2018 Term 4 Uru Manuka SLAM

My Inquiry focus has been:

“How might explicit teaching of Critical Literacy accelerate writing progress?”

What did I do? By having multi-level groups, akonga were able to discuss their ideas, without being limited by their decoding ability. (This was helped by speech to text, The Read Write App etc). This meant learners were able to discuss ideas and challenge others thinking, in ways, they're often not able to do when limited by colour wheel text ability.

Key Reference

‘Wide & deep but with a narrow focus’... explained

By Aaron Wilson & Rebecca Jesson from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre

• Why Multiple texts -More reading requires synthesis and comparison
• It provides a scaffold for developing transferable reading knowledge.

A lot of the groundwork was in the reading aspect of literacy, however, due to the synthesis and comparison, they were able to record their discussion ideas in the form of writing.

What’s next? Explicitly teaching critical thinking and critical literacy. The akonga need to be better at differentiating between fact and bias as well as considering the reliability of the source.