COL Inquiry #6: Academic/professional reading and hypothesis

Find 3 Pieces of academic/professional reading. Explain how they and other sources helped you form hypotheses about aspects of teaching that might contribute to current patterns of learning.

Reading ONE: The Reading apprenticeship
The  Reading Practice Intensive (R.P.I) is a programme that was being run in terms 2 and 3 for those staff who were interested in the support to meet the demands and changes to new policy mandates, which they had built into the Year 7-10 RPI design.  The aims of the programme were to:
Building readiness for the reading and writing co-requisite unit standards and the common literacy assessment activities; dText set approaches to teaching reading strategies, skills and dispositions to support deep learning and ākonga literacy improvement;
A shared ‘pillars of reading’ framework that can be used to scale practices across teams and departments, in line with cross curricula (Te Mātaiaho), cross-subject and Common Practice Model approaches;
Draws on research based practices from Reading Apprenticeship in the secondary subject disciples and Secondary Literacy: A Teacher Handbook.
I clicked on Reading Apprenticeship and watched a video showing a Science teacher teaching and reading aloud supporting the students with a text.

Teacher modelling to the class:
I noticed that this is exactly what I do with my students but I see we could spend more time asking the questions.  One of the techniques was breaking down the title of the article.  The teacher models breaking down the title then asks the questions and writes it around the article.   Then she asked the students if there was anything they missed and to add to it.
Individual tasks:
Student then practiced on their own the same technique.
Group:  Then students got into groups and discussed the text together.
Class:  Students reported the questions/queries back to teacher as a whole class.  Teacher repeated the question back to the students and a shared understanding of the text was gathered.
The approach looks at 4 key dimensions below:

What Does a Reading Apprenticeship Classroom Look Like?  This I read through this document outlining some basics.  Here are some (mainly Science) curriculum specific units and I liked the History one. 
I found heaps of good accessible resources on this site and I am interested in learning more about rubric’s like this one; Rubric-for-Student-Self-Assessment-of-Collaborative-Work.pdf

Reading TWO:  Nicola Wells CoL Teacher Report 2019 - Discussion Points, Conclusions and Suggestions

In 2019, Nicola Wells who was an across school COL teachers wrote a comprehensive report on her inquiry called 'Accelerated reading comprehension in students arriving at Tamaki College from Manaiakalani cluster Primary schools'.

Some of her key findings that I found interesting were:

Reading mileage - suggestion

To improve reading comprehension I propose that reading mileage - time spent actively reading a wide range of texts for a range of reasons, engaging in repeated reading of the same text, or engaging in supplementary comprehension strategies - should be increased. 

In the Secondary school additional reading mileage could be implemented during one of the single, 50-minute periods for many of the core subjects such as Science, Social Studies, Health and History, as it already is in English. Question generation and comprehension could be tailored to suit reading comprehension in each subject. For example, reading in History and Social Studies would suit the Questioning the Author package/routine while question generation targeting fact recognition and reliability would suit Science. 

Summarisation is supported as a reading comprehension strategy by multiple studies. Sencibaugh (2005) reported that some auditory/language-dependent strategies had a great impact on reading comprehension for students with reading disabilities, including ‘paragraph restatement’ and ‘summarisation.’

Reading THREE: Understanding the Science of Reading in the 'Reading League' (notes here)

How these readings helped me to form a hypothesis.

My hunch at the start of the year was that my learners were struggled to read because they were in the right learning environment and this has distracted them from their learning. Our students arrive at our school well below the national norm and this leads to a lack in engagement and motivation to engage in learning about reading.

From these readings, it is clear that the science of reading and structured literacy is an important approach to achieving success.  A key factor to succeed in Senior Social Sciences is the ability to critically think and comprehensively describe and understand key concepts and unpacking meaning of language is important.  Teacher modelling and reading mileage is another way to improve reading comprehension.

My biggest takeaway being the amount of time I need to spend focusing on modelling the understanding of key words through phonetic sounding out of words, something which I have done in the past, but can work if used in more frequency.  Developing and utilising a simple framework that would deepen their understanding of the text their reading is another area I want to explore further.

Staff PLD: Informing our Staff about our Inquiries

Today we presented our inquiries to our staff to take stock of where we were at.

My inquiry:

Can understanding PAT testing better support our year 9 readers.

Do I kids know their learning and can they articulate it?  

• Gathered Evidence through survey’s and PAT’s.  

• Scanned using my own teacher judgement and discussions with some of the other teachers of these classes.

• Created hypothesis about my own teaching eg. If I really unpacked the PAT tests and understood the gaps, I can help my learners.  If they could understand the tests, they will know why they are important.

Research suggests a whole lot of things eg. like creating communities of readers and a school with a culture of reading.  I remember we did Accelerated readers and we used once a day pick up a box in here with a class set of different books for students to read because research showed that if they read for a least 20 mins a day, that would accelerate their literacy rate.  What are we doing now?

