Teacher Only Day - Literacy with Marc

 Link to Marc's document

Academic Reading - Literacy

NCEA Literacy Planning Resources

Case Studies

How to Read a Text

Disciplinary Literacy 2: Reading

Effective Practices that Support Literacy

Online Research

 There many things that my students have to research about and the main place we do this is the internet. I know from my own research how time consuming it is to find information that is both relevant and useful. Some websites have a bit of what information you are looking for and not all of it so you have to dot about through a selection of sites. I also find the language that is used on websites when you do find them is not always the easiest to understand what they talking about. To help my students while they are doing their research, I have been putting links onto our class website as helpful starting points to save them some time.

Examples here - Year 11 Designers - Year 12 Design Era Hexagons - Materials Research

A website that I use with my students a lot and that I rate very highly is Technology Student.Com. The content on this website is great and written in a way that is easy for students to understand. It is better to get information about types of hardwood, for example, from this website than a website that specialises in wood, as the language used is much more technical on the specialist website that is not relevant or understandable for the use it is needed for in a student project. Also, doing this kind of research is not the main focus of a project and I find that the student s are turned off really quickly if they are finding the research hard or they are not able to understand what they are finding. Copy and paste happens and no understanding is going on.

As much as I love the Technology Student website for its content, I absolutely hate the layout and the navigation. I don't bother going on the main site and searching for something. I normally do a Google search along the lines of "types of softwood technology student" as I know that this will point me to where I need to be.

This year, I have started doing research for my Year 11 Visual Art students too and I find this even harder as the language that is used to talk about artworks and artists is at a much harder / higher level than is easily understood or is needed.

My blogpost about reading about Henri Rousseau.

Marc Milford's blogpost about this same exercise, as he helped me put it together.

With all of this in mind, I have decided his year to start to put together my own website of "stuff" based on the research that I do to find information for the students. What I have got on this website at the time of writing this blogpost is not a lot. I have mainly focussed on starting on materials as that is what my students are needing at this time, but it is a job that will be ongoing and I will plod along with it into the future. I am not expecting this to be a quick thing to put together at all and will work on things that my students are needing at any given time so that it slowly builds up to be something that is useful over time.

Link to website - its hasn't even got a front page yet!!

Link to materials page

Link to wood page

Reading - Effective Literacy Strategies

 Link to document

Reading in Visual Art - Scanning and Predicting

 It has got to the point in my Year 11 Visual Art class where we have to start reading about our artist models so information about them can be included in our sketchbooks.

The first artist we have been looking at is Henri Rousseau. We have been looking at his work in terms of experimenting with different media to do copies of sections of the work. 

We started our reading today. In my inquiry last year, I spent a lot of time looking at how to do information transfer with my classes. Marc Milford, our literacy specialist, is keen for students to learn how to scan and predict. He took a text I had found online and made me an example of how to do this. Link to document here I felt a little overwhelmed by the size and content in this document so I had a go at making a lighter one to use today. Link to document

After showing this document to Marc before the lesson today, he felt that it still needed some work so he came to the lesson with an addition to it as I had not included any work on scanning. Link to document

When we started the reading, we had our guest reader from last year, Ms George. The students had to read along and use the table on the document to record any words that they did not understand.

After the reading we talked about those words and we looked up the meanings together and discussed them.

The students then re read the the document and underlined the key words from Marc's document as they read.

Readings - Supporting English Language Learners

 

12 Ways to Support English Learners in the Mainstream Classroom

10 Strategies That Support English Language Learners Across All Subjects

6 Essential Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners

Innovative strategies for teaching English language learners

What can I apply now?

• I already do help videos that I make myself, so I am going to look into how to create the closed captioning on YouTube to support them. I have noticed that this can be done on TikTok, but the captioning that I have seen in action on there is terrible and does not get the words correct a lot of the time.
• I am already aware that when I get excited about a topic, I talk too quickly. I am also aware that my accent from the north of England is also a barrier to understanding sometimes.
• I have had feedback from teachers of English and our literacy specialists that it is a good idea to have subject specific vocabulary on show in the class as a help / support to learn new words. This is mentioned in these readings a lot too so that is a really easy, quick one to work on for the classroom.
• I have been trying to include a multi-modal approach with my class site and workspaces so the information is given in multiple ways for a while now so it is reassuring to see that mentioned on these lists.
• I have been talking to the language specialists in order to get some instructions translated.
• The students are able to write the analysis of their work in their own language as there is no stipulation at NCEA for it to be in English. This will help them get the depth of analysis that they need and not worry about writing it in English.

