Tactical Reading
June 2nd, 2016
HaSS teacher Juanita Stafford recently attended a three day Professional Development Program, Tactical Teaching: Reading.
The three Tactical Teaching: Reading workshops provide a practical, hands on, whole school approach to improving literacy in the classroom. Strategies are easily implemented across all learning areas, enabling teachers to take ideas straight back to their classrooms and successfully support students in dealing with the literacy demands in their subject. It allows teachers to have a common language when discussing the reading needs of our students.
The three processes of the program are:
- How to Help Students Use Reading Processes which explores teaching procedures and activities that support students in making sense before, during and after Strategies are designed to activate background knowledge and create a purpose for reading, clarify vocabulary and help to monitor understanding.
- How to Make Reading Strategies Visiblewhich identifies what it is that proficient readers do when confronted by challenging texts. Research highlights that readers benefit greatly from explicit teaching of reading strategies, including adjusting the reading rate, re-reading, connecting and self-questioning. This workshop provides teachers with a range of activities to make students aware of the strategies good readers use and how to implement them with their own reading.
- How to Build Text Form Knowledge which helps students to comprehend what they are reading through teaching them specifically about the structure, language features, organisation and purpose of specific text types that they are faced with in the classroom.
Since returning, Juanita has led the first of several Tactical Teaching: Reading workshops, training 18 staff members in how to help students use these processes. This will be an ongoing program to skill staff in all aspects of the program as part of a whole school approach to improving literacy across the school.
