Manaiakalani RPI Course - The Highlights

This is by far, the best PLD I have been on regarding reading. I completed a one year Graduate Diploma in Teaching and Learning after 30 years away from University and my initial Law degree. This one year diploma was mainly theory with 14 weeks of placement. Although we learned how to plan etc, a lot of it was not very practical as to how to set a reading programme up, what to do with the kids, how to do rotations, what to put in rotations, it wasn't even explained why we use rotations!  It was an eye opener to get into our practicum classes and see how things were run. Different teachers did different things, for different reasons with different theory behind it. WHAT WAS I TO DO?

I had a fabulous Mentor Teacher and colleagues who I gathered information and ideas from and away I went. We were always changing things up but I had a few misunderstandings practically which have given me a good laugh in retrospect, but the revelations in the Manaiakalani RPI course came thick and fast.

The practical advice and modelling backed up by robust research was very very helpful. My favourite sessions involved vocabulary and the create session. I am the first to admit that I am not very creative at times and find it difficult to come up with engaging content for the tamariki digitally. The suggestions and the way to develop these was extremely helpful. It made me feel more confident I could actually do things that make the tamariki use their brains and new found knowledge into new contexts to help it transfer to their long term memories.

Vocabulary is a passion of mine, but the way to teach it was varied and this course gave me a clear pathway to teaching it. My teacher's aide, Te Arani made an amazing vocabulary tree for my class and brought my vision to life. It has been hard to actually keep up the use of it, but that will come with repeated use and reminders to myself!

I have changed the way reading is presented to my tamariki and the independent work is more aligned with their learning objectives. Before it could be a little hit and miss at times, but things have slotted into place now. Six years of teaching and I'm still learning the basics it seems sometimes. There's so much to choose from, so many things thrust at you and so many ideas about what is good to do, it is nice to have a clear path to take with reading.

This does not mean I didn't enjoy the other sessions. I absolutely did. I have slowly put into place nearly everything now that I have been taught. I had to ensure that I didn't just change everything straight away, but be sure that the tamariki in the class were ready for change and that I could model it, practice it and embed it before I added more change into the mix. Some of my tamariki do not like change so I had to take moments that I knew I would succeed or succeed with most of the kids otherwise it would be a disaster. I did get a bit excited once or twice and have to back a change out due to the tamariki becoming discombobulated! Nothing like a sense of chaos to upset the apple cart.

The reading pillars, or pou, are extremely helpful in developing my classroom programme. What I am doing, what I need to do, where I am going and how I am going to achieve the lift in reading we need to see. The checklist makes it eminently practical to implement. Moving forward I am going to continue to blog about how I am going with ensuring my programme refers to and uses the different pou. If I haven't done a blog in a few weeks about this - comment and give me a kick in the proverbial!!!

I'd like to thank the facilitators of the course, particularly my group leader Anna for her caring attitude and down to earth understanding of the pressures teachers are under at times. It made for great sessions and learning opportunities. 

Manaiakalani Reading Practice Intensive - Guided Reading - Day 4

Guided reading is the mainstay of reading instruction in my classroom. However, I was checking every child's reading every time I saw them in guided reading. Doh! I have looked at my guided reading (GR) instruction from university and it wasn't very complete at all. So for the past five years I have been struggling to keep up with the groups and every reader every week. No wonder I have found it to be not my favourite part of the day. Probably not for the tamariki either.

The biggest epiphany is that I don't need to do this! I do have tamariki on the colour wheel which I will continue to work on intensively, however, I can now release the older and better readers and only do observations maybe fortnightly. Sigh. A lot of work over the years for probably little benefit for my tamariki and way too much work for myself. I think I might sit in the corner and cry later today. 

I will be taking a closer look at the more formal note taking ideas from the rōpu and trying various options to see if it works for me or if I need to make changes. Currently I do anecdotal notes which end up all over the place unless I do a probe or other formal assessment. 

Looking at the introduction of the texts for GR, I have probably been a bit loose in my preamble with regards to prior knowledge, and the examples of the more targeted questions and the choice of words was excellent. 

Fluency is something we are working on currently. We have been recording ourselves, but I will now use the fluency rubric to get my tamariki to self assess and then discuss it with them. It will make them look more carefully at the way they are reading DURING their reading, rather than waiting for me to assess afterwards.

This is the first time I have been explicitly taught how to do comprehensive guided reading. This is my 6th year of teaching. I have found bits and pieces here and there about it, and have watched others, but this PLD session has been great on the practicalities of teaching reading and I will be changing up the way I do things as a result. 

