answering the questions, they weren't sharing evidence/examples from the text. This is a great reminder for me to jump in a prompt for evidence and examples. 

At the end of our discussion, we filled out the group reflection table, which I almost completely forgot about as I was actively watching the time knowing that my class had sport very soon.  So, we filled it out rather quickly and I hope in the future that I can make this more of a time for students to hold the discussion and fill it out without me being part of the conversation. 

RPI: What Types of Readers are We?

 As part of the Reading Practice Intensive, we are asked to do homework in between our sessions to apply what we have learnt. The first thing I did with my class was look into what type of readers they are. I was a little hesitant to do this with my group of Year 4 students knowing that many students in my class aren't necessarily learn ready at this point in the school year. However, I took a step back and thought about how I could modify the task to effectively reach Year 4 students who are mostly still learning 1.5-2 years below their year level. 

As you can see on Slide 3, I added coloured boxes over certain words on the slide to see if the students could remember the missing word from each statement instead of the whole line. This was a great way to scaffold this so that it was obtainable by my whole class. 

The students really enjoyed the movie and were quite surprised that after listening to the students in the video, that they feel the same way about reading even though many find it quite challenging. The were able to acknowledge that they can still enjoy reading, and being read to, no matter what reading level they are at and still be a "good reader."

After chatting with my teaching partner, we decided to have our whole learning space take the survey together, which provided with some very valuable information since we have very fluid reading groups. 

It was great to see that nearly every child not only viewed themselves as a good reader but they felt their teacher thought so as well.