Manaiakalani Reading Practice Intensive - Thinking - Day 7

This session has made me understand how much more deliberate and focused my comprehension questions and design of Guided reading needs to be. I ask questions, I try to ask "good" questions, but what is good??

My tamariki aren't particularly critical (from my general observations). They tend to believe things they are told and don't really think about it unless I point out things to think about or, what I consider to be obvious faults in their thinking. This session will get me started on thinking about getting more from the literal questions and far more into the evaluative end of the kaupapa. The critical thinking skill is one that is more important than ever to teach ALL tamariki as there is a world of information they are being bombarded with and a lot of it needs critical analysis. They need to be literate in a whole world that never existed when I was a child myself. Although there was still misinformation and misleading information when I was growing up, the invention of the internet and rise of information available to everyone now is overwhelming and needs to be looked at carefully. Anyone can say anything online now - ANYONE. It isn't just published authors or experts that are writing/filming or broadcasting their "facts" and opinions.

The literacies of today.

Looking at Bloom's High Order Thinking diagram, we need to be pushing our tamariki into developing higher order thinking skills. Analysing, evaluative and creating.  Rather than shallow thinking, they need to be deeply think about themes and get more opportunities to be challenged.

In reading there are three main levels of thinking:

Far too often I feel I don't get into Interpretative thinking enough and rarely into evaluative thinking and making judgements.

So many pieces from today's kaupapa showed me how to be better at this so it was an excellent session. I had not thought about critical thinking quite as much as during the day today. My tamariki are enthusiastic about reading at times, but the discussions can be like pulling teeth. Perhaps with more thinking involved, it will make the discussions easier? It will be great to watch and find out over the next few weeks as I move from more literal questioning to evaluative ones.

The rational proposed by the session was that struggling readers rely on the immediate source of information. This was supported by my class's struggle this week when we were endeavouring to compare and connect with two pieces of writing and a video. They struggled beyond the surface features. I will need to work more on this. So it is a definite "must try harder" report on myself this week! Must provide more opportunities and BETTER opportunities for better questions and provocations for my students to help them to develop critical thinking skills. I'm looking forward to it!

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!

PGC 2023 - Hypothesising and Reflecting

So why and how?

The tamariki have had three years of Covid. Time away from school through lockdowns, teacher and student illnesses. During this period a lot of activities have also been curtailed. We completed no trips away, weekend activities were almost non-existent for long stretches of time. Interesting experiences with lots of vocabulary were few and far between. An increase in screen time for everyone as activities went online has meant less time with other people, more gaming time for kids and less interaction at home with their whānau. Note, this is not ALL whānau, many many parents made and still make, huge efforts to get their kids doing things outside, sports, hunting, fishing, trips to places and a lot more and have enriching discussions with their tamariki.

From observation it appears that parents across the world have become more protective of their children. They don't want to upset them and want to protect them from any adversity. This is not surprising due to the way the past few years have been. Children are now more anxious and their attendance has reduced as a group. Parents aren't willing to force their children to school when they aren't feeling safe even in their own homes. 

This is a big issue with multifaceted causes and it will be years before research can really figure it out, if ever. In the meantime, what do I do?

Action taken - General Cognitive Understanding

• Instructions given verbally, written, and recorded for those who need it.
• Checking in by having kids repeat what I instructed if needed.
• Opportunities given to be leaders in class to build skills.
• Working independently - short time periods at first, extending these times as they get better at it. They are not used to working independently well.
• Choices given - but limited at first. Then more and more offered as each child progresses. 
• Education on making decisions. How to make a good decision. 
• MANA value discussions every day.
• Rewards given to those who show they are working hard (trying). Rewards for those who come and ask for help. 
• When asking for help, working on exactly what help they need. They are not good at giving specifics and sit and wait for me to do it as their teacher. Working on getting them to explain exactly where they are stuck. The questions usually started when they were told to begin our activity. They oftentime haven't even got their pencils out when they say "they don't know what to do". They seem to know, but they can't identify their sticking point, apart from having to do the mahi!

Reflection

• Each term the tamariki have gotten better at working independently.
• They can all work for about 30 minutes independently after I give instructions.
• They feel better at asking questions of me.
• Their questions about the work are more precise and targeted. I am not taking "I need help" at face value but questioning why? On what? What is hard? Can someone help you that isn't me? etc. It seems to be working well.
• Still working on making choices - finding the information first before you make a choice. Trying to ensure they all have one choice that they find interesting/like the method of creating etc to increase engagement

