Best Intentions

I had the very best of intentions to blog my progress teaching comprehension strategies last year but … we all know what can happen to best intentions.

Yes I did keep the group going – three terms worth, two sessions a week, with eight 10 year olds who find reading challenging. When we finally mastered the routine and got focussed, the amount of text we got through greatly increased. We stopped worrying about finishing the story and concentrated on getting as much as we could out of the bits we did read. I got lots of honest feedback about the quality of the stories I wrote for them and went away vowing to do better.

It reminded me once again about why I have continued as a teacher all these years. The kids open-faced honesty, their trust and willingness to please once they see that you really are interested in them, and the buzz you get when you know that you have made a difference. Yes we all got better at reading. By the end of the year everyone had managed to crank their instructional reading age up to their chronological reading age and some went significantly beyond it. They were sold on being CSI investigators and marched off boasting about how much reading they were going to do in the holidays. And I’m determined to become a better blogger  - Hilton

Sharpening the Behaviour Management Pencil

Now I know why their teacher calls this group ‘The Tornadoes’. Twenty minutes with them and you feel like you’ve been in one. It’s not the overt behaviour ; it’s all the secondary stuff … ‘Sarah’s looking at me’… ‘No I’m not’… ‘Yes you are’ … which knocks your preconceived notions about 20 minutes of intensive comprehension instruction off-balance. So today is session number three and it’s time to address the issue … sort out a couple of behaviours that are going to be acceptable, with the obvious inference about those that are not, and then reinforcing them like crazy. ‘Minding your own business’ and ‘keeping your eyes on the story’ were enough for a start and we managed to quench the storm by zeroing in on the ones doing the right thing and ignoring the off task fringes. And … we did some reading.     by Hilton

‘Upstream or Downstream’

Seth Godin, the guru behind “Small is the New Big” and an unlimited number of insightful articles and stories, suggests that we take a good look at what is upstream as well as what is downstream to help us perform better in the stream we are in. I know this sounds like he is a little too deep into the fermented red currants but it actually got me making connections.

As a teacher could I effect what was upstream or downstream to improve my present students’ ability to learn or perform better? Should I poke around in the younger classes they come from or the classes they will go to? With schools constantly battling with good approaches to whole school progress I couldn’t see me getting far with that. Jumping out of the trenches and throwing myself on barbed wire might be easier. Then I thought about ‘home’, the place our students spend 70% of their time. Could our school do something there? Something small but big in terms of the effect it may have in the classroom. I thought about diet. Done to death by Jamie Oliver. Barbed wire flash backs. Then I thought about homework. Hiroshima. I give my 10 minute speech about homework at the beginning of the year at parent teacher evening, I ain’t gonna give up extra time training the good parents (the only ones who ever come to my meetings) in how to manoeuvre through the homework skirmishes and full on face to face homework warfare. Then I thought about the PTA ? (parent teachers association). Every year they raise 4 to 14 thousand dollars for new computers or some other object the school ‘really needs’. What about if they were to spend some of it on the upstream and the downstream. Diet management, counselling skills, behaviour approaches for parents. Parents really helping our parents. Wouldn’t that in turn help our kids and in turn help our classroom learning environments? My boat is certainly in the water on this idea. Anyone got a paddle? Jump in.

By Brian

A Letter To Anne

Writing a business letter to someone I don’t know is always a conundrum as I often find myself caught between the “business head” and my jovial self, (knowing that my business head can be such a bore). Producing a letter to send to a Minister of Parliament raising issues of concern about the well publicised National Standards, meant that I wasn’t really caught in two minds because a first time letter to Anne Tolley was not the place for jocularity. Nevertheless the prospect was exciting because this letter could potentially begin my career in the field of political-educational dialogue. An interesting image. Me shooting the breeze, toe to toe with the head honchos. So with phone in hand I called the cavalry, principals from all around Canterbury, to gather ‘info’ on their National Standards views.
It is amazing how freely the cavalry talked. Almost to the point where I couldn’t stem the flow. Visions of a burst pipeline in the Mexican Gulf sprung to mind. It only took a week to gather enough data which I quickly summarised into a well constructed ‘business head’ email. With careful consideration and nods of approval from colleagues I took the final step for this week’s work and pushed the ‘send’ button. This was done with a slight pang of nervous tension. Actually that is not really true, as it was more like fear than nervous tension. The kind you have when you know you may upset someone only then to be made worse by the realisation that you have never met them.

