The 2019 reading project: takeoff!

Yesterday at our HOD forum, we looked at the draft proposals for our annual plan objectives and targets, based on the data and discussion presented at our annual plan middle leaders' hui last month.  Reading will definitely be a school objective and target, and we considered the challenge of how to measure reading progress throughout the year.

For me, measuring is irrelevant if we don't unpack our processes with teaching reading.  I've mentioned before (I think....) my frustration with the current state of reading guidance for secondary schools.  Lots of good ideas, lots of links on TKI which are often for primary audiences, but I know something is missing.  It could be that it is missing from my world and I find nirvana just by doing some more research.  Or it could be (more likely), that we need to start by locating ourselves in the student's experience, and building up from there.

So, yesterday afternoon we started with unpacking the PAT reading experience.  In blue below is the task I set up for us to work on in our department meeting time.

Unpacking PAT reading: Tuesday 11 December 2018

We will each work with a photocopied set of the PAT Test Seven booklet (typically used with Year 10 classes).  I will have highlighters and scissors available. We will work through the following questions on paper (so old school!  I’m all about tactile at the moment, and then taking photos to upload for records and next steps).

1. Can you code each question: blue = on the lines; orange = between the lines; green = beyond the lines?
2. What is the essential vocabulary for each question which not all of our students will have?  Make a list.
3. Is it feasible for us to integrate this vocabulary into our teaching?  Ethical?
4. What other skills are needed to decode the answers?  Make a list and link the skill to a specific question(s).  E.g. p3, q1 requires understanding of connotation.
5. What key competencies/dispositions are needed for students to demonstrate their best skills in this test?
6. Next steps/questions for 2019?

We were blown away by the experience. We all thought that the test is very difficult. It is very 'white' and 'middle class' in terms of the texts ("The lore of finchland"?!). The demands of the vocabulary in the text are considerable, and the process of making the inferences required to answer many questions correctly requires three steps and strong visualisation skills. Key next steps for me/us include:

• The first set of questions is really difficult, possibly the most difficult in the test. We need to flag this to our students, and help them develop their resilience to keep concentrating, and not to give up and make random or close to random choices for their answers.

• Provide a paper copy of the test for the students. As with the Unfamiliar text exams for NCEA, students will answer online, but have the ability to underline, highlight, circle and do any other annotation which supports their processing. We noted for the Science text in particular, that the questions were on the lines questions, but they required close reading of the text to isolate the precise step which answers the question. Doing that manually is much easier than only being able to use our eyes to search for a specific piece of information.

• There are some processes tested which are specific to Maths and specific to Science. Using my Literacy Leader hat, I could break these skills down and share the expectations with the relevant departments in my school.

• The level of inference that the test asks for is very high. For example, one question asks the reader to choose the best word to describe the sea. When I went searching for the keyword "sea," it was nowhere in the text. I then looked for words which referred to the water, and found Pukewai Harbour. All good for the student who knows the word harbour, not so much for the student who does not. Then the phrase in the text was "Pukewai harbour was a sheet of bronze." So in order to decide whether the sea was white, choppy, warm, flat or stormy, the student has to identify the reference to a body of water, understand and visualise the metaphor and then evaluate it against four adjectives. That is a 3-4 step process of making inferences, and I think we generally teach two steps of inference.

• Some teachers noted that this seems harder than the Level One Unfamiliar Text paper, and I am inclined to agree. We do really well with our results for Unfamiliar Text at Grey High, and I have wondered before about the relationship (dissonance?) between the closed nature of the norm-referenced reading tests (we used asttle reading before we used PAT reading) and the open nature of the Level Six texts and questions we see a year later. However, PAT Reading tests skills across a much wider area than just English, and interrogating the test from a student's experience has already begun to show us paths for us to be more effective at how we teach critical thinking and close reading.

• We started with PAT reading three years ago, and I think I didn't go near the actual test because it seemed like cheating in some way - that we might be influenced to teach specific vocabulary and that would compromise the test process. This meant that the world of these skills (or the specific PAT manifestation of these skills) stayed quite closed for us. We have spent time (quite a lot of time) analysing the results of the tests, and we have had a valuable session with Cathy Johnson of NZCER looking at how we can make the most of the NZCER data, but that hasn't brought us closer to understanding the student's experience.

