Today I began my journey in the Reading Practice Intensive programme. This course will allow me to better my practice to ensure I give my students the best learning opportunities I can.
Today has given me many opportunities to think about my practice, how I teach in the classroom and ideas that I can take forward. We started by looking at What is a good reader?
This encouraged us to reflect on ourselves and our students. This task made us reflect on our students but also ourselves as we are readers too. We thought about the qualities and the characteristics of this and how we meet these in the classroom.
One thing that came up repeatedly was how we are giving our students choice and ownership. In the reading of Reading Motivation: What the Research Says, they stated that "Student motivation is a key factor in successful reading." The motivation of students is influenced by their teachers, their peers and themselves. How we teach them can influence this. This made me think about I interact with my students and the disposition I display towards reading.
One resource that I will be taking away and looking forward to using is the student survey on Reading and how they read. This will be something that will give me vital information and will influence and affect how I plan. This will also be a segway into setting up group discussions in their reading groups. Following the structure, today of Toss n Talk, I will use this to teach them extended discussion.
In one of our examples today, we were shown how a teacher used the results from her class as a text to analyse. Full of data, she taught the students how to analyse information in a reading setting when the context would have been maths. Seeing something as simple as this has allowed me to think of ways that I could incorporate statistics into reading or vice versa.
