Kia ora bloggers,
This post is number two in a duo of blog posts. If you'd like to read part one you won't have to scroll too far to find it!
Let's get back into Planting Seeds by Susan Sandretto. One small note, these are not the official names of the chapters (I've now returned the library book so can not check), more a summary of what I learnt from them...
Chapter 4 - Making Critical Literacy Visible
Text selection...
The example Susan used was really interesting: the back of a box of pain killers. It was discussed who is excluded from this text. Anyone who is not confident with English is more than likely to struggle with the scientific and technical language. This just goes to show that you can teach critical literacy with almost any text.
Starting with a slightly simpler text was also recommended so that students aren't bogged down with decoding. This goes really well with the idea of scaffold texts that we use in our T-shaped literacy units. Another idea is to use a text that has already been used with students. So that they don't become bored with it, you can explain that this second reading has a different focus.
Role of the teacher...
Critical literacy and quality discussion can only happen when the teacher has set up a caring environment for students where they respect each others' opinions. Teachers should also model having a questioning stance and support students to make connections, both between different texts and between texts and their own lives.
Role of the student...
It was interesting to read about literacy circles, with students having time to read a text, then prepare to take part in a dialogue (which may be written or verbal). It made me reflect on how often I expected students to have an opinion or to take part in a discussion immediately after reading a text and how unrealistic this is an an expectation.
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| Image by Wokandapix @ Pixabay |
Reciprocal teaching was also mentioned at length, something I know a lot of Ako Hiko schools use or are experimenting with. What stood out for me here was how important it is for the teacher to model the roles of predictor, clarifier, questioner and summariser before expecting students to be able to do them independently.
Chapter 5 - Assessment
I learnt that assessment comes from the word assidere which translates as 'to sit beside or with.' This made me realise how much we have deviated from this original definition with so many of our current assessments, with the teacher being a long way from the student's side (literally and metaphorically).
Summative (assessment of learning) and formative assessment (assessment for learning) have obviously been discussed a lot but I loved the analogy used in this book. It said that summative assessment is equivalent to when the customer tastes the soup whereas formative assessment is when the chef tastes the soup. It's pretty obvious to see which is the more useful if the goal is to make the soup taste as good as possible!
It also highlighted the importance of assessment AS learning or in other words students being actively involved in self-assessment.
Chapter 6 - Student Voice and Feedback
Again, the importance of self and peer assessment was highlighted here. This time peer assessment was suggested as a scaffold to allow students to move towards self assessment. Other benefits of peer assessment include:
- Students often use language that is easier to understand
- The teacher is freed up to have other discussions (which reminds me of our 'powerful teaching conversations' High Leverage Practice)
This whole chapter reinforced for me how powerful blogging can be as a way for students to post published work but also to reflect on their growth, skills and progress towards goals.
This term we have a big focus on Smart Relationships which spends a lot of time on Quality Blog Comments. For the first time I started to think of blog commenting with a critical literacy lens. I'm not sure how or where to work this into lessons but I'm interested to explore ideas around:
- How am I making the blogger feel with this comment? Am I making them feel like they are an expert? Or that they are deficient?
- How will they consume this feedback?
I'm now rethinking how I get feedback from students on my sessions. In the past I've got some classes to fill in a Google Form. This was a bit time consuming and ate into the already busy sessions. I also realised (after reading this chapter) that I was excluding some people's voices from this feedback. For example, it was typically the more fluent and settled classes that got round to filling in the feedback. This probably gave a skewed view of how successful the lessons were. The voice of those students in classes who didn't get round to finishing the lesson was probably more valuable but was missing.
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| Image by Gerd Altmann @ Pixabay |
Moving forward I might experiment with ending sessions with questions like:
- What did you learn about _____?
- What did your teacher do to help you learn
about ______ today?
- If you were the teacher, how would you teach ______?
Chapter 7
My notes on this chapter were brief but pretty important I think:
"It doesn't count as critical literacy unless there is social action."
The book suggested a continuum which might be useful as Ako Hiko schools develop on their T-shaped literacy journey.
1. Shift thinking about texts
2. Reconstruction of texts (writing our own)
3. Localised action (the example in the book was a group of students choosing to stop using the word gay in a negative context)
4. Global action
This continuum really resonated with me as someone who is passionate about the environment and does a fair bit locally. It was also a timely reminder at the end of the book that learning all of this content and reflecting on these ideas from a text is great, but it's pointless unless you act on it. This reminds me of a quote I heard this week....
"Knowledge without action is like a bird without wings."
So what next? (not a chapter anymore - just my thoughts)
Something I'll do straight away:
In my sessions on quality blog comments I'll make sure there is discussion on thinking about how people will consume our feedback. How will it make them feel?
Something I'll do soon:
Our Ako Hiko ambassadors are already creating podcasts. I'm now wondering if these could be used as shared books/texts in classes.
Could critical literacy be used as the focus for shared books for one day of the week? e.g. Monday = new vocabulary, Tue = punctuation, Wed = critical literacy?
A slow burner:
After reading Planting Seeds I feel like I'm in a far stronger position to support teachers or schools who want to dig deeper into critical literacy. I also feel more confident to offer PLG workshops or toolkits on critical literacy using many of the ideas I've discussed here.
Thank you for reading this far. I'd love to hear where you, your class or your school are at on their critical literacy journey. What have you tried? What's worked? What are your challenges? Let me know in the comments...
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