Manaiakalani Teacher Only Day - Structured literacy for older struggling students - Betsy Sewell

 English is extremely complex: 

- Our alphabet letters to sounds 

- It's not one language it comes from many other languages and moulds into English from Latin, German, French etc. 

- There are 12 ways to make the sh sound 

- While all words are speech written down, they aren't kiwi speech. The spelling is the same although the way we pronounce it in the 21st century is constantly changing 

- Because it has so many strands there are no rules that apply everywhere 

- It is a pattern based language

The complexity is not what makes it difficult. The thing that makes it difficult is that we do not have a reading centre in the brain - we create this centre. Some of us create this centre in different places in our brain (speech and language vs visual area) - which is what creates difficulty for some learners. 

3 layers of skill in learning to decode: 

The first layer - frog f r o g when you say a word we blend the sounds together. Students need to learn that it is four different things our mouths do and then how to blend it all together. 

Second layer - if I know that I can split these words into onset (cluster at the beginning) and rhyme (vowel and what comes after) then I can make connections to mix and match the units of language. I can generate so many words by doing this. And I can add a prefix to this as well. This is 2/4 of the language covered. 

Third layer - the self teaching principle - the student figures out the words by looking at it breaking it into words and understanding the spelling pattern. For example shout - sh and t make sense so the ou must make the ou sound. Teachers can not teach every word, students need to make meaning for themselves. 

Visual thinking - focus on the beginning of words and the visual features. 

What we now know about good readers - youtube video "how the brain reads" (look it up). Students see the sounds (not the letters) and it is attached in the brain in the same pathway as when they hear the sound. 

Consequences of a visual approach:  

- comprehension is compromised 

- poor spelling 

- unable to develop vocab through reading

Free assessment tool - agilitywithsound.co.nz - to support teachers to understand how students are making meaning of words. 

Begin with how words work! 

- An apps for older students who struggle (word chain app on iPads). Learning that the way I hear sounds when they come out of my mouth is in the same order as the way that the sounds are written down. Teach the skills but not how to blend the sounds. 

- Word mat - Where's Wally page - find the words that have the same patterns. Start with the vowel and then add on the front letter. This is looking at word families. We need to teach students to chunk right from the start. 

Manaiakalani Teacher Only Day - Surfing Semantic Waves - Dr Jannie van Hees

Semantic - meaning making 

Semantic waves 

If you are starting with complex then you need to ask yourself how you are going to get the learners to access and unravel the text. If you are starting more simple you need to be thinking about how to push them to access more complex texts. 

The suggestion in the workshop is to start with simple text and then quickly surf them up different levels of complexity to the level that is pushing their vocabulary and understanding. Never leave a student sitting in the trough/vacuum of simplicity always push them to read more complex texts on the subject. 

If we start with a text that is too complex for the learners to access we will have made the learners disengaged and given them a feeling of whakama. 

Teachers need to be thinking about where the starting point is for the content that links to the learning outcome and then where their students literacy skill is in terms of what level they can understand. "Where do I need to focus my energy on so that the learners know what I need them to know." 

In some cases the teacher may need to create a text that provides the scaffolding so that they can access the more complex texts. Often the resources and content online is out of reach of the learners in the class space - even when you type "for kids" or "simple". 

Interesting thoughts/resources: 

- Newaela is an american site that provides complexity levels of text. Thinking about sentence length and the complexity of each sentence. 

- Subtitles are great however they require a high level of cognitive functioning and load on the brain. 

Reading Observation Tool

 Looking for the direction of change for Reading. 

All of our teachers need shared ideas about what the end point is and what needs to be done differently to get to the end point. 

Take the snapshot (observation) and have a professional conversation. The snap shot will allow us to know what is going on in classrooms. The snapshot is summative - what does it look like? It is a moment in time. How does it change from before to now? The professional conversation comes after as a formative function for Leadership to mentor and support change. What the teach needs to change after the analysis of the snapshot. 

Today we are aiming to have a shared idea about what we are seeing in the snapshot and what it is coded as what. We are calibrating our scales so that we all come up with the same results. We need to know when this is an instance of the thing and when it is not the instance of the thing e.g. is it a vase or a cup? and what makes it so. 

Looking into windows and mirrors when looking at diverse texts. 

Teaching learners to think and question involves actively working with learners. 

When we are thinking about this in a cultural lens our Maori and Pacifica students are expected to not question adults/teachers but rather to do as they say.  In a bigger picture we are all taught about "politeness rules". How does this effect a classroom environment when we are asking the teacher to teach students to question? Do we teach the skills to think critically and disagree with each other? 

All of the circles above are being looked at in the observation tool. We are saying these are the things that exist in a quality reading lesson so that is what we are looking for. 

To be continued...