Digital Intensive 23rd June 2017

A few years ago I conducted a reading survey at a college similar to ours. Eight students were given stopwatches and record books and asked to measure how much time they spent during a class actually reading. Students were asked to record any act of reading that took place whether it was of a text, of a handout, from the whiteboard, and or on a screen. Later, I followed two students for a day each, stopwatch in hand. I found my recorded times were within half a minute of the times recorded by the students.  The results were not a surprise, similar studies have been conducted and have produced similar findings. The average reading times per student worked out as 7 minutes a period and with an overall average time of 30 to 35 minutes per day. It should be noted that the students who agreed to conduct this study were, generally, the more motived students in each class, those with better than average reading skills. One was left wondering how little reading was completed on a daily basis by those students with poorer reading skills.

We know many of our students do little or no reading outside the classroom and this is why it is essential to scaffold reading tasks when teaching the curriculum. We need to do this so the less able students can engage in authentic reading tasks every day. Reading with instruction is the aim of the site Literacy Blend and it is this type of instruction which takes account of the literacy needs of our students. Sometimes it is enough to just give students a reason for completing a reading task – to join a conversation, to answer some questions, to make a comparison, to write an essay. At another level making the structure of a text explicit greatly improves the comprehension ability of our less able readers. Adding material to this website offers teachers examples of simple strategies which are easy to construct and which can be applied to most reading tasks. Improving visibility of the site is a major goal for the coming weeks that, and adding more material of how we can increase the quantity of reading in our classes. Here is an example from the Literacy Blend site, it shows an Information Transfers and is combined with text chunking. These are two examples of easy strategies teachers can add to their repertoire.  Please scroll.

Year 9 reading task with Information Transfer

Read the text and list features under each heading

Foods	Sought-after items	Island nations
·          ·          ·          ·          ·	·          ·	·          ·          ·          ·          ·

Digital Intensive 16th June 2017

Visibility and connectivity were the focus for the day and my aim was to add some bells and whistles to my very plain literacy site. Motivation is based on the need to make connections whether it be on a blog, in a class page or on a professional site.  Marshal McLuhan once said the medium is the message and the digital classroom offers the opportunity to change how we perceive education. Just as television changed the way we perceive crime, warfare, and politics so to the digital classroom will change the way we perceive education. In the 1960s, for example, the television news changed family life forever and now the digital classroom has the potential to do this as well.

For this to happen successfully students must be engaged in authentic reading (as opposed to whole language reading tasks) and writing tasks. If students can't summarize the text they have just read then it is up to us to ensure they are given support with their reading, support that empowers or improves their comprehension skills.

One of the elements used to describe an authentic reading task is simply, reading with instruction. This involves the explicit teaching of skills and strategies which address the learning needs of our students. Comprehension is a skill which needs to be taught. In a Glen Innes school this is not an add-on or something extra. It is instead, a basic requirement, one which ensures we address the learning needs our students.  Instruction which helps students recognize the regularities and structures of written texts is an essential aspect of our teaching.

The site 'Literacy Blends', now in development, aims to provide examples of literacy infused instruction for the classroom. This is not the sugar and cream of text teaching instead it is the inky black stimulant of improved motivation where students move from, "But Sir, we don't like reading," to thoughtful understanding through comprehension.  I will add historical material to the site along with material that I have created in collaboration with students and staff. The use of reading strategies has the potential to transform classrooms where students find a purpose in their reading.

Lastly, the Point England School presentation assembly, run for Pat Snedden in recognition of his citation as a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit was a moving event which celebrated his wonderful contribution to education in New Zealand.

Literacy Reading a Maths Text

There are many skills or strategies employed when reading a text. When a student reaches secondary school it is expected that these skills are fully developed and automatically used. These skills are taught directly at primary school but for many of our students these skills are weak or underdeveloped and many students have trouble comprehending what they read.

You may have noticed how some students do not adequately scan a text and as a result do not make a relevant prediction and do not know the topic before reading. To address the literacy needs of our students’ we need to teach questioning, clarifying and summarizing skills alongside disciplinary tasks. Students often have a single reading speed and don’t use their strategies to repair their comprehension when understanding breaks down.

Hand Span Measurements

 

Maths questions are the hard sums of reading comprehension and the average maths texts tend to exhibit what is referred to as Lexical Density. That means a lot of meaning is packed into four or five lines of text. As a result, students often encounter difficulty separating the topic from the instructions found in a question.