Too late the button was pushed and so I waited. Two hours later I get an email back. Wow heart palpitations. Trevor Mallard (spokesman for education for the opposition) replied, thanking me for the email and the clear summary (heaven knows how he got a copy of the letter so quickly. Bcc). Trev and I are now like that. You know Bro Town tight cause he has emailed me twice. As for Anne she is pretty busy with the next roll out of National Standards. She wants to add 50 more experts to the mix. Hang on didn’t I just find out from principals that the clarity of the standards and their implementation leaves most a little flat? I am reminded of the expression that a number of principals used when talking to me “they are sailing the ship as it is being built”.

Summary: Mr Mallard is waiting for an update on a reply from Mrs Tolley. Brian is waiting on a reply from Anne. Mrs Tolley still doesn’t know I exist.

Beginning

The first day with a new reading group is always ‘interesting’. You can sometimes cash in on your novelty value if you are not the regular classroom teacher, but there is only so much mileage you can get out of that. Joshua (not his real name) has lots to say about everything other than the job at hand. It takes a while for the undercurrents that he has brought from the playground to subside. I explain who I am and what we will be doing – trying out some new reading strategies. We talk about how thinking about the words while you are reading is often more important than just being a fast reader. They like that – it goes a bit quiet and I get good eye contact. I don’t think they have heard that message before. I show them how to use “I think that means …” with a couple of sentences from a story I have brought and then they have a go. There is a lot of parroting  but I can hear some cogs whirring in those heads. I make sure I walk back to the classroom with Joshua. I guess there’s a Joshua in every group.

Teaching Comprehension Strategies? Tell me how YOU do it!

It all very well to have lots of theory to spread around about teaching comprehension but teachers want to know if we can walk the talk. Brian and I have tried to maintain a habit of working with a group of children on a regular basis in the midst of everything else we do. Call it ‘research and development’ if you like but it certainly keeps our feet on the ground and confronts us with the need to provide teachers with practical support that works at the coalface . We use the time to trial new CSI variations but it’s also fun to be with the kids. I find it much easier to write stories for a live audience. They give me the really honest feedback.

Last term I started with a new group of 10 year olds and you can follow our CSI ‘journey’ on this blog. Of course the first port of call is to identify the students needs and although there was data available I wanted to gather my own. I spent a couple of sessions using our Informal Prose Inventory tests to quickly establish how these kids were coping with decoding and comprehension strategies. I purposely chose a group who were underperforming because I want to prove just how effective CSI could be over time with lower ability kids. I ended up with a group of eight which is always on the high side for guided reading, but I wasn’t looking for an easy option here. In summary I can say that all my students (chronological age 10-11) came out with an instructional reading age of 9-10 years. Six of them passed the accuracy or decoding criteria at this level (97%), three passed the Retelling criteria (50%), but none passed the Comprehension from Questions criteria (75%). So despite some obvious variance within the group, I was confident that I had a group of kids at a similar ability level who could work together on comprehension strategy instruction. Coming up … establishing routines!
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Welcome to our Handy Resources Blog

Aren’t Holidays great … no sorry, it’s now called Non Contact Time. Anyway, a chance to take a big breath and give the brain a chance to stop spinning. We hope you find our Handy Resources site a place where you can find answers to your reading programmes; not just a quick fix but something more substantial and long term as well. This is not meant to be just a resource book shop. We want to get you thinking about effective reading instruction. We are very interested in what you have to say so please add your comments about what we are doing and whether it is working for you.