In this blog post, I’m going to summarise some of the key changes I’ve made in my teaching practice and explore other factors that have influenced student learning from my inquiry so far this year. It’s been a journey of reflection, observation, and tweaking to find what works best to engage and support my students. I’ll be sharing some of the shifts I’ve noticed, what’s had the biggest impact, and where I’m heading next.
Group Discussions and Question Cards
By adding in this simple task at the beginning of every lesson has made my guided reading sessions more vibrant with a lot more buy in and participation. The students are excited to share and I am not having to pull information out of them. They are also more comfortable with each other and being able to share ideas, it is a safe space where everyone can share their thoughts and ideas.
Inferencing
Building this in as a warm up activity each day for reading has been really beneficial the students are now thinking about what the question is asking them rather than just making up an answer from the first few lines of the text. Building in on using the image prompts too has been a big help as it is making them look at it from a different perspective. One other really cool thing is that we have been using AI generated images for our follow up tasks and the students need to feed the right information otherwise the AI tool will make up what it thinks they are wanting which has made the students really think about what they are writing and how they are describing things.
Response to text tasks
These have been working really well. It has been really clear to see the link between what we have been learning in guided reading and then focused on after reading either independently or as a whole group. By having the create element to this task the students have had the opportunity to explain key pars of the text in a different way that is meaningful to them.
Novel Study and Reading for Enjoyment Time
By having the novel study alongside our reading program this year has allowed students to choose something that they want to read and find enjoyment in reading. I have created my own small library shelf in my room this year which allows the students to pick something new to read and gives variety that they might not have checked out before. By having time each day set aside to silent reading the students are picking texts they like rather than just a random book.
It’s been an exciting journey to see how these changes and approaches have shaped student learning this year. The question cards have boosted student confidence in unpacking a text and I’m keen to build on this even more next year. Picture prompts have encouraged deeper thinking and made students more confident in sharing their inferences, while response-to-text tasks have let them show their understanding in meaningful ways.
Introducing the novel study and reading time has been a game-changer. It’s helped reignite a love for reading, giving students more freedom to explore and discover texts that interest them.
I’m proud of the progress made so far and am looking forward to continuing this journey, building on what’s working and staying open to new ways of supporting our students to grow as readers and thinkers.
