RPI Day 9: Sharing

The final session has brought all of the loose ends together and afforded an opportunity to consider "where to next?" in our practice. 

Digging into the session, there are 4 main ideas: Visibility, Feedback and reflection, collaboration and whānau engagement. That is: Making the learning visible, allowing opportunities to give and receive feedback and reflect on learning, collaborating and sharing ideas, drawing in the families of our learners to comment and share with the learners.

I will print out the Pillars of Practice (below) to put up in my classroom as I'll often be referring back to it/using it to help me focus my Design For Learning.

The slide below resonated with me. I like the idea of getting reading groups to make screencasts of themselves collaborating on tasks:

Other thoughts:

1. Encouraging learners to "reach out" to Authors via Blogs, Social Media, etc. could really inspire them. I've met and rubbed shoulders with quite a few of my musical heroes (in another life, of course) and the experience has demystified that world for me. It made everything more 'real' and instilled the belief that I could be like them with a lot of hard work. I'm sure it would inspire my would-be-authors to keep stoking that fire. 

2. I've left with quite a few nuggets/ideas that I really want to try out early next term. Below is one which Robyn Anderson has used, to great results, at PBS:

3. Finding my peace in the pace has been really key to handling the additional work load. I'm not an academic, so I will often tune out once the academic words start flying. Fortunately I quickly identified that trusting in the process would be key to keeping my stress levels as low as possible. 3 new curriculum areas as well as this course? Well, with each session being 3 weeks apart I paced myself to let things filter in the first week, plan and execute in the second week, then reflect and evaluate on the week before the next session. 

4. Although I feel as though I need to let things filter again, a part of me is keen to start picking the bigger things apart so I can introduce it at the beginning of next year. I'll review everything in the next few weeks and come up with a few ideas...

Follow Up Survey Results 8/25

The responses to this question indicate that attitudes have remained about the same, with a slight trend towards feeling more positive towards reading at school. When I asked the children for their thoughts, one student thought that " maybe because our school library hasn't been open in ages. That's why we don't go up there on Tuesday anymore". Another said that they are going to the Panmure Library more often as they are reading the Amulet series and want to keep reading them. 

2 more students have signed up to their local library. When asked why they decided to ask their parents to sign them up, they both replied "it's because they have manga, which you turned us onto this year". Graphic novels ARE books, you know! 

One interesting difference, and a great learning conversation, was seeing the change in attitude of the learners to how they think I perceive their skills as readers. A number of children spoke to this by mentioning that when I'm seeing groups and we're discussing things (or debating, as it may be) they like the enthusiasm of the conversations we're having. 

RPI Day 8 - Create In Response To Reading.

So much to delve into, explore and digest during this session. I'm going to need to bookmark and flag a handful of things to come back to in the next few days. 

At the front of my mind right now is seeking more opportunities for learners to choose HOW they create. To date I've been fixated on building speed and efficiency in getting tasks done, but I'm going to reflect on ways I could open my practice up to allow my learners more choice in how they create. I'm thinking trying different "tighter/looser" ways in designing create tasks might be a great start.

"Book Creator" and "Storyboard That" are two different tools I'll draw on next term. ...

One more session to go, but this one felt like it's part one of a two part-er! The "Create over longer units" part is too big to think about right now. I'll file that to look into later on down the track, because I do a lot of Novel Study work in Process Drama. This method could really make it easier than making slide deck after slide deck. 

LOTS to ponder going forward...

RPI Day 7 - Thinking

 Out of all of the days so far, I have connected with this one the most. I didn't expect to feel this way, however, I can see many ways that our school wide approach to process drama in literacy directly connects with this approach. 

During Dorothy's presentation she highlighted how important Critical Literacy and Higher Order Thinking was in teaching the Cybersmart programme. I really connected with the notion that we encourage our learners to demonstrate a healthy level of skepticism. 

I'm not so sure about SOLO as I have had very little to do with this, thus far. 

One thing I was really looking forward to finding out more about, when I signed up for this course, was the use of provocations to trigger extended conversations. I'm very interested in using these to stir up emotions, trigger reactions and get the learners expressing some opinions. Although this is something our learners do with process drama experiences, I want to go deeper with them. It's quite a natural fit. Note to self: Make sure the protocols for discussion are VERY clear before stirring the pot!

I personally LOVE getting my learners to discuss and debate issues in my class. I'm looking forward to seeing how some of the activities work with my class.

RPI Day 6 - Vocabulary and Decoding.

 During today's session the focus for me has been to look for areas missing in how I handle gifting language to learners. The basic takeaways from this session were to focus my attention to the Key Approaches to Explicit Vocabulary Instruction:

1. Building Word Consciousness - Interest and awareness (FUN!) of words.

2. Deliberate, robust interactive teaching of words.

3. Skills for cracking unfamiliar words.

4. Morphology. 

I'll be using the resource bank for morphology in particular for my taskboard activities next term. Setting up a Word Knowledge Organiser will surely help my kids with reflecting on their learning, especially in fear of being "outed". I don't like being reminded of what I don't know and neither do they. 

RPI Day 5 - Planning A Reading Pogramme.

 Another interesting and informative day, today. As the session opened, we all shared our class site/timetables/reading planning with others in our small group. We often get so caught up in the day to day running of our classes that we don't get to have a look at how others are trying to cover everything in their weekly schedule. I'll keep coming back to this slide deck in future as there were so many great ideas to use. 

Much of the SL part of today seemed like it would be over my head completely, given that I haven't done any structured literacy training yet.  In the meantime I'm grateful for the introduction to the concepts and will wait to see how my school will implement SL PD at my level. On the other hand the "Great Beginnings" was fun to try and I will definitely roll an activity like that out in my class this next week. I enjoy running my reading into writing. 

I've also really enjoyed going through Mr Wiseman's evolving taskboard design. Especially naming the reading groups after Fender guitars (well played sir!) which is encouraging to see others having fun with themselves and their planning. 

RPI Day 4 - Small Group Instruction

 Today's session gave me quite a few takeaways to try and a lot to ponder. The first idea I'm going to try is to get one-to-one time with each student, get them reading a text and really observing/listening to their fluency. Initially I think I'll record them either via audio or video, just to catch everything and note it down. 

It was mentioned that the LTR-WWW recording sheet, which is quite similar to how Running Records were recorded, is a brilliant way to make notes on each student's reading aloud. Going through the samples my students recorded and rating them using this rubric made total sense. Definitely happy with this. On an important note, the "Boredometer" sparked my interest, as I'm quite fond of poking fun at myself with my learners. The last important takeaway was to make sure I entrench using different apps so as to make my job easier looking forward.