Creativity, 'Learn Create Share', and reading

Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini 

My success is not my own, but from many others

I don't think this is the first time I've made reference to this whakataukī on my blog, and today was another great example of why it is so apt. Today 191 teachers and support staff from across our Uru Mānuka cluster came together to upskill and make progress on the very tough nut of improving student reading. Improving the educational outcomes for our learners, and so improving their lives, is a collective endeavour. It represents the greatest opportunity to have a positive impact on a whole community, and as I have written before, there is very little in the way of answers that we don't have somewhere within our community, within our collective kete of strategies that cause learning.

However today we took a firm grasp of the issue of reading, and spent the day with reading expert Sheena Cameron and her colleague Louise, working together to upskill on how we can do this better. As Einstein is reputed to have said "insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result" (or something like that anyway). Our actions today (and increasingly consistently over the past decade) across Uru Mānuka, show the lie that was the neo liberal right wing reforms to education that tried to tell us that the market would give the best results. Markets work best (if they work at all) on the basis that each one of us is out for ourselves, and be damned to everyone else.

It is just possible (isn't it?) that one of the results of that approach has lead to the observation of Stuart McNaughton (Prime Minister's Education Adviser) in his 2020 paper "The literacy landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand, What we know, what needs fixing and what we should prioritise" that there is no consistent approach to teaching reading in Aotearoa. We are seeing the consequence of that in declining literacy standards across the country.

So where are we at across the Uru Mānuka kāhui ako? We have made great progress on writing. Our students are on average accelerating writing progress at twice national averages. Reading however is accelerating at something less so, so now it's time...  time to focus on reading. This focus began last year, and our teacher only day this year (postponed from March 2021 because of Covid) is a large building block in this work, expanding staff capability to improve reading. It is bigger even than that though, because it offers learners coherence and consistency as they progress on their learning journey through their years at school as the educators use a common or shared language in their work.

At Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka Hornby High School our own focus on writing has been pretty intensive, both at the junior level, and at the senior academic level. This is because we have the belief that great readers don't make great writers, you have to write to learn how to write. However similarly you have to read to improve your reading. 

Several specific reading strategies stood out for me. The first was the development of the skill of inference, the relationship between the author and the reader, the ability of the reader to read into the author's words the connections and meanings that the author intended.

This took me back to my own learning around creative writing (I do a bit of that as a past time, after completing a Massey Uni paper in 2010), where the basic approach is best described as “Show don’t tell” For example, don't tell me 'the sun rose'. Tell me that the 'growing daybreak bathed the landscape in a warm orange light that brought the bare branches of the trees to life'.

You can't write that sort of thing (I think) until you have learned the skill of inference, and that skill is what makes the relationship between the author and the reader so special. There is a cross over between the two. So teaching students the skill of inference might be expected to help them to write more creatively too?

Of quite obvious relevance to our Manaiakalani kaupapa is the reading strategy of activating prior knowledge. This caught my attention as well given the importance of cultural knowledge and the cultural lens that the child brings to the text. Valuing each child's culturl world view is essential to supporting them to make sense of any text. 

The biggest 'aha' moment for me was the discussion of the reading skill of synthesising. 

"Synthesising is when the student merges new information with prior knowledge to form a new idea, perspective, or opinion or to generate insight. Synthesis is an ongoing process. As new knowledge is acquired, it is synthesised with prior knowledge to generate new ideas

Synthesizing is the most complex of the reading strategies. It lies on a continuum of evolving thinking. Synthesizing runs the gamut from taking stock of meaning during reading to achieving new insight.” Stephanie Harvey and Ann Goudvis 'Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding', Stenhouse, Portland, ME, 2000. .. 

The first paragraph could easily be a restatement of our own definition of 'Create' from our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy. It emphasises the importance of creativity for our learners. Every act of connection is an act of creativity, every time learners create meaning for themselves this is an act of creativity, every time our learners add new knowledge to what they already know this is an act of creativity.

The universality of our pedagogy, and the strength of our moral imperative to improve outcomes for our learners, are drivers so strong that we see teachers every day giving their best, and running at 110% in terms of their energy and their input. You can't do that forever, but you can sustain that for a period of time. It is a testimony to the 190+ educators across our kāhui ako (and across the motu, I reckon) that they do this day in and day out, often in the face of significant headwinds of deprivation, and (increasingly) of helicopter parenting.

The challenge for our staff now is to develop a hunch about what to do next to develop literacy skills, regardless of their curriculum area and specialisation, to think about something that might make a difference, try it, and see what the resulting data says. We are all teachers of literacy.

In the meantime, this is what collaboration looks like. This is the power of clustering schools together. This is what 'system change' looks like, at least for our Uru Mānuka community. It is a privilege to be a part of this group of professionals supporting our great community.