Create in Reading - RPI Day 8

You don’t empower people by just being consumers. Teaching people to read and not write, teaching people to play and not design is the way to make customers and consumers and not producers and creative thinkers”

James Gee, New London Group 

Our session today kicked off with Dorothy (Manaiakalani) sharing why the 'create' part of the learning process is so important for our students. "It engages and empowers."

Dorothy talked about how many people know about "Big-C" creativity where extraordinary people like Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Einstein's groundbreaking theories are considered highly creative but there are also everyday forms of creativity that are crucial to having a well-rounded society. When our students enter the workforce they compete with one another and employers want creative individuals on their team. As teachers, we must support our students to develop their creativity and be innovative about and deliberate in how we plan for these opportunities.

Dorothy also talked about how It's important to recognise the significance of creative thinking in the new age of AI. You can use AI tools to share learning, and these tools can also be used as a conversation starter during a task or a way of visualising what students are thinking about a text. Dorothy mentioned that 15-year-old New Zealanders are recognised as the 5th most creative thinkers in the world, so we must be doing something right!

Kaupapa of Creativity and Empowerment

“That Hook” was the phrase of the day. The message was clear that learners who have the opportunity to create are more likely to be engaged. Through creativity, learners are empowered to combine existing knowledge with original ideas in new imaginative ways. This kind of thinking from the next generations is what our current global climate needs to tackle the numerous problems our planet is facing.

We watched an interesting video by Professor Jonathan Neelands, a Creative Fellow at Warwick University which again highlighted the need to teach and support creativity in our students. He believes that creativity should be a part of every subject, not just the arts, to help students think critically and solve problems. This makes students more adaptable and ready for future challenges. He also talked about the importance of keeping learning fun and engaging by sparking curiosity and imagination.

This made me think that our students also need to learn how to use technology creativity (AI for example) so they can tackle big issues, like our current environmental problems, in a new way.

Thinking about how time-poor we are Naomi shared some great ideas for how to include both short and long opportunities to respond to the text. Think about where the task best fits!

Here are Naomi’s top tips for Routine Opportunities: Short Responses

• Before reading: You might introduce the text by getting learners to sketch the setting described in the opening paragraph, or draw and annotate the meanings of symbols from the book cover.

• During reading: You might stop to get learners to demonstrate (e.g. ‘hopscotch’) during guided reading or pause to improvise an interview with the character from a novel.

• After reading: Make the recipe, dress up as a character, storyboard events, draw an object, or construct 

• We discussed the concept of "tighter" versus "looser" design when creating follow-up tasks.

• "Tighter" design involves using templates like stencils or graphic organisers to provide clear parameters or "guard rails" for the learners to focus their learning.

• "Looser" design, on the other hand, involves open-ended tasks where most of the creative responsibility is placed on the learner.  Noami suggests including a reflection or a written prompt to help students connect their work to the learning objectives.

Choice:

Georgie then talked about how choice can be managed when giving students opportunities for creating: 

Her top tips were:

• Tools: Choice of app, material, style, resource, for example, a Google Drawing or paper/pencil sketch.

• Task: Choice of showing the key events in the story that influenced a change in the main character OR how other characters influenced the main character to change.

• Product: Choice of timeline, poem, collage, storyboard, animation, screencast, painting.

• Outside the Create by working together to contribute to the design or co-authoring and co-constructing.  

• ‘Inside’ the Create by having learners' faces, voices and/or movements are ‘embodied inside’ the Create (e.g. photo, video, screencast, portraits)

Here are a couple of screenshots to remind me of some of the other opportunities I can try to develop creativity during reading sessions.

Another eventful day, full of valuable resources to share with my team, which will surely ignite creativity among my colleagues.

Thinking - Day 7 RPI

“ Students who are competent thinkers and problem-solvers. … reflect on their own learning, draw on personal knowledge and intuitions, ask questions, and challenge the basis of assumptions and perceptions.”   (New Zealand Curriculum p. 12).

Today, Dorothy (Manaiakalani) led a discussion on the framework for 21st-century learning and innovation, emphasising the 4 Cs as essential skills across different learning areas. Critical thinking is especially crucial for our young students in navigating life in the 21st century. With this in mind, we dived into a day all about how to teach our learners to think critically!

Dorothy’s thoughts about our students’ online presence were particularly insightful and valuable. Our learners make choices that put them into vulnerable positions online, so it was great to hear how the critical thinking aspects of Maniakalani’s pedagogy can help students navigate the digital world wisely. Teaching critical thinking in all years is more crucial now than ever before.

My top tip from Dorothy’s today (there are always many) is about trying Adobe Express podcasting to incorporate more text-to-voice technology opportunities for my students. It will continue to develop their oral language skills in a rewindable way.

Higher Order Thinking to Access Deeper Meaning

Next, we dived into different frameworks that help organise our student's thoughts that show a progression from simpler to more complex thinking. Higher-order thinking, which is more complex, requires more brain power and needs to be scaffolded. This is very clear when using Bloom's Taxonomy, something I used a lot in my early teaching career and a framework worth thinking about again when planning meaningful learning activities.

I found it valuable to revisit the progression from literal to higher-order thinking skills. It allowed me to reflect on the distinctions between interpretive and evaluative questions. I sometimes struggle to differentiate between the two and being reminded that evaluative questions often involve an element of interpretation, will help when using these questions in response to text activities.

• At the literal level (‘reading on the lines’) information is stated directly and can be located at one or more places.
• At an interpretive level (‘reading between the lines’) readers have to use their reasoning and critical analysis skills to work out an implied or suggested meaning (not directly stated).
• At the evaluative level (‘reading beyond the lines’) readers are making judgements concerning values, correctness or issues of wider social significance (and relating these to their own contexts and lives). 

One key idea that I noticed was that students need to be able to evaluate as they read so they can understand how they have come to think in a certain way. We should always aim to empower learners to go beyond the surface meanings, and not to take those meanings for granted (or as a given).

Critical Analysis to Read Critically

I enjoyed the sessions on how powerful it can be for our learners to look at a text from different perspectives or positions and to reflect on how well I am doing this in my class. To think like this my learners need to be able to critical analysis to solve the problem by evaluating or making judgments based on the text.  

Provocations, dilemmas, or perspectives can spark higher-order thinking but can be hard to understand. I need to make sure I plan in more opportunities for learners to revisit and talk about the text. This will help students remember and use evidence or vocabulary from the text to back up their views. 

The vocabulary activities I have implemented from previous RIP days are helping shift new vocabulary from being just understood to being actively used. Finding ways to keep encouraging them to talk freely about the text is key. A next step for my teaching practice. 

Lastly, we looked at analysing figurative language and how this helps readers extend their thinking skills through analysis and interpretation of language features. This included looking at different activities for students to respond to a text with an evaluative lens. We have been tasked with creating a few activities for our students to try over the next few weeks and I am looking forward to getting stuck in.