I found the Fountas and Pinnell Guided reading framework a good way of structuring my sessions, although I will be introducing the learning intention at the start of the session as well as touching on it during the lesson. I find the more you express the LI, the more likely the tamariki seem to be to understand what and why they are learning something. 

Fountas and Pinnell 2017

Overall I found the session gave me a practical sense of what I should be doing, as well as the theory behind the practice. I am doing most of it, but perhaps not as well as I should be, and other parts I am doing relentlessly unnecessarily. Yay for ongoing learning! I hope my tamariki get as much out of my learning as possible and I'll enjoy changing things up a bit with guided reading and hopefully they will enjoy it more and therefore, enjoy reading more.

Now off to write some feedback for my University!

Manaiakalani Reading Practice Intensive - Text Selection - Day 3

Another intensive day, this time about what texts we choose and why we choose them. We are working on the Inside Classroom pou of our pillars of practice (see below). 

Having to do some activities with a tight timeline made me realise it isn't as hard as I can sometimes make it out to be! I often angst for hours over texts and then they are read and done in a few minutes and I wonder at how much time I wasted for the kids not to connect or to "get it" so easily it was almost unworthwhile. I put together a text set in just a few minutes which I will add to but will be using next term. 

I realised over the past few weeks that I really have steered clear of poet
ry. As a poetry lover since I was a child I am absolutely frustrated at myself for the disservice I have done to my tamariki. I deliberately have chosen poetry to start of term 2. I am going to be using ones that evoke the senses which will also help them with the descriptive writing we are doing next term. I have chosen poems about events or situations they are familiar with and can use their prior knowledge to connect with. I have other writing about these same topics that will help fill any gaps they have and to give different perspectives on the subjects.

Another part of the kaupapa that resonated with me a lot this time was ensuring we were providing texts that gave tamariki the opportunity to see themselves, see others and to experience other worlds - mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors. 

                Rudine Sims Bishop, Professor Emerita, Ohio State University

I work in a small rural type of town. We are a decile 2 school and our kids don't go a lot of places often, or have experiences that take them beyond their own small neighbourhood. We do cover a lot of te ao Māori as our tamariki are 85% Māori. They live in a Pākehā world however being only 30% of the town's ethnic make up (don't talk to me about where the 70%'s kids are going to school though!!). We teach Te Atiawatanga which is the way that our local iwi participate and interact with the world (most of our tamariki are part of this iwi). We ensure they know about local land wars, Parihaka and the rich Māori history of our rohe. They are somewhat closed off to the world out there though. They often haven't been out of the North Island, let alone the country. So ensuring they have meaningful interaction with texts of various forms about other people and cultures is vital, and helping them to figure out how Aotearoa fits in this world.

Putting my practice into a rubric to see what I am doing with the way I teach reading was interesting too. I do long texts often as read alouds of novels, where I read something like "The Wild Robot" to them purely for enjoyment, although I model what I am thinking and some new vocabulary occasionally. I cast this to my TV via a reading app and can see some of them reading along as I go. Others are drawing the scenes that I am reading about. They love it and so do I. Guided reading is completed each day but I was a bit slack on the shared reading. I often struggled with what to do with my older students but seeing today's example of shared reading made a few pennies drop so I will be incorporating more into my classwork for term 2. I'm excited!  I also like the buddy reading. We already are focusing on how fluently we read and recording ourselves, so having a friend help them read better out loud in a safe environment will add to this immensely.

Another week chock full of learning and I'm sure I have more to talk about, but will catch up with my fellow RPI attendees at school and my mentor. 

 

Manaiakalani Reading Practice Intensive - Know your Learners as Readers - Day 2

Day 2 was a very intensive day. I feel shattered at the end of it! 

We had a quick look at our assessment data from the PAT Pānui Reading Comp testing. Three of my tamariki are incomplete: one was away and been away a nearly every day I scheduled to run it for him, then two just mucked around and gave answers and attitude in such a way I know they weren't taking it seriously. They will have the joy of resitting with a mentor watching over them.

I have always looked at the ARBs for maths, but no so much for reading. Having the opportunity to look more closely at these was good and I have many ideas for how to use them. The readings a short but varied. I rarely use poetry and that showed in the PAT test as a low area. They were unable to identify metaphors and to picture the scene in their heads and answer the questions correctly. I love poetry myself as my parents gave me poetry books as a child - why aren't I modelling this to my tamariki? Moving forward I will definitely be using these in my reading groups to create discussions and discover how the akonga are thinking and why they are answering the way they are.

