Reading Practice Intensive: Session 1 - Reading is Core to Learning - A solid foundation

 Today began my coaching journey with the Reading Practise Intensive. I was a little nervous about the parts I had to present. 

I notice that I am someone that needs lots of reassurance that I am doing the right thing. A personal development for me is trusting myself and my own capabilities. Easy written than done. 

Profile of a Good Reader

Early on we covered what the profile of a good reader looks like. The task required thinking about what we think this looks and then connecting it with what research tells us a good reader profile has. 

My list of a profile of a good reader:

• Enjoys reading
• Thinks about what they read and talks about it
• Able to decode
• Self-motivated to read
• Reads a wide range of texts
• Understands what they read
• Good oral language
• Able to write because of their reading ability

This is what has been highlighted. Many of my points are covered by most of these, so it is good to know I can identify what makes a good reader. 

Note: Reads to Learn includes their knowledge of the world + their vocabulary knowledge. 

Whanaungatanga is part of this too - we want to foster connections to learners’ identities, languages, cultures, and each other.

The Pillars of Practice 

The Manaiakalani Research Team have pulled together what the research says to create 'Designing Learning with the End in Mind to help our Network think about what grows good readers.

These have been broken into pillars, with specific things targeted under each. We are going to cover all of them over the 9 weeks but today we are focussing on the overview and then drilling down into Knowing our Learners as Readers.

Part of the focus of today has been looking at research that supports what creates a Good Reader. I read the article Reading Motivation: What the Research Says by Linda Gambrell & Barbara Marinak.

• Motivation = Success
• To have success in reading you have to be able to motivate yourself, this term is called self-efficacy.
• Self-efficacy = self-belief
• Self-belief = your choices, the effort you put in and persistence when things get hard
• The most powerful source of self-efficacy is Mastery Experience (this occurs when a child evaluates their own competence after learning and believes their efforts have been successful)
• Beliefs and behaviours of teachers and peers help to build a student's self-efficacy

There are a number of factors important to reading motivation. This article highlighted the following factors:

• Self-concepts and the value they place on reading. Gender plays a big role in this, especially for boys.
• Choice helps motivation. Allowing students to make their own choices about reading material makes a big difference to their motivation.
• Read-Alouds and Discussions are effective in engaging motivation. Read-aloud allow teachers to model reading strategies and behaviours. Discussion helps invite students into active learning. 
• Balance of books collections and text types
• Rewards can be used but need to be well thought through in terms of motivating further reading. 

The rest of the session focussed on how things we have talked about could be covered in a reading group through out a week. It was challenging to see all that was included but also powerful to see how easily you could 'tick off' many of the things we had covered in the few examples. It is good to know that my methods of teaching reading have been on the right path.

I am looking forward to building on the knowledge that I already have and seeing how my group journey through this PD.