PaCT Reading and Writing Frameworks and Illustrations.
PaCT Symposium Tuesday September 29, 2015.
Melanie Winthrop
Slide 2
So how do the reading and writing frameworks prompt teachers to notice what
students know and can do as they use their reading and writing to support their
learning in different areas of the curriculum?
To fully explore this question we need to back to the development and intent of
the National Standards, 2009. The standards document states that the reading
and writing standards “address the complexity and challenge of the texts and tasks
that students need to engage with in order to meet the demands of the NZC.
Students read and write texts as they develop the key competences across the 8
learning areas of the curriculum”.
Slide 3
However, and this is the important bit, “Students need to do more than read and
write: they need to be able to use their reading and writing as interactive tools to
meet specific purposes across the curriculum. This means that students read and
write texts in ways that help them organise their thinking, construct and create
meaning, communicate information and ideas in print and electronic texts, and
reveal their developing knowledge of content across the curriculum. As their
expertise develops, students use their reading and writing to become more
reflective about their learning”.
The use of reading and writing is inherent in much of the learning that students
engage with across the curriculum and it’s pretty important that students
develop expertise in the reading and writing required in all the different
curriculum areas.
When we began the development of the PaCT reading and writing frameworks,
we first had to tease out or extrapolate what ‘reading, responding and thinking
critically’ looks like and also ‘using writing to think about, record and
communicate experiences, ideas and information to meet specific learning
purposes across the curriculum’.
These are pretty broad statements, and even broader is the idea of matching
reading and writing expertise to curriculum levels, (no wonder consistency was
an issue as teachers tried to make sense of all this when they began to make
OTJs). So we drilled down into all the reading and writing that takes place on a
day to day basis in ordinary NZ classrooms across years 1-8 to get a sense of all
the ways in which reading and writing are involved in all learning contexts.
Slide 4
So, seven aspects in both reading and writing were developed. In reading, the
first 4 aspects all relate to the processes for making meaning of text, including
processes for decoding, using knowledge of text features and structures,
developing and using vocabulary knowledge, and for thinking critically. All these
PaCT Reading and Writing Frameworks and Illustrations.
PaCT Symposium Tuesday September 29, 2015.
Melanie Winthrop
processes are interrelated and integral when reading for a purpose. By that I
mean, we don’t read to develop our vocabulary, or to practice our knowledge of
text structures etc. We read for real purposes, like reading to acquire
information and ideas, or for literary purposes. And to do this all of these four
processes are used, in one way or another, although some may have more
prominence, depending on the learning purpose or the type of the text.
Of course the same applies for writing. We need to be able to get the words
down on the page, with the letters, and words, in the correct order, using the
correct punctuation symbols to indicate where ideas begin and end, getting the
ideas in the right order within an appropriate structure, using appropriate
vocabulary, and so on. And we generally have clear purposes: to communicate
ideas and information, to write for literary purposes, and to persuade others of a
particular point of view or idea.
But that leaves two important aspects: ‘Reading to organise ideas and
information for learning’, and ‘Using writing to think and organise information
for learning.
Slide 5
When we thought about the sorts of reading and writing we do in our daily lives
we realised that reading and writing are continually used as tools to find
information, and to organise, think about and record information and ideas.
During the development of the PaCT frameworks, we kept coming back to these
two aspects that address an important slice of what it means to use reading and
writing as tools.
However, they were also the most problematic aspects in the piloting and
trialling processes. Teachers at first had no idea what these aspects were about.
Their reactions varied from: ‘I’ve never done this’, to, ‘what does it mean?’ to, ‘Oh
yes my kids could do that easily.’
When we explained the purpose of the aspects, they all realised that both were a
‘taken for granted’ part of their programmes’. What they generally hadn’t done
was to put any importance on students’ developing understanding and control
over these knowledge and skills - across year levels.
What they usually meant when they said their kids could easily do the tasks was
that their students could fill out the templates and graphic organisers, or answer
the questions, when they, the teacher, had done all the thinking for them about
the best ways of organising and categorising questions, ideas, information etc.
Slide 6
To skip ahead slightly, in the past two years, I have been part of another team
building on the PaCT framework for years 9 and 10. When gathering material for
each of the aspects, in science, Social Sciences and English, we found that
PaCT Reading and Writing Frameworks and Illustrations.
PaCT Symposium Tuesday September 29, 2015.
Melanie Winthrop
generally teachers provided quite basic frameworks and processes for students
to use to organise their ideas and information. In fact, we found that often, these
were less sophisticated than the ones we found students using in Year 8.
(although nearly all these were entirely teacher generated).
One of our theories around this was that because of the increasing complexity of
ideas and concepts, the content teachers, who to be fair are expected to be
teachers of literacy but generally have little training in this, need their students
to access and use specific ideas and information for their curriculum specific
learning, so they make the literacy challenges as easy as possible.