My class has quite a few gaps and I'm glad I'm on this course to help me to plug those gaps and to ensure the success of my tamariki with reading. 

I feel a little overwhelmed with the tracking sheet. It requires a lot of time to build up the data and then once it is full, the data needs to be tracked again in other ways at my school. When we get into using it though, we will have some evidence to drop the repetition and just link everything to the comprehensive tracker! Sooner rather than later would be a good outcome. It would be great if the rest of the school used these also as it would mean that as students move through the school we would have the data being tracked and what has been covered. We track students through HERO and know where they are up to, but it is only as good as the data being input. At the senior end we inherit the data from previous teachers and there can be gaps that aren't gaps or things marked off that need re-visiting.

I always give a WALT for my lessons and we discuss the Success Criteria (SC). The tamariki do have the opportunity to help decide what the SC should be, but often it may be only one sensible SC offered by them, but at least that gives them a hand and a feeling of co-creation. I will be working on trying to get more out of them though. The splitting down of the AO, LI and SC was a great exercise and one I hadn't thought about it. Also the backwards planning. Makes perfect sense. It's how I handle things in my own life - want to go on holiday? What do I need to do to get there in the months prior to leaving? Same with what the tamariki are expected to be able to do at the end of a unit or similar. So what do I need to do to get them there?? I LOVE THIS. 

The dive into why we do assessment was interesting along with the 7 characteristics of expert teachers. The surprise was that establishing and maintaining high expectations with the learners effect size was so high. I think I do have high expectations, but am I making sure the tamariki know this? I will be taking steps to ensure that I am communicating this clearly, both at a class level and at an individual level. 

Over the past two weeks I have used the supplied slide with inferencing work for reading times in my class. This has been a steady battle with teaching them to learn how to use it and the expectations it has on them and self management. The first week I did no group reading because my time was spent teaching them where, what, how and when to do the activities. My biggest struggle is the tamariki that came from the ipads and have little or no digital knowledge. I have several tamariki that have not used chromebooks before (from outside our school or using ipads) and that has been a learning curve for them that can monopolise time somewhat. Next thing, it's morning tea!  There is also a lack of ability in quite a few to TRY new things. They sit, look and do nothing. Walking around the room, discovering tamariki that were zoned out and not saying they needed help, or not even made it onto my class website surely upped my steps for the week but showed a lot of "helplessness" this year in the cohort. "Someone will do this for me" also showed up with older students completing the work for those friends who didn't get beyond getting their device. I need to work through this and have responsibility and self reliance as a goal for them. 

I am looking forward to using the template slide with the graphic organiser with the week's work to access,  and having the tamariki settle into their reading more. The best thing is seeing that they have gotten books out of the library now - those titles that were in the best fit book choosing exercise! I re-ran the activity with books from inside my classroom - it was a race to find them on the shelves and to read them. This was an amazing result. I will continue to do this activity and vary it somehow to keep putting books in front of them to read and choose. I may get them to try choosing a book for a partner to read based on what they say they like and see if that gets titles in front of them to get excited about. 

We are starting to write book recommendations with covers next week so that they can see what others like. I am going to work with the school librarian to do this in the library too. I think the teina would like to see that their tuakana liked a book as they model themselves and their behaviour on the older tamariki.

Professional Development 2023

This year has been a year of breathing. A year of trying to not take on too much outside of direct school work. Late 2022 I was diagnosed with long covid. It has been a rough time for me personally. My mental fog has lifted, but unfortunately my body is still on the floor. If I spend a couple of hours doing something outside my energy "envelope", I suffer for days afterwards with overwhelming fatigue, muscle pain and headaches. 

As a result, I made a decision not to take on extra PLD that I organised myself this year until I felt I was able to cope with extra commitments on my time. 

Our school PLD focused this year on Restorative Justice. I also attended a Manaiakalani conference where I was upskilled on everything from maths, history and minecraft, to the latest google updates we can use in class. I attended an archaeologist's tour of a local battle site between Māori and the crown in the 1860s as part of the Taranaki wars and also when on holiday, made sure I went on a tour which taught us about the stories in Rarotonga and how they reflect our stories here in NZ.

Here are my reflections on my PLD:

Restorative Justice

Manaiakalani BOI Summit

Waireka Battle

Manaiakalani Principals' Conference

Migration stories