RPI 7 - Thinking

 Before we even started today we went through some of the tasks we had completed from Day 6, I found some interesting ideas I want to use. Thank you, Rochelle.

I am proud of my Magpie Wall - I love to colour code things, which I did with my word wall. We are currently reading The Maze Runner it has made-up words Neologisms (dark green), and words that can be used in other stories and books (cream) and we are looking at STEAM which has different words, mostly technological or technical terms. 

I also found it sad to realise we are coming to the end of RPI, (well, 2 more sessions) It doesn't feel that long ago we embarked on this journey. I thought oh far out I have 8 more days like this and now it feels like it will be over all too soon.  It would be great to have the opportunity to get together next year and see how we are going, what is working and what we need help with...

Connecting with Dorothy - Smart Thinking for Smart Learners

We must teach students to make decisions while reading so they can analyse and evaluate what they read. Here are a couple of ways we can do this...

Students need to be critical thinkers in the digital world as AI becomes used more and deep fakes harder to spot. We can also do this with the Cybersmart Programme through Manaiakalani - Smart Learner and Smart Media, teaching lifelong skills and habits. Such as, How to evaluate what images they see or what they read or listen to, checking reliability and the purpose of what they find online.

A few resources Dorothy eluded ways to include hoax websites and news, helping kids understand disinformation and misinformation.

The other useful tool Dorothy talked about was the Adobe Express tool for podcast recording and how it is editable through the transcript. - Even better, you can create a class to see how students progress with their tasks.

Higher Order Thinking

It was mentioned how we always tell students to show not tell in their writing so the reader can engage their brains as they read, and try and solve the mystery of what is happening before it happens.

We must teach evaluative and interpretive questions and how to answer them to empower students.

Evaluative Questions ask students to make a judgement, (e.g. which is better or worse) and justify their reasoning. 

Interpretative Questions require students to use what they know and information from the text to explain why they have a different interpretation than their peers.

Analysing Text

There are many ways to analyse text. Three common ones used in school are...

I have used all three throughout my teaching and know they all have their benefits. I love the hats as you can use hats as reminders on student laps and it was the first one I ever got my head around.

Most recently (the last 10 years) I have been using SOLO, and as I was reminded recently it is what High Schools use and we want our Year 7 & 8 Students prepared for success.

Bloom's Taxonomy is useful when I need words for Learning Intentions, and Success Criteria and need a Verb to describe precisely what I want students to do. It was wonderful to see Bloom's has a new layer of Creating. This video is useful to understand the different aspects of Bloom's Taxonomy.

Kiri also talked about how we can zoom in to focus at the word level and zoom out for evidence of the big idea the text is sharing.

Figurative Language

We can zoom in and out on Figurative Language helping to develop meaning. It is vital to teach students what similes, metaphors, hyperbole, and anthropomorphism are (along with other figurative language). We don't want students to go around pulling someone's leg just because they heard a teacher say why don't you 'pull the other one'.

Critical Analysis - Perspectives

Perspectives - interpreting perspectives, needs a provocation - can’t be one that everyone agrees with - or you can play devil's advocate. These are great for extended discussion. If a shared text you can share the provocation and students can discuss in table groups and report back.

Again we need to teach students how to disagree with each other. We are challenging the idea, not the person. Dialogic - let's weigh up the options is a better term than persuasive - bullies are persuasive!

Critical Analysis - Positioning

This looks at agendas, political, and social constraints or constructs, religious views, race or gender bias ...

Language is not neutral. When reading we can see what bias the author might bring, as readers we also bring own ideas. This is where text sets can help bring in different ideas and perspectives.

Teaching Synthesis - Skill Builder

Synthesising - We first started talking bout this when T-Shaped Literacy came out, with these Resource Room Activities- which include a video on screencast on modelling analysis by a student

Where to Next?

• Using Adobe to record practise presentations before students do the final presentation
• Encouraging students to go to the next level with their presentations to include synthesis and analysis.