#23 Burst and Bubbles
Jess- Teacher: We are learning today to use the pictures to help read our story.
*Read a PM book page - incorrectly*
Emma- Student: Mum went shopping and got some stacks bu-uns.
Teacher: Great try with that word! Can you look at the picture to help you figure out the word? What clues can you see?
Student: I can see a cupcake? A croissant with jam on it?
Student: All long camy Greedy Cat. He looked in the shop bag. Go-ba, go-ba, go-blg and that was the end of that.
Teacher: What do you think will happen next in the story?
Student: Ummm…
Teacher: Who is the main character in the book?
Student: What’s a ch-ar-ater?
Jess- Kia ora, my name is Jess and this is my hub mate, Emma. We have been doing a collaborative inquiry about causing shifts in reading. We were interested in finding out if our school's Learning Process and a focus on specific thinking skills through a structured literacy approach could cause a shift in reading.
Emma-At the beginning of the year we analysed the literacy data of the learners in our hub. We observed a group of year 3 and 4 learners who were reading at magenta, red, yellow and blue levels and throughout their time at school, they had made little to no progress in reading. Many of these learners were experiencing anxiety about coming to school and were rarely seeing success in their learning.
Jess-To build a rich picture of our learners' needs and gaps, we used running record data, spelling results from Liz Kane’s The Code and a Phonological Awareness assessment. We identified that these learners had no rhyming and syllable knowledge and were having difficulty decoding unknown words.
Emma-When profiling my own teaching, I identified that I had strengths in designing learning from Schooltalk progressions and questioning learners about the texts in the reading workshop. I recognised that I did not have the skills to teach learners to decode the English language in a way that they could understand and make connections between known and unknown words.
Jess-A key noticing I made in my own teaching was that I had become “stuck” in my way of teaching reading. It wasn’t until Emma and I started doing our own research on structured literacy strategies that I became more aware of how to weave this into my practise. My strengths are knowing my learners, and what their next steps are. I have always been able to draw from the progressions and design learning around this. Originally I thought this was accessible for all students- I would differentiate my questions and follow up activities… easy, surely the learners would progress…
Emma-Our hunch was that our learners would likely make more progress if we used a more explicit, systematic, and sequential teaching of literacy at multiple levels. If we taught them about phonemes, letter–sound relationships like rhyming words, syllable patterns, and vocabulary, would they make some progress? Let's find out!
Jess-In the initial stages of this inquiry, we looked at a number of Structured Literacy Programmes such as iDeal, Little Learners Love Literacy and Liz Kane’s The Code. We picked out bits and pieces from different ones that we thought would work for our school. We were limited with resources so had to get creative with how to make lessons fun and engaging. We tapped into RTLB experts who modeled lessons for us and had many conversations about what a Structured Literacy Programme could look like for us in year 3 and 4. As we were doing a collaborative inquiry and working in a collaborative space we really wanted to make the most of our time and how we could get the most out of our learners.
Emma-The easiest thing for me to change was my design for learning. I found the iDeal Scope and Sequence easy to follow and was able to create lessons that included games and a wide range of texts. I was impressed with the resources that were already out there on TKI. The learners responded really well to the new structure of these lessons and were so proud of themselves once they started to see success in their reading. The thing that I found the trickiest to change was explicitly teaching the learning process thinking skills in each lesson as I felt there was already a lot of new knowledge to cover in each session. I found it easier when I picked a few focus thinking skills to focus on and repeated the same ones with each session, since making these changes, the learners are now familiar with the thinking skills.
Jess-Throughout our research about structured literacy the easiest change for my practise was following the specific scope and sequence through iDeal. Every week the learners were prepared to learn a different “rule” of our English code. Readers, resources on TKI and activities were accessible to find and related to the learning. The learners confidence grew in the space of just 2 weeks changing the structure! They were finally experiencing success in reading, their love for reading took off. The trickiest thing I found was landing on an assessment to keep track of their progress. After close work with an amazing RTLB we landed on the best one that suited our scope and sequence structure. We were able to show the rate of progress and had specific data to back it up.
Emma-Once we had our hubs structured literacy programme set up and were seeing some incredible results, we started to share our practise with other teachers in the school. A teacher from another hub in our team shared about the successful influence of our inquiry on their learners. Amanda, our team mate said “you introduced me to the scope and sequence that supported me with the grouping and assessment of my learners letter sound knowledge. Learners have made great progress, 3 out of 4 learners phonological awareness was developed. Their confidence through being explicitly taught the letter sounds increased and they became keen to read. Their confidence in sound knowledge in reading transferred to writing more challenging words too.” Our next steps in this space are seeing how we can support the junior school to get going with structured literacy.
Jess-Overall the changes to student learning and evidence was on average a shift of 60 weeks of progress in a 32 week time frame. That is a year and a half of accelerated shift in 9 months. The most important learning we made about our inquiry was in order for learners to love reading, understand books and make connections across the curriculum they cannot jump straight to comprehension. The need for solid foundation skills in decoding is essential.
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