Action taken - Knowledge Building & Vocabulary

• For two terms, and now the third, we are working with our Inquiries with reading as well as dedicated inquiry time. Not only are we reading and researching our in inquiry area, but covering knowledge related to that inquiry, whether it is based on questions the tamariki have or not. T-Shaped literacy is behind every choice also. Multi-modal options are being offered so that every tamaiti is able to access the learning and show me how much they know even if they can't read or write well.
• Daily Warm ups - every morning we hit random topics on a slide show. Things that are related to maths vocab, daily words, general knowledge, inquiry topic words, ANYTHING that increases their general knowledge. Sometimes we get waylaid with discussions and the kids ask questions about things that really interest them which is awesome.
• It has resulted in more questions. I am trying to teach them to ask better questions by modelling great questions and asking them good questions. Trying to get them to think better! With limited experiences and knowledge, it is hard for them to wonder a lot. They don't seem at times to have any wonderings at all, but these sessions have opened up a lot of good questions and answers. It's fun and the kids like doing it.
• ReadWorks - a reading comprehension online programme. This involves 5 mins of reading preassigned, levelled reading passages about non-fiction themes I choose. They have to read them, (or listen if they aren't reading at all, or poorly) and then write down two or three things they want to remember into their online "book of knowledge". I am considering having them write it down using handwriting too, but won't change that until 2024. Research shows that handwriting information gets it stuck in our brains better than typing. These small tidbits of knowledge they find interesting is also often a springboard for discussion about the topic. For those that can't type their answers, I quiz them on what they listened or read about verbally to ensure they understand what they read. I try to align these readings with the inquiry we are doing, but it isn't always possible, so random items can pop up, but that all adds to their general knowledge.
• TIP Charts. I have loved these since I saw them on a PLD in either 2018 or 2019. I update them each inquiry to cover words we may come across. The vocabulary is gone through thoroughly so when they see it in their readings, it isn't new to them. Well, that is the hope!
• Base & Root words work. I began teaching morphemes. Each day we focussed on one morpheme and then used those words all week. For example dec = 10, TW = two etc. The kids LOVED this. They could understand what some words meant when they knew what part of the word meant. They had to think hard and use their ability to find clues like word detectives. This enabled them to make connections to multiple words with that morpheme and decipher what they MEANT. Not just how to say them. I can decode te reo Māori kupu and pronounce them ok, but I do not know what they mean. If I can decipher some of the part of a word though, it usually gets me on the right track. This is the same for English too. 

Reflection

• I won't see any benefits from this until we do the final assessments of the year. 
• I see a change in their thinking with the increase in vocabulary
• The research says to start knowledge building earlier rather than later. I can't fill in all the information that these tamariki have not yet been exposed to, but I can only do my best.
• I feel that later teachers may benefit more from their increased general knowledge than I will.
• Their reading assessments will only be better if I have covered off a topic that is in the assessments. Chances of that, slim! It isn't that I want to give them the answers, but I want them to understand what key words mean so they can understand the reading and interpret the questions and answer them correctly. If they don't know what some of the key words mean, they are stuck. That isn't done by decoding the word, but whether they know the meaning of it. 

PGC 2023 - Noticing and Investigating

Within a few weeks of starting the year, it was noticed by the senior syndicate team that we all had the same issue. A lot more tamariki that were well below in their reading. We had a stark separation between year 6 and year 5 students, far greater than previous years.

We also noticed that the new akonga were unable to do things for themselves. They lacked the ability to get themselves a chair, didn't seem to be able to figure out how to use an exercise book to write in or how to follow simple instructions.

This required a massive rethink of the organisation of our classrooms. Cognitive load had to be reduced, daily routines unpacked and simplified and repeated constantly and even then I found I was still struggling. 

These akonga were behind primarily in reading, some had an inability to decode, but the biggest issue for my classroom was comprehension. As a student of te reo Māori, I have spoken the language since I was young, however I am unable to understand a majority of it. So in effect, I can decode and say a word in te reo, however, I can't understand everything I read. These tamariki are like this too but with their first language.

A few do have difficulties with decoding, these were put into a special reading programme developed by the RTLit for one student, and copied for 3 others in my classroom. But how to tackle comprehension?

The current route is to teach comprehension strategies in isolation, for example, how to infer, how to find the main idea etc. We choose books that make it easy to use that strategy and teach it regardless of the topic. 

Unlike the "reading wars," there has not been the same focus on comprehension as there has been in decoding. However, there is plenty of research about it and most points to the way we teach comprehension as individual strategies is not best practice. It will be interesting to see the way this research develops further. 

In my opinion, this research makes sense. Readers who have relevant knowledge about a topic prior to reading a piece about the topic, or have a good vocabulary before reading about a topic, understand what they are reading more. 

One example given was a reading comprehension assessment which was about baseball. Those kids who played baseball or were involved in the sport in some way did far better than the readers who knew nothing about the sport before reading the text. Even poorer readers (as assessed prior) scored well if they were in baseball teams in comparison to their "normal" reading level. Knowing a bit about something first (especially vocabulary) meant the children could comprehend better the article or story they were reading.

According to research, understanding word meaning accounts for as much as 80% of reading comprehension (Davis, 1972; Nagy & Scott, 2000). So why are we spending so much time on teaching strategies when we would be better off increasing their word knowledge base instead? If the strategies may only account for 20% or LESS of a child's reading comprehension, why would we waste so much time teaching them how to find the main idea in a story? Which they may indeed miss because they don't understand what they are reading in the first place?

Good general knowledge or "topic" knowledge means better comprehension. Being able to find the main idea in a text won't happen unless they understand what they are reading in the first place. They need the vocabulary involved at a basic level to be able to make inferences from the text that the author is making. You can teach them what an inference is, but if they can't understand a few key words, it won't be apparent to the reader. 

Building Knowledge. The Case for Bringing Content into the Language Arts Block and for a Knowledge-Rich Curriculum Core for all Children By E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

Reading comprehension is not a “skill” Robert Pondiscio

How Knowledge Helps It Speeds and Strengthens Reading Comprehension, Learning—and Thinking By Daniel T. Willingham

Dramatic New Evidence That Building Knowledge Can Boost Comprehension And Close Gaps Natalie Wexler

Vocabulary Instruction: Essential for Proficient Reading Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D.

A Kindergarten Lottery Evaluation of Core Knowledge Charter Schools: Should Building General Knowledge Have a Central Role in Educational and Social Science Research and Policy? 

So, practically, what should I be doing in the classroom?