In a page of maths calculations, there are frequently numerous technical topics loaded with unstated meaning or context. For example, measuring and recording hand span data would normally be associated with a number of different fields of research or occupations. Mature readers instantly use prior knowledge to visual hand span research and may make relevant connections:

• to physiotherapy or occupational safety studies  
• to the use and teaching of musical instruments like the guitar and the keyboards
• to research associated with accident recovery rates due to hand injuries

and even

• to the hazards associated with avocado stone removal and personal injury

Comprehension of maths questions can also be hindered by ellipses or substitution, where the topic in a question is replaced by a pronoun or in many cases is left unstated. The unusual use of the minor sentence ‘Explain.’ is a difficult word and loaded with various interpretations. When you combine these features with maths related function and topic vocabulary it’s not surprising that students have difficulty bringing meaning to a calculation.

One simple way to check student understanding of a question is to ask them to restate or rewrite a question in their own words. One easy example of a solution to these problems involves using Information Transfers. This improves a student’s familiarity with the language features of maths questions and it also helps students break down a question into manageable parts. Student comprehension is aided when they are required to reread a text, comprehension is also aided as they become aware of the grammatical features of that text.

The words, grammatical features, can be intimidating but an understanding of a few basic grammatical structures can dramatically improve the way students tackle a reading task. Getting students to explicitly unpack: topic words, technical words, action verbs, imperatives, nouns, pronouns and relational verbs will improve comprehension.

The Weekly Stretch

The requirement to address the learning needs of students at Tamaki College is a key motivational strategy and developing a literacy site is an essential part of professional practice at Tamaki College. Ensuring all teachers have access to the various elements of literacy enhancement is a process which needs visibility.

The Teacher Council's draft of Professional Standards for the Teaching Profession offered an excellent way to practise our embedding skills as we created links to each set of criteria. Thank you again to Dorothy and James for their patience as we negotiated the tricky field of HTML sizing and resizing. 
Along with a little help from Lenva, Youtube tutorials and a workshop on Avatars there is now a nascent literacy site for Tamaki College titled Literacy Blend. There is just a hint of the caffeine which seems to fuel the staff on a two-hourly basis.

The next task will involve making the site a little more dynamic with a few bells and whistles while linking it to electronic resources such as Quizzlit, Rewordify and Newsela.

Digital Intensive 2nd June 2017

Digital Intensive 2nd June 2017

Reflection

This was an awesome session. The use of a Padlet and Google Sites demonstrated the power of online links to enhance student research but more importantly their creativity. In the short session, a science teacher and two English teachers were able to collaborate a possible unit around the simple word blackbird. This started a process of making strong links across the disciplines.

This collaboration began with the retelling of a simple nursery rhyme - Henny Penny - in the form of a magpie. This led to links about blackbird behaviours and evolution. These quickly developed into links which explored relationships between various types of blackbirds and humans -crows trained to pick up litter in San Francisco was my favourite. Lastly, English texts were found and displayed: a Beatles’ song and Dennis Glover's The Magpies. The creative element involved students creating a hybrid of themselves - half student, half bird. The change committee may be interested in this process, it would certainly help departments to shed the silos we often inhabit. Working with PRTs would be one way to introduce creative unit planning where the focus is on student choice and creativity.

Improving Decoding Skills and Vocabulary Learning

Provisionally Registered Teachers     Literacy Workshop  Tuesday 6th June 2017

Improving Decoding Skills and Vocabulary Learning

Students

• tolerate inconsistencies in their comprehension

• do not stop and repair the breakdown in their comprehension

• do not adjust their reading speed
• are often unaware of the strategies which should be used

• do not realize they must work to make sense of a text

There was lots of positive feedback from the PRTs. More importantly, there was instant uptake by some of the teachers who used the strategies the very next day. One of the lessons was recorded and it was great to see students being instructed to take their word maps home and to attach them to the fridge.

Literacy in Maths -Hard Sums

Literacy Support in Maths

Some options

Reading

   Pre-reading

Vocabulary   oral or written words

-lists and /or matching exercise  

-clines

-keyword memory prompts

-cluster diagrams

Anticipatory Guide    

-focus on understanding the type of question

During Reading

Information Transfer  

-focus student comprehension

-forces students to reread

-changes student reading speed

Reading Template

-develops comprehension skills

e.g.

-what must I find?

-what unknown must I deal with

-what must I use?  

-what equation must I use

-what new vocabulary have I encountered, topic/math related

-what memory prompts will I use

-what diagram/shading will aid the task

-what steps must I use

After Reading

Functional Grammar grid

-student awareness of question structure and language features

-student awareness of ellipsis or substitution

Think Aloud Strategy, or Say It grid   related link

-steps awareness

-students develop mathematical independence

-decreases student reliance on the teacher or other students

-promotes student confidence in their own ability

-metacognition, how do I know what I know

Making Connections table     -metacognition

-The skill I’ve learnt is ……………

-I can apply this strategy to the next question because……..

-this problem is similar to the last problem because………but now I

have to…………………

Calculation Grids

-scaffold the problem-solving process

Literacy in maths links

Say It         Think Aloud I       Think Aloud II Think Aloud III