School+-+Cranbourne+West+Primary

This has become a journey I didn't expect - With a full teaching load and co-ordinating my area it has been a busy year. Because of this it was easiest to attempt my coaching as a team and use it to introduce a new group reading program.

There are currently multi-aged areas within the school that work as a group. This allowed us to begin multi-aged reading groups of 3 to 4 students with a range of reading abilities. Teachers have begun these groups by giving all students the same topics to discuss when reading a story such as, find the author’s purpose, or discus the setting by finding the words that describe the setting. Every fortnight the staff set a reading focus for the whole area.

The children could make their own decisions in regards to: Who read, If the youngest brought their reader to read aloud, the more capable read to the younger student, if they read silently or what they read. The non-negotiable factor was the purpose or goal behind what they read, this was decided by the teaching staff.

There were immediate success indicators. First and for most, students began to enjoy reading more. They loved going to reading groups and they whole area became more collegiate – they saw each other as friends regardless of age and teachers started commenting how they would stick up for student in the area in the playground. After one term we noticed some improvement in reading levels and a continued desire from the younger students to continue with reading groups however the older students interest was waning. We collected observation data and reading record data to use as our evidence to supported these findings.

After gathering our evidence the team used a team coaching session to openly talk about their thoughts and the evidence towards the reading program. The result had mixed feelings. Some of the issues were: both too much and too little time spent in reading groups, timetabling, direct teaching time, focus of the sessions, student productivity levels and were we continuing to address the purpose of the sessions. We used this to reflect and find new purpose and strategies for the reading groups. At another team coaching meeting we discussed the continual role and purpose of the reading groups. General consensus was the reading groups had lost the original purpose that being to create powerfully literate students, as the children were becoming more complacent with the reading groups as well as the teachers using this time as preparation for their next class rather than direct teaching time. After much discussion we felt the time was still a valuable tool for student but after reflection we decided to change the groupings of the students with the hope that older children would become more engaged and teachers would bring direct teaching into the reading groups.

__Where we are at now:__

 After much discussion the team decided to move from mixed ability groups to same ability groupings. The purpose of this is to see if the teachers can give student direct instructions and focused goals directly related to the student learning standard. Each student has been given a reading journal. Inside the reading journal is a list of reading learning goals that are in student language but are directly related to VELS standards. These reading goals are used within the groups as learning focuses for the sessions and children can highlight and tick them off when they feel they are confident in that area. The reasoning behind this is to create purpose for the students in the reading groups so that they know what they need to achieve in order to move to the next standard, to make the expectations of learning to read as transparent as possible.Where to next??