Tools, Measures and Approaches

Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge. Justify why you chose these approaches and tools.

Link to Google Drawing

Bursts and Bubbles 2023

My students in DVC / Graphics choose my subject as they think they are going to draw and make things for the whole year. It is a bit of a shock to them when they discover the amount of reading and writing that is involved.

The aspect of student learning my inquiry focused on this year was reading for understanding in the research tasks that they have to do to support their projects.

I identified this as my focus when I noticed that the resources and links that I was supplying for my students were not being used in much depth. There was a lot of copy and paste going on from the internet.

To build a rich picture of my students’ learning I used the PAT tests that my Year 11 students did at the end of Year 10. I also used student voice where I asked them what their thoughts were about reading. They felt quite negatively about it.

There were a lot of changes that I made to my own teaching. I had to learn how to chunk a piece of reading and use information transfer. I pulled the reading from the original source and used targeted questions that focussed the students on what they were needing to find out. I had to be able to give time during lessons specifically for reading activities that were planned and supported.

The expertise that helped me decide what changes to make was mainly the Tamaki College literacy specialist, Marc Milford. I worked closely with him to plan structured reading activities for my Year 9 food tech class which I tried out and assessed how they had gone. I then made changes with Marc’s help and used these resources with my Year 11 inquiry group.

Readings that have helped me this year are The Reading Book by Louise Dempsey and Sheena Cameron and various online texts about cross curricular literacy.

All of this helped me to realise that reading with students was not something for me to be scared of but it was something that I could learn how to structure in order to help them.

The hardest thing for me to change was my own mindset on reading with students in class. I have realised that it can be done as an activity within a design project. We can work on it all together and support each other with it.

Overall I would rate the changes in student learning as good. They made good progress over the period of time we worked on this intervention. Their written answers from their reading had a lot more depth and understanding shown. This came through when they were writing their material analysis for their design development work. What I was happiest about was their confidence level with the reading we were doing. They were feeling a lot more confident which is always good to hear when you have put measures in place to help them.

The most important learning I made about reading for research was to make it relevant to what their project work is about so they can see the point of what we are reading. Taking the reading away from the original source on the internet helped with focus and targeted questions for the content helped them to see the point.

The most important learning I made about inquiry was trialling and changing as you go and getting feedback that guides the changes.

Some learnings that would be relevant to other teachers are to do things that are outside of your comfort zone.

Inquiry 2023 - Student Voice on Interventions Tried

 I have asked my Year 11 class for some feedback this week about the reading interventions that we have tried this year. They have already done a pre and post reading sample for me  - blog post here - so it was time to find out what they thought.

Here is the form that I got them to fill in

Here are the answers that the students gave

Please explain why you chose the options in the previous question. Please give as much detail as you can.

It is helpful for the teacher to explain

I have picked these options because they helped me.

Reading the information myself and answering questions related to my design helped me understand the task much more clear.

Because it's just easier and we will actually follow through the reading while the teacher is reading it out loud and then finding the words we didn't know and searching it up.

I find it hard learning bymyself sometimes and having the teacher read to the classroom and doing research all together gives me reasuring of what im doing and makes me feel confident in my work.

I feel more confident with my learning when the options above are given to me, it makes it easier for me to learn that way. When Ms. Ferguson or anyone else explains the work to me, I find it more simple to know than figuring it out on my own. Having the questions about the text is a very useful feature for me as it helps me to understand the text more rather than just reading it and understanding a little.

The reason why I choice these activities because I found all of these useful to me in a way. As for example when Miss Fergurson or our guest reader (Ms. George I remembered) read. It helped me to get in the zone, not only that but also help me to see words that I don't know. Which linking it to the looking up words as a class together. It was truly helpful because I learned new words when Miss Fergurson was defining and putting it into simpler words. I found those to be useful to me. But the other activies I also enjoyed doing it independantly because the information I read at first then answering was good. As I like the questions about the text relating to my design. Because it gave me indication on how I can improve, have thoughts, and how I can build up on my design.

Why i chose those options is because for me it is more easier and simple to do.

idk, i just got here

Things that I need to keep doing and expand on

• Reading with the students - either me doing it or convincing "guest" to come and do it with them
• Pulling out the words they don't understand as we go so we can all work on them together
• Pulling the text from the source but also having the source available as an option (linked)
• Having topic specific questions ready for them so their reading is targeted (information transfer)
• Giving them plenty of time to work on their own as well as working on it as a whole class.

It is very pleasing to see their confidence levels improve with the activities that we did. This will only help them to not disengage when we have to read in the future.