Beyond a Blackboard

 How well do your students self-reflect and monitor their understanding of a text? After inquiring into my practice and my learners reading habits, I noted that many of them were not noticing when they stopped understanding something. We had a lot of discussion and discovered that we might lose focus of a text for a number of reasons, sometimes our eyes are walking over the words, but our minds are dreaming of something else.  After consulting research literature, my class data, analysing my own practice and conversing with other teachers on this matter, I designed an intervention. In its current iteration, we are reading a short chunk of text (about a paragraph) and rating our understanding on a 5 point scale. We co-constructed this 5 point scale together and use it often to ensure the students clearly understand each level clearly. We then discuss any causes for confusion and the strategies that might support this. We apply these and re-read to get a better handle of what we...

Does assessment data always accurately reflect the capabilities of our learners? As teachers we use multiple data sources to inform our  OTJs, in order to account for the odd bad day or fluke test. But when we know we had positive testing conditions and that our children are motivated, we cannot dismiss our results. Last year I felt that my class had performed really well in reading. Their class work, learning conversations, increased interest in reading and running records (which are administered by a relief teacher) all pointed towards positive shift. We used even used Read Theory, a website not too dissimilar to the PAT tests, to practice for them. So I was really disappointed when the results came back - most of my learners results demonstrated they'd made average shifts, despite some increasing their reading age by over two years. What does the research say? Corkey (2014) studied the PAT results of a group of year 8 students who were stronger decoders than comprehenders. ...

Over the past two years I have been able to track a target group of students in my literacy group. The students are all girls except for F and G but these boys left in 2018.  I wanted to track this group closely this year as they came to me with reading ages between 8 and 9, where our learners seem to get stuck. In the first year, some were able to achieve accelerated shift, while others only made 6 months. Student End 2017 End 2018 End 2019 A 8.5 9 11 B 8.5 10.5 12 C 9 10.5 13 D 9 9.5 11 E 9 10 11.5 F 8.5 10 / G 9 9.5 / I focussed on those that had made the best shift and surveyed them to see what they thought caused it. F said that he enjoyed the topics that we were reading and that he was reading more. B and C had similar answers, with my hunch being that B made so much shift due to reading more at home. In fact, I gave B an extra text every week. In 2019 I attempted to give the students texts that they would find more interesting, and for the end of te...