RPI Day 3 - Text Selection

Text selection is thoroughly important when it comes to creating a reading programme. There needs to be a variety of books that are different genres, outlooks and topics.

Choosing Appropriate Text:

Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors is a concept that relates to text diversity in readers. It discusses the importance of diversity in books and the authors who write them. We need books in which children can see reflections of themselves - but also look through and see other worlds. 

Grouping Learners:

There are two types of grouping - mixed ability and levelled grouping. Mixed ability groups learners in groups that are at different overall reading levels. Levelled grouping keeps learners who are at a similar level in one group.

This text is Level 3, however the reason for this is due to the critical thinking that is needed. There are only a handful of words that are difficult, making it a good text for mixed ability grouping.

Changing and adjusting groups help learners grow and excel in their reading. By leaving them "static" in a group, they don't get the opportunity to push themselves. By ensuring learners are changed when appropriate and reviewing of reading groups termly helps push those learners further.

Selecting Texts for Groups

Text Sets :

Choosing texts that follow a theme can create a text set. By finding a theme, it allows learners to further develop their ideas and knowledge around that theme. 

Reading to learners is important as it can broaden their knowledge and extended their reading mileage. Putting aside even a few minutes per day can help with this. This gives them an opportunity to hear a book that may be outside of theri reading level.

Shared reading, paired reading and independent reading are three great ways to read. Each brings a different aspect of reading into play.

Reflection: 

I learned that it is so important to included a range of texts in our reading programme. From different genres to perspectives. Reading can also be done in different ways such as reading to, shared reading, paired reading and independent reading. They all have their own benefits and as a whole we can extend our learner reading mileage by using different ways to read. I believe I need to bring more of that into my daily reading programme and this can help our learners thoroughly.

I thought it was a really important to emphasise that keeping reading groups static, doesn't push learners. By reviewing and re-evaluating groups each term we can keep on top of continuing to push our learners further. I believe this is super important when it comes to challenging our students and extending their knowledge and bringing up self efficacy.

Know Your Learners - Reflection

Analysing data is an important aspect of teaching as it allows us a better picture of strengths and things that need improvements. During our second RPI session we learnt how to analyse our PAT data. We received some interesting results and were able to see where we needed to improve. 

My mentor helped both my co-teacher and I, analyse our data from PATs and easTTle. We use graphs to show where pour learners are and analyse our graphs to find our strengths and gaps within our data. We then focus on the gaps in order to inform our teaching.

Below is the analysis of our PAT reading data.

I was very impressed to see all (7/7) year 4 students achieved "at" or "above" the expectation. This was unexpected as this was their first year completing a PAT test online. 3/7 year 4 students were above their expectation.

82% of year 5 learners were "at" or "above" expectation which was great to see. 

Below are our stanine reports for year 4, 5 and 6. 

• 57% of Y4 students were stanine 5-6.
• 43% of Y4 students were stanine 7-8.
• 100% of Y4 learners were “at” or “above” expectation.
• 82% of Y5 learners were “at” or “above” expectation
• 50% of Y6 learners were “at” or “above” expectation.
• Retrieval questions show learners were able to find and use information to answer questions.

 

RPI Day 2 - Know your Learners as Readers

For day 2 of RPI we were focusing on "know your learners as readers". We first reflected on our homework from our first session in our break out groups. I found this incredibly helpful as we were able to discuss what we were proud of, what we found challenging and what we needed more support with. 

How do we use data to inform our teaching?

Assessment 101

Evaluating the impact on learning has the highest effect size. The effect size under 0.4 makes an effect but isn't huge on learning. Any effect size over 0.7 is considered a high effect size and you can guarantee there will be a shift using that characteristic. This table just shows how important assessment is when it comes to progressing our learners.

A range of both informal and formal assessment data should be used to make judgements of students' progress and achievement. It is so important to not rely on just one assessment type. We need to use a range to get a more accurate result. Just like everyone, students have bad days.

Formative vs Summative :

"If formative assessment measures how a student is learning during a course of study, summative assessment is designed to measure “how much” a student has learned after a unit or course has reached its completion." Definition sourced from HMH

How to keep track of data:

We use a multitude of ways to track data. A teacher Workbook allows for the teacher to see where each learner is at in all forms of assessment. A teacher workbook also allows for a reflection of each child and general observations. It is a great place to see what your next steps should be for each individual learners and groups. 

Example of teacher workbook - Fake data and names

How to use NZCER Assist

NZCER Assist has a wide variety of ways to view data. You can access the individual reports and class data in comparison with the average in a range of ways. This makes it easy to see the 'gaps' and 'strengths' as a whole.

Using the data to inform teaching while still engaging them in lessons helps learners improve their skills while maintaining concentration on the task at hand. An example of this would be below. The Reading profile was used to find a text that interests the learners and in this case a "scary story" was something the learners wanted to read more of. The activities are based around the learners' gaps from the PAT data.

Learning intentions and success criteria

We always start with an achievement objective and from there split it into small achievable learning intentions. 

When we use learning intentions we want to make them both specific and generic so they can be used in multiple learning areas. Our learning intentions need to be understandable by our learners, so using wording they understand is essential. 

The success criteria describes how students with go about achieving a learning intention. It is a list of things needed to show they have achieved the learning intention. Co-constructing success criteria helps learners take charge of their own learning and allows them to have buy in. We do need to make sure we give a range of exemplars to help learners co-construct their success criteria. We need to gradually release the responsibility of success criteria to teach our learners to co-construct them.

Below is a task we did by placing the boxes in the LI, LO or SC columns. Here is how I did my activity and the answers I got.

Reflection:

I found this session incredibly helpful. There was a lot of research provided to show the effects that data has on informing teaching. I thoroughly enjoyed the session and will be adding a few new aspects to my teaching such as keeping informal data notes on learners and their progress during group sessions. As well as ensuring I use their reader profile to gauge their interest more when selecting texts and text types.

I am also going to try and use a task board to see how well it goes with my select group of learners. This will have a range of activities to do before our guided session and introduce them to the book we will be having an extended discussion about while bringing more of a multi modal aspect to it.

RPI Reading Survey

As part of our RPI this week we carried out a reading survey. This was done on 56 year 4, 5 and 6 learners. This reading survey was used to see what our learners thought about reading. 

It was very interesting to see the results we obtained and I was especially intrigued to see that 72.5% of learners enjoyed reading and 80.4% of learners considered themselves good readers which showed a high self efficacy within our class as a whole. I believe this could be due to the high push on reading last year in LS1. We focused heavily on extended discussion and our learners showed great improvement in their overall confidence (see my previous blogs for my teacher inquiry around this).

Going forward these are the questions I have:

• Is there a prominent link between reading for enjoyment and self efficacy? If so, why?
• Will encouraging reading for enjoyment at school, raise learners want for reading at home?
• Will reading for enjoyment help learners understand what makes a good a reader?

My mentor, Robyn, observed me carry out a lesson implementing the ground rules for talk. We recorded this as a way to make my own learning rewindable. I was able to look back on my lesson and see both my strengths and need for improvement points. I believe this is a great way to see yourself teaching while being able to analyse and look at the improvement over time. This observation went very well and I felt as if my previous teacher inquiry hugely impacted my confidence in the RPI implementation. My learners were actively engaged and were able to use the talk rules to carry out a small extended discussion. Some of my learners had previous experience with this and I believe it scaffolded my new students well. Here is a link to my lesson.

I'm interested to see how our results change after implementing the RPI course into our classroom.

Below are the results from our survey.