Going back to the expectations in the standards, it is stated that from year 5
onwards, students will ‘develop control and independence in selecting reading
and writing processes and strategies’, and by the end of year 8, ‘choosing the
most appropriate processes and strategies for reading and writing in different
learning areas’.
We teach students a range of strategies to make sense of text, to identify specific
features, to integrate and synthesise information. But discerning the most
relevant or important information in relation to a purpose or question, refining
and ordering questions, organising and categorising content and ideas in
appropriate ways to retrieve and use later, are important aspects of being a
competent reader and writer, and they need to be given value as such.
The use of writing to clarify an idea or a concept, either as running text, or in
diagrams, or to reflect on learning, are important skills for reinforcing learning.
But how are they taught? Are they modelled? Discussed? Do we value this
learning, or are we just focused on the bigger learning purpose? And do they
form part of the picture of our students’ writing expertise when making
judgements about the standards?
I want to take a slightly different tack as we consider the role of reading and
writing in learning across the curriculum.
As we have seen, the standards describe that students need to flexibly and
independently use the most appropriate processes and strategies to meet a
curriculum purpose. As students move through primary/intermediate into
secondary school the tasks and texts become more specialised to particular
curriculum areas.
This means that by the time they get to year 9/10 they need a good handle on
what it means to read and write like a scientist, or a historian, etc, to read and
write literary texts etc, in other words – disciplinary literacy. As the texts and
tasks become more specialised, and more complex, so do the associated literacy
skills and knowledge.
I think this diagram, used by Aaron Wilson at UoA in his research into “Literacy
and Language Pedagogy in Years 7-11” , demonstrates this really well.
PaCT Reading and Writing Frameworks and Illustrations.
PaCT Symposium Tuesday September 29, 2015.
Melanie Winthrop
Slide 7
The basic skills students develop as they learn to create and make meaning of
text, all help to build a strong literacy foundation. These basic skills are not
exclusive to the first four aspects in reading and the first three writing, but these
aspects do have a strong focus on their developing use. Although these aspects
separate out the basic ‘meaning making and creating’ skills and knowledge, they
are of course interrelated and none stands alone.
The intermediate literacy skills are not exclusive to, but contain a strong focus
on, the increasing development and refinement of the literacy foundational skills
to meet wider learning purposes. They include gaining control over a wide
variety of reading strategies for understanding, interpreting and using texts, and
the appropriate vocabulary, structures and language features required by
different purposes for writing.
The disciplinary literacy skills relate to the specialisation of their reading and
writing skills and knowledge in particular learning areas for particular purposes.
I think this gives us a strong clue about the literacy skills and knowledge our
year 7/8 students need to be know and be able to do. However, a word of
caution here: you are probably not going to expect students to have gained
complete control over specialised literacy in the learning areas by years 7/8 but
they certainly need to be on the way.
The two aspects: “Reading to organise…” and “Using writing to think and
organise ….” are crucial aspects for supporting the bigger purposes of reading
and writing. Scaffolding needs to be carefully provided with the aim of
supporting students’ independent control over the use of these skills and
strategies.
Lets take a look at some of the examples to understand the thinking
underpinning these aspects:
Slides 8 -12
Examples
Slide 13
Activity
Slide 14
At first we thought that there would be six aspects in each of reading and writing,
and that there would be one crossover aspect ‘using reading and writing to think
and organise for learning’ or something similar. Actually all the aspects have
gone through numerous labels, but that is another story.
PaCT Reading and Writing Frameworks and Illustrations.
PaCT Symposium Tuesday September 29, 2015.
Melanie Winthrop
We thought we would combine reading and writing annotations for a single
student response, in both these aspects. For example, ‘Tuatara’ is an example
where the reading and writing organisational processes are closely entwined.
It’s hard to see where one begins and finishes. The annotations for the student
response in each of the reading and writing aspects are almost identical.
However, this was not to be. In the trialling, teachers got totally confused and
the placements of the illustrations were all over the place. When we separated
them out and trialled again, the results were more consistent. And of course, the
teachers were right – although there are some tasks where reading and writing
are interrelated, there are also many occasions where they aren’t linked, where
for instance they just use their writing to clarify a concept or idea, or follow a
sequence or pattern, especially in maths or science, or to reflect on their
learning.
Slide 15
Activity
Slide 16
Given that most of the examples we have looked at today contain various levels
of teacher scaffolding, think about how a teacher can provide the scaffolding
necessary for supporting their students’ learning, and at the same time, build
independence, so that by the time they leave year 8, they have control over both
these important aspects. Think about how you can slowly pull away the
scaffolding so that students can select and use, pretty much independently, the
processes and strategies for devising and refining questions, locating and
organising information, categorising and retrieving information, and so on. In
this way they will be well equipped to further develop the more specialised
literacy skills they need as they enter secondary school.