Asking Others and Collecting Data

Since my last blog post I have been actively asking others as Katie Martin suggested. Pushing Out.

On Tuesday I had my first appraisal meeting with my Vice Principal. I explained my struggles with my book corner and reading in general. We decided to make that my professional goal for the year (as well as generally settling into the school). My focus:

Develop a coherent and effective approach to reading instruction, including organising the class library, reviewing home reading, and implementing effective guided reading practices.

You see how big that snowball is getting now?

My amazing Vice Principal is actively supporting me in this goal in several ways:

1. Release time to observe other teachers doing guided reading

2. Reflective time with G2 and other teachers on options for organising guided reading

3. Reflective time with VP

Explaining it all and just talking about it made me feel so much better. It also encouraged me to talk to my team about it. Today I explained my goal and asked for suggestions. I got some great ideas from them and we all agreed that home reading book choice should not be limited to levelled readers. I want my students to LOVE reading. It hurts my soul that I know three of them don’t enjoy it. My mission is to change that this year! I’ve told them that.

I am a strong advocate for student voice. It’s simple. It’s their learning, so they should have a say. So today I had my students respond in a Google form I created. I wanted some raw data to really get a feel of the general feelings about reading in my classroom. I’ve been with these students for 8 weeks now and while I think I have a pretty good handle on what they know and can do, I am going to continually ask them for feedback. About everything. My Teaching Assistant commented today that she has noticed that I ask the students to think a lot and involve them in decisions a lot instead of just telling them what to do. Absolutely right! 

What follows are the results of the questions and what I think the implications are, and how I am going to take action…

As I’ve already mentioned… 3 students to work on! I’ll try every trick in the book! Hoho. Any suggestions welcomed – please feel free to comment below.

Interesting mix of answers here. Some of the ‘yes’ students thought that we should be reading at our own level. A few of the ‘no’ students said they just wanted to read for fun (HOORAH!). Action: We will have both levelled and un-levelled books. That way both groups are happy.

The ‘no’ students thought that we should be choosing levelled books.

As agreed with my team, I’m going to give them a choice. Yes, they need to take a levelled reader. But they can also choose to take home ANY book from the book corner that they like. I want them to LOVE books.

Majority wins! We will not be organising the entire book corner by level (which is how I inherited it). We will have some (small) boxes of levelled readers… but the majority of the book corner is going to be organised by genre. Action: The students will decide how to organise the genres. They will come up with a classroom library system that works for THEM. I cannot wait to see what happens – for SURE there will be some debates about this!

This one surprised me. Maybe I’ve been too hard on myself. As I told my team today, I feel that my guided reading sessions have been OK. But not great. And I want them to be AMAZING.

Interestingly the three that indicated on the previous question that they did not like guided reading were the same three that indicated it was too hard. One of them told me that was why she didn’t like it. Action: Now all my individual reading assessments are complete I have a much clearer picture of where each and every student is. Hopefully, in a few weeks time, all students will be saying “just right”.

Really wasn’t sure how this one would go! But I know that I’m going to keep the similar ability reading ability groups for guided reading (they are mixed ability for other literacy tasks).

I showed the students the pie charts and was very open with them. I told them that I want them all to LOVE reading.

So this afternoon, we started pulling the book corner apart. Together. 

Students started choosing which books to keep, which books to store, which books to GO.

Books are everywhere. It’s a complete mess! But I’m completely OK with that. I know they will get this organised and sorted. And the suggestion jar is nearly full – can’t wait to explore that with them… watch this space!

#IMMOOC #Learning #Reading