Retelling, Relating, Reflecting

Thanks everyone for your honest reflections this afternoon.

It was such a powerful opportunity to learn from and with each other. The continual revisiting of the Retell, Relate and Reflect process enabled us to delve deeper into our own thinking about particular students of concern and our own teaching.

Looking closer at the data sets was an important time to slow down and look across each student's data, and gain insights from other R3 teachers. It's surprising to see how far some students have come in such a short time in some test aspects, but when there is discrepancy across test results it means we have more questions to ask.

As expected when we looked at the videos teachers had already done so much reflecting on their own practice, but it was also helpful to look at these videos through different eyes and focusing in on a particular student who has been causing concern.

I'm so looking forward to our next session and hopefully some more R3 visits in between!

Thoughts from visiting R3 Lessons so far

It has been a real privilege to  come and sit on on your lessons over the last couple of weeks. I have been most impressed by the enthusiasm of the students, as well as the hard work you are putting in. It's also heartening to see how the students are becoming more articulate in what they are noticing about themselves as readers.

I love the way you are organising your spaces and treating them like your own classroom, with anchor charts to support students as they read, and how some of you are making a real focus area for independent reading.

I'm noticing that choice of texts is challenging - finding a just right text for Shared and an appropriate one for Guided Reading as well. Perhaps we can share some that have worked particularly well for you in your group. We need to ensure they are at the right level of challenge but with sufficient supports as well, so if we can support each other with this it would be great.

A blog for us to share how things are going with R3.

As promised I've set this blog up so that we as teachers can all support each other with R3 - sharing any articles (from the Literacy Network magazines) or other resources that seem to be working well for us. I will invite all of us to be authors/administrators and then we can take it from there.

The other blog will still be there for the students to use, but this will be ours. You will be able to post directly from your computers or if you would like we can help you set the iPads up so that by using your photo from the Easy Blogger Jnr app, any posts you make will automatically go directly to this blog.

Hope you are enjoying your holiday break.