RPI - Day 3 - Text Selection

One of the key messages today that kept coming back to me was this notion by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop around mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors.   The idea of this was that Students need to be able to see themselves reflected in what they are reading as well as be provided windows into seeing how life is beyond their own understanding as well as being provided opportunties to truely experience this new world.  The interesting notion is that if students only ever see themselves being reflected back in the texts they read then they get an over inflated sense of theseves or the lives they live and may not really be exposed to the wider world ideas. 

This notion of building wider world ideas and capacity supports students growth not just in reading but in all areas of their learning and life.

• Can students see themselves and their views? (Mirrors) - Reflections of themselves
• Can students see other worlds and how they match up or do not match up to their own views - Windows to the world
• Can students engage and intereact in these different worlds they are being exposed too - Sliding glass doors enabling them to extend their world.

Sometimes students only see mirrors and then get self inflated and inpractical versions of themselves but need to see the wider world. In otherwords the diversity of experiences both with texts and beyond texts is vital do development over time.

Dorothy Burt as per normal also had some though provoking ideas.  As is the costom she was very digitally focused but also brought up the very good point that we need to make sure that we do-not outsource the teaching and management of reading ot an app that now days has inbuilt affordances to track and manage strudents but rather we need to as teachers use these affordances to support us in looking at the bigger picture (using their amazing analytics) to enable us to make good selections of books and texts now and int he future based on needs, interests and focuses.  I liked the idea of students taking screenshots and using these to keep a track of their progress - Often students show us as teachers and we do see it but when there are 30 individuals doing the same sometimes its hard to keep track of their accomplishments.  I liked this idea and would like to trial using this for both reading Mahi that the students are doing and in other curriclum areas such as Maths (especially basic facts & times tables practices) 

Easy, simple and in one place (I will just have to train the kids to do this now - Simple!)

Text selection was of course the main focus of the sessions today with lots of work on grouping to enable students to have a variety of exposure to different texts and focuses.   We revisited the task boards and extra ideas around this as well as having a focus session on summarising texts as a little hot spot.  Lots of mahi.

We looked at a range of ways we can select texts based on both group, purpose and needs.

Todays Take aways - Mostly timely reminders

- continue to incoporate a range of texts and text types into planing - New terminology here was 'text groups' LOL.  It 

- I do, you do, we do

- Talk moves but in reading not maths

- Tracking text coverage - How do we do this both as a school and as an individual teacher

- Keep building capacity of learners in class to use digital taskboards.