• Lauren and I are going to spend some time in January looking at a possible coding system for the different types of reading skills required in this test, and then look developing a skill focus and tracking test for one skill for each term.

Reviewing my 2018 inquiry

My inquiry into using blogging to support the social nature of learning was part of a larger school goal:

How might we improve key competencies for Year 10 in order to experience learning success?

In 2018, I have been conducting my own inquiry into this with my year 10 class (wearing my teacher hat) and leading a professional learning group of six colleagues on this goal (wearing my CoL/Mawhera Kahui Ako within school role hat). Many of the teachers in my PLG also taught my class, so we took advantage of opportunities to collaborate, whether through discussions, observing each other's lessons, or aligning vocabulary and approaches.

Last Monday all of the professional learning groups shared their journeys. Each group had a poster board on which we put summaries for each person for the following headings:

• Improvement Actions (What we did)
• New Learning (What we found out that supported our Inquiry)
• Shifts in thinking / practice (We started thinking x but now we think y...)
• Outcomes for learners (including target students)

Then we all had drinks and nibbles and wandered around reading the poster boards.  The mood was positive and genuinely interested.  Making the spiral of inquiry front and centre to our professional learning at Grey High was our big project as CoL leaders, so it was great to see so much thoughtful and effective work.  Below you can see some GHS staff looking at our poster board.

When I return to my own goal and inquiry process, I am both pleased and wanting to have achieved more. I used a blend of social inclusion strategies and scaffolding of tasks leading to blogging, in order to build a culture of deeper learning and sharing in my classroom.

Outcomes:

• high rates of inclusion in my lessons. Only two referrals in the year, and even for those two students, outside of the week of the referral, lots of evidence of growth in working with me or working with others or both. 
• Student voice (from circle time, restorative meetings, 1:1 interviews) very positive about the supportive environment in English.  
• Growth in students interacting positively with each other.
• Growth in students taking learning risks, both on their own and together.
• The research unit involved students choosing their own topic and sources, learning to evaluate sources, to summarise relevant information and to form conclusions.  I saw many positive effects of the high element of choice, particularly for students who don't love English (or school).
• Progress in students finding a "high school" mode for blogging.  Part of being a teenager is about creating a distance from childhood, and 'selling' blogging has involved creating a distance from primary school blogging.
• I didn't see outcomes reflected in amazing asttle writing scores.  In an environment where students responded best to high levels of choice, these norm-referenced tests were highly restrictive.  Students commented that they found it much easier to write describing the scene on the Greymouth floodwall (one of our practice tasks) than the asttle market prompt.  Of 19 students with beginning and end of year data, 26% made accelerated progress (3+ curriculum sub-levels), 26% made expected progress (2 curriculum sub-levels).  Below this, 21% made one curriculum sub-level of progress, 5% stayed static and 21% went backwards.  
• Even though the work we did as a class this year that I was most pleased with focused on reading skills, they didn't translate to the level of progress I am clear our students need in order to be successful in NCEA.  PAT Reading is a closed test which I don't think draws out the best in our students, but it is the one we have to work with.  Results below:

So, what next?  Two things on top for me that I can change:
1. To set up 2019 with a Friday blogging culture in my junior class, either weekly or fortnightly.  We had some blogging success, but it took quite a while and our frequency wasn't high enough to maximise the culture of sharing.  I need more contexts where the interaction will build deeper understanding.  One on layers of understanding in reading a film could be worth trying.
2. Reading!  Almost a quarter of students going backwards.  Our data across the whole cohort strongly suggests that we need to do more and try new strategies on reading, and think very carefully about our planning for reading opportunities.  Next week in our English department meeting, we are going to take some old paper (we do online testing now) PAT tests and chop them up and organise them according to what skills each question tests, which skills we think we are teaching now, and where there are gaps.  NZCER process a lot of very useful data on the results of the tests, but I want us to start with the student's experience.  Next year is definitely going to be about reading.