Research in a secondary school found Huntly College 

Vision Huntly College is associated with reading; leaders are readers

Mission Working together to support staff and the student leaders to promote and inspire Huntly College students to read for pleasure and wellbeing

Our knowledge of reading at Huntly College comes from research over several years by two different groups in the school using different methods. The first investigation of the reading culture at Huntly College was carried out in 2019 when a curious teacher new to the school wanted to find out if and what students at Huntly College were reading. What was found out was that the reading culture at Huntly College was minimal with few students reading and one parent specifically saying not to teach Māori boys to read. To quote, "Don't teach Māori boys to read, all they need to do is know how to dig holes on my farm".

I’m interested in finding out what is our current reading culture at Tamaki, do we need a refresh and what becomes of our school library and reading programmes now that our lovely Librarian Ebenezer is gone.

NEXT STAGES we are currently looking at is our Plan stages:

What is a PAT test?

Identifying key gaps and using the data more effectively to create strategies to shift achievement

Know your learners! Knowledge & skills in making meaning (reading), relevant to all learning areas. Your learners in comparison to other learners in Tamaki College, as well as in comparison to national learners. Grouping of your learners.  Use the range, highest to lowest. Identify gaps & needs. Help to use differentiated teaching strategies. ‘No one size fit all’ No one is left behind

Draft unit plan for ESOL here

Create a teaching template fit for Sos using the Literacy matrix for reading around the 3 Big Ideas:

• Make sense of written text 

• Read critically 

• Read for different purposes

Working with Graeme Ball who is our NCEA facilitator

Steps Web programme with Mary-Ann

Working with the Level Up team to support a school wide approach to literacy and numeracy

Survey of students ‘what are you reading?’

Survey of staff 

Intervention:  Trying these strategies

Research for reading

An inquiry into building a culture of reading at Huntly College

Hands up if in the last week you have read a book (non-fiction, fiction).  Did you know that research shows that if teachers read and share a love of reading so we should take into account reading role model

COL Inquiry #5: Summarise your key findings

1. Summarise your key findings about the nature and extent of the student problem

After gathering data from PAT results, discussing how to identify struggling readers with a literacy expert and gathering student voice as well as my own observations, I have summarised some key findings to the nature and extent of the student problem.

• Most students want to read but there are some barriers which push it to the background, like trying to get used to new classmates, new systems, new ways of teaching.
• The Science of reading needs to be explored better through structured literacy so that kids who are feeling forced to read and don't understand the mechanics and the why of reading.
• Boys would rather play sport then sit and read.
• Regular reading needs to be a learnt habit.
• Reading in short bursts works best because kids become distracted.

In summary, my hunch is that my year 9's are still transitioning and moving into specialist curriculum areas that all have different approaches to reading is a struggle.  They tell me that time constraints may not allow them time they want to process information, even though we had moved to one hour periods.  

I need the students to be critical thinkers which is an important social science skill to have and this needs to be built through understanding the why of reading better. Unfortunately, the reality for the majority of my year 9 kids right now is that they struggle to get one task completed during our class time.  This is leading to a lack of engagement by the less able students and a lack of motivation by the more able.  By making things like their PAT tests more transparent and understandable, students may be more likely to feel invested in their learning.

2. Explain how some of the data you have used to build a profile of the students’ learning will be used as baseline data at the end of the year.

The data I will look at will be PAT reading results to compare test 1 to test 2 as well as mid-term exams.

COL Inquiry #4C: Discussions to identify our struggling readers with Marc Milford

One of the key ways to understand the challenge of reading for our juniors is to see how departments across our school are unpacking the problem to help solve it.  I sat with Marc to talk about one of the main challenges around reading in his many hours of trying to understand our learners needs.  Here are the notes I took from our meeting. 

Manaiakalani Cluster Teacher's only day 2024

The theme for the TOD was a Focus on Digital Technologies Empowering Creativity.

How are we harnessing digital technologies to empower creativity and embrace opportunities to engage our young people in being creative?

Today a team of us presented a workshop on our Level Up work to an enthusiastic team who selected our workshop.  Those who attended said it was positive and we enjoyed the discussions that came out of it.

Here is our presentation.

Each person presented key elements of our workshop which was supported with data and research.

Celebrating 'Cultural Visibility': Samoan Group performing at our Manaiakalani Teacher's only day

Today our small Samoan Group got to perform in front of our staff gathered from our Manaiakalani cluster.  It was important to acknowledge and celebrate the language week as Samoan is one of the three most widely spoken languages in New Zealand behind English and Te Reo Maori.  

Our group is a diverse group with a mix of Samoan, Tongans, Cook Islanders, Burmese and European and many of these students were excited to see some of the teachers that had once taught them in their primary school days.  

This year, their head tutor Alby Tuuga-Stevenson wanted them to be involved in as many school wide and community wide opportunities as they could.  He understood that being part of the group was not just about dancing but learning and nurturing the values like respect and service that come with the Samoan way of life or fa'a Samoa.  Some of these students are entrenched in their Samoan culture at home and in church, which is enhanced when they are part of the group but for many, being in our Samoan group is their only connections to understanding who they are and where are they from.  It is only right that we provide an avenue to make those connections and to connect them with their identities.  They may not know their language but their language knows them.

Fa'afetai Manaiakalani for allowing them the opportunity to perform.