Day 3 RPI - Text Selection
Over the last few weeks I have been continuing scaffolding the ground rules with my learners in my classroom. I sat down with my mentor (Toni Nua) and she took me back to the data to see what my learners needed. We looked back at our PAT Reading Comprehension results and realised that my target group had struggled with reading and understanding Poetry. This goes to show I need to be doing more poetry with my learners on a regular basis rather than this being a one off in my class room (face palm).
We firstly went into our break out groups where Kiri explained to me how she did a poem every week with her kids a few years back. I think this is a fantastic idea and am going to start trying to do a different poem every Friday. I'll try to make a fun engaging create activity to go with it.
When looking at text selection with our students, we need to make sure as teachers we're having half of the texts as books in front of our learners and the other half being online texts/videos. One thing I loved that Dorothy mentioned this morning was no matter how great online apps are, they’ll never do the job as a teacher, these apps should never be what your planning/learning is based around.
Pillars of Practise
Today we are looking at the pillar of 'Inside the Classroom'
Text Sets
This is the best part of learning, having different text sets about different ideas/themes/people/places opens you up to a world of learning/knowledge.
When looking at the image below, this is the best way of creating a text set. It is important to pick a text you know that your learners will engage with. Once you have chosen your instructional text, you need to choose a complementary text that will offer your learners more information about your theme. Next, you need to select a tension/challenge text, this is always the best for starting discussions, this makes learners look at the other side of the story/argument, learners have to use information that they have learned to support their ideas. Lastly, the student selected text, I usually use an epic article, or a YouTube video, this is always engaging.
Today we worked on making a text selection, I did mine on a theme of the 'History of Kilikiti'. Students have the 3 texts to read and 2 YouTube videos to watch.
Click here for a link to the slides.
The one thing I would share with my syndicate from today would be what I learned from the text sets, but mainly how to use Journal Surf and the filters from the advanced search that you can use, I foound these great!
This was another amazing session, thanks heaps to Naomi, Kiri, Sharon and Dorothy for giving us this opportunity to better our teaching.
HI Zac, As usual it's great to see the enthusiasm you bring to your learning and to your classroom practise. In poetry I liked too the way you can use the language features in your writing the following week, so the students become receptors and creators in this space. I found it really embedded the learning. I too really love the T-shaped approach to text selection, I think too often we leave the students out of this process when they can have a lot to offer. I look forward to listening to a few of your podcasts as we go forward and I'm especially interested in the interview you planned for this week. Kiri
ReplyDeleteKia orana! I love reading your reflections and hearing about what you are taking into your class from the RPI. You are so luckly to get time with Toni as your mentor - what a legend!
ReplyDeleteI realise I may have said that half your texts should be print/digital, but in hindsight I don't think I should have! Perhaps what I should have said was "It would be great if we have an even mix of print and digital texts"? But the reality is that is never going to happen. I suspect we lean into the digital text now (even if you are 'ripping' it out of a print book), because we simply don't have the money and materials to supply half our reading texts in print - without always going to school journals. It would be interesting to see how it worked out in your team over the term.
Dorothy