Beyond a Blackboard

I am currently examining my own practice to identify how my teacher actions relate to my hypothesis. I believe that I am not supporting my students to self-regulate as they read, neither from teaching enough reading strategies that support this, nor by teaching self-regulation explicitly. After viewing videos of my practice, I could clearly see that I was not teaching these strategies in person. I was scaffolding my students a lot, asking my own questions to help prompt them to make sense of the text, instead of getting them to do this themselves. I believed that I was teaching 'clarifying' and 'questioning' strategies through reciprocal reading, but I actually put most of the focus on 'predicting' and 'summarising' instead. I wondered if any of the activities or independent tasks included these strategies, so I began to look at these next. I was sure I remembered asking a question somewhere about the students understanding of the text... To make i...

After exploring the research, building my student profiles and hypothesising about my problem, it is time to think critically about my own practice. So far I believe that my students are not metacognitive readers. They don't consider whether or not they have understood something and they don't go back and reread when they are confused. This also means they aren't using strategies like questioning on their own. In other words - I'm not teaching them to self regulate, or supporting them to select the strategy they need! When researching I stumbled a lot about how reciprocal reading can be helpful at supporting kids to self regulate as they read (alongside the explicit teaching of self-regulation). This got me wondering how well I was really using reciprocal reading these days.  Fortunately, I have two reciprocal reading videos from my literacy classes from the past couple of years. Thanks Class OnAir!                       ...

Covid-19 has had a huge impact on us as educators. We had to rapidly adapt to a new teaching style and move to online distance teaching. As we return to the physical classroom, we must not forget all of the lessons that we have learnt from lockdown. Here are my top 6, although there are many more. Technology cannot replace teachers. As many wonderful educational apps there are, online learning is not the same as learning in the classroom. Collaboration was just not the same (yes I know there are 'apps for that'), but the conversations had over video chat are nothing on those we could have face to face. It was far harder to respond to my students needs in the moment and everything took so much longer than it would in the classroom.  Self-regulation is vital. This experience really illustrated how important 'managing self' is as a key competency. The students who were able to set goals and routines for themselves were far more successful at learning from a distance...

So far in my inquiry I have been gathering information about my learners reading habits. I have a bit of a hypothesis related to these learner profiles; that they are reading texts quickly and not monitoring their understanding of what they read. This week I have turned to the literature to gather more insight into how to support my students to comprehend independently. I wanted to learn more about reading strategies and self regulation. Metacognitive Reading Strategies Can Improve Self-Regulation . Susan Nash-Ditzel (2014) This case study followed college students (with average results in a foundation programme) who participated in a reading course aimed to support self-regulation. They learnt strategies such as considering prior knowledge/ background information about the text, questioning, identifying main ideas and inferencing. They were taught to monitor their own reading over the course of a year. I quite liked reading the literature review in this article, as it discusse...

Despite not being able to conduct the pretests that I was hoping for, I have some insight into my students independent reading habits from the lockdown ( see this post ) as well as their test data from the start of the year. I am also in a unique position as I am spending a term teaching a different literacy class, which means that I am not 'living' my inquiry daily. It does mean, however, that another teacher is conducting the mid year running records with my students, which is great for reliability. To summarise the data I previously collected, at the start of the year student achievement in my class looked like this in terms of reading age:                             Interestingly, many of my students reading level (from probe/ pm running records) are close to their biological age, with a small group performing well below and a few performing well above. However, the majority of the students achieving at their...