Professional Readings

Pasifika students: teachers and parents voice their perceptions of what provides supports and barriers to Pacifika students' achievement in literacy and learning. 

Jo Fletcher, Faye Parkhill, Amosa Fa'afoi, Leali'ie'e Tufulasi Taleni, Bridget O'Regan

My main take-aways from this paper were around valuing the diversity in our Pasifika students backgrounds. The authors made a number of points about Pacifika students in terms of engagement and students not wanting to risk being wrong in front of their friends. Pasifica students are usually good decoders but have poor comprehension. This is all played out in my classroom where one of the first teaching points is getting everyone to contribute to learning conversations, and making sure students are comfortable doing this. A next step for my room will be trying to source texts that students can connect to. 

Raising reading achievement in an 'at risk' low socioeconomic, multicultural intermediate school.

Jo Fletcher, Michael Grimley, Janika Greenwood and Faye Parkhill

This paper underlined the 'external' school organisation factors that need to be in place for reading achievement to take place. 
My take-away was around the explicit teaching of reading skills and collaboration with peers to help develop new understandings. That repeated interactions between reader and text, between teacher and reader and between readers themselves is needed. Where they debate and interpret the intended meaning of text to enhance their comprehension. Teachers need to give students the opportunity to clarify their new understandings. As a next step I am going to look into structuring teaching sessions to provide students texts that include a character choice, and to have discussions about this. It will tie into the evaluative focus with my target students.





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