In-school Reading Professional Development

This term, we have begun some in-school reading professional development. This professional development has some overarching goals:

1. For learning to be transparent, explicit and cooperatively owned.

2. To have a shared understanding around best practise and a shared language in reading that is explicit and consistent.

There are some critical components of reading that we have to be aware of. We are using a number of resources to support us in this, including:

- Effective Literacy Practice

- Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey: The Reading Book

Image: The Dimensions of Effective Practice, NZ Curriculum

This diagram shows the different dimensions of effective literacy practice. During this reading professional development, we will be focusing mainly on the instructional strategies section of this diagram.

After the first session, we were asked to go away and observe the errors that children in our target group were making.We needed to think about what they were doing, why they might be make that error and the needs of this particular child to move them away from making these errors.

Here are some of the patterns I noticed in a group of children reading at 8-8.5 years.

- 6/6 children showed signs of missing the middle of longer words. These children need strategies to attend to and correctly decode medial blends.

- 4/6 children showed signs of not attending to the ends of words. These children need strategies to support them in attending to the ends of the words.

- 5/6 children seemed to lack confidence when it came to decoding. This showed in a number of ways. Sometimes these children froze on challenging words and did not attempt to use any strategy to decode. Some children read extremely quickly and did not correct errors (either add ins or omissions). 2/6 children often added words in or omitted words and did not go back to correct themselves.

In my next blog post about in-school reading PD, I will explain strategies and prompts we are learning to support each of these above errors that are happening for these children.

Inquiry into reading

We met as a team to discuss how we can better plan for explicit teaching in reading. When teaching reading, it can be difficult to make strong links between what you teach in a guided reading group and what the children do as a task when they are not with you. Therefore, we worked together to discuss how we currently do this, and how we can improve our practice.

Here are some notes towards a potential reading plan for a group learning to infer and understand different points of views:

WALT make an inference about the author's purpose and their point of view when they don't state it explicitly.

[Make connections/ inferring/ applying knowledge]

Direct instruction idea: Questioning/ prompting the children to discuss.

Learning experience idea: Ask ourselves: Do they need the text to be able to complete the task - if not, it's not achieving what it should. Video contrasting two scenarios which are present in the text (teamwork vs. not showing teamwork).

Cycle rate idea: 2x a week guided reading + 1x check in.

How will I know what difference it made? Do similar WALTs for 2 lessons then tweak learning experience ideas. Seeing how they answer relevant questions in guided reading sessions.

Things to watch out for: Children who are mid-way through year 5 and reading at around 9 years need to be getting enough mileage so we need to ensure that enough texts are being read in a week.