Professional Development

My students working on creative writing

The Canadian team that is visiting provides professional development for the teachers and their focus has been literacy development for the past 6 years.  The national curriculum, which is almost exclusively what is taught at Rwentutu, does not have much space for literacy development as we know it in the U.S..  Within their English curriculum most of the content is focused toward vocabulary and grammar.   Focused reading and authentic writing experiences are almost non-existent.  This is something I noticed once joining P2.  At Rwentutu they have been working to create a space for real literacy development but it is still a work in progress.  In my P2 classroom I worked with Ziporah to make Library time more meaningful by working with students to select good fit books, practicing different types of reading out loud and creating time for creative writing.  

One of the Canadians big projects a few years ago was sticker journals.  These were journals that started with a sticker selected by the teacher which the student then created a story around.  This activity is paired with the prompt “If we stepped into your story what would we…. smell, hear, see, hear fell, touch, think, taste, ect." My P2 students are very familiar with this format and enjoy the opportunity to write creatively.  The prompt pushes students to be more descriptive in their writing. My students familiarity with this type of journal was evident when I did some creative writing with them when I gave them no prompt. Some students really wanted that sticker to jump start an idea where as others were excited to be able to write whatever they wanted.

This year the Candaians are focusing on reading, which I think is very important.  My friend Jenna who is also student teaching at Rwentutu did a lesson on reading were we were observed and our supervisor asked her “What is the point of letting them read books?”  This was not an academic exercise or challenge for her to defend her practice, this was an honest question and reaction to her lesson in which students spent the hour reading individually. 

At our professional development day the main focus was on reading comprehension.  The Rwentutu teachers were split into two groups based on what class they teach.  The Pamela, Zipora and I  worked with the P1, Top, middle and baby class working on building comprehension using images.    We focused almost exclusively on the concept of reading the pictures of a book, and practicing this skill with our students, then reading the text.   The teachers main role in this is picking an appropriate text and questioning students to push their engagement and increase their reading comprehension.

On Monday Pamela started this with our class.  I was very excited about it because our P2 classroom has a diverse group of readers with a few reading at grade level and almost all reading below grade level.   I have done a few read alouds with P2 however I noticed that my students with lower English abilities usually zone out during these readalouds.  I saw this picture reading strategy as a way to engage all of our students no matter what the English language ability is.  Pamela started by having students look at the cover and asked “What do you think this story will be about?”  Hands shot into the air and almost all students had ideas they wanted to share.  After watching Pamela do the picture reading I noticed that my students who are usually zoning out during read aloud were much more engaged, however when it came time to read the text as a group those same students where doing other things than following along with the text.  Over all I am very excited about how this strategy will help my students make meaning from the texts and also increase their ability to use images to check their understanding of the text.

The older classrooms, P3 and up, focused on reading comprehension strategies with chapter books.  They started by selecting good fit books, books with less than 5 difficult words on a page.  Next they looked at the cover and back cover and made predictions about what the text would be about.  Then they read for 10 minutes. After that 10 minutes they sketched an image detailing what they had read about.  Then they read for another 10 minutes, and sketched an image detailing what the new reading was about.  They ended their reading time with a summary written from the main characters perspective.

One thing I really liked about both PD sessions is that they all focused on images, which built off of the PD they have done in previous years with picture journals.  Have students study images in the lower grades is accessible to all learners no matter their English level.  Additionally asking students to draw images of what they are reading about allows us to check in with what they are understanding from their reading without adding another level of complexity by making them write about what they are reading. 

Note:  One thing that I am still struggling with and have been since I started working on reading comprehension and focusing on images in texts that may not make much sense to  my students.  The texts and images that our library is filled with are texts produced and published in the U.S. or Canada.  A lot of the images and stories don’t make a lot of sense within my students' lives.  This is something that I haven’t yet figured out how to navigate.  When I get home I will be researching more Ugandan published picture books.  I think it would be very cool for our teachers and students to publish their own stories and share them in the library.  Unfortunately wear and tear would probably destroy these texts faster than they could be produced, but this would be a very cool possibility.