As I am the sole teacher of reading in our team I am constantly thinking about reading-how it's going, what's working/what's not, getting feedback from the students, changing/improving things and also updating. Over the year (last year 2015) I began to form a hunch that things just weren't quite working. And after focusing further with my reading students I started to notice some common things. At the time students were grouped by ability and this caused the problem of student 'knowing' if they were good readers or at the other end of the scale in their eyes bad readers. This then lead to two other problems some students lost confidents in their reading abilities and interest and at the other end of the scale some students thought they were so good at reading they didn't need to try or work hard in this area anymore. Reading was mainly focused on Book club and students weren't up to date with there reading and the quality of their reading roles was a concern.
From these concerns I started thinking about the following things. Did they need to be grouped based on ability? Had I set high enough expectations at the beginning of the year? Could there be more to reading that just book club? How could I build confidence in the students who thought they were bad readers? How could I continue to challenge students who were good readers and encourage them to share their expertise in this area?
After reading John Hattie's ranking of influences on achievement-students being in ability groups is not the most effective way of teaching. Something I have always believed is that mixed ability teaches all students different things. There are different types of discussion, students can lead in different ways, they bring different strengths and weaknesses to the group, everyone has different skills etc. From this I thought with in reason for Book Bash this year I would group students by the books they wanted to read from the reading survey they did and regardless of their reading age mixed ability group the students in Marama.
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