Describe and explain the changes/tweaks you have made in your practice along the way...

Motivation is intrinsically related to engagement, so learner engagement was a vital component in establishing a class culture of learners who are motivated to read for enjoyment and understand the benefits that reading outside of the classroom could bring them. Developing this motivation did not happen by magic. This is something Dianne and I have worked hard to develop with one of the most important changes we made to our teaching being to make sure our students saw us as a readers. Chrissy Smith put it best when she said ‘by not reading with our students we are not valuing what we are asking them to do’

If I roll back the clock to the start if the year, I remember walking past the student trays in our class and noticing that the library books I had seen earlier in the week were in exactly the same place. The reason for this was simply that no one said they could take the books they had borrowed home. I knew I needed to do something about this but I didn’t know how.

After a very rich learning conversation with Naomi Rosedale I had a tentative pathway mapped out going forward and was challenged to think about and inquire into and track my learners’ reading dispositions and interests. I didn’t have to start from scratch as I was able to use Naomi's Reading for Enjoyment survey with my class to help me get to know my students as readers.

Our data showed that within our class there was a huge disparity between the students who have made the connections they need to allow them to operate at a higher and more challenging level, and those for whom the gap has widened each year. By strengthening students connections to the benefits of reading for enjoyment, I hoped to see a change in attitude towards reading, strengthened connections to new learning, increased vocabulary awareness which would be transferred to personal writing, higher levels of self efficacy and an overall shift in achievement so that a higher number of our learners are achieving at or above the expected norms in literacy.

Gathering student voice gave us a clear picture of where our students were at, what they were thinking and what we needed to do to allow our learners to make their individual connections to the learning. Naomi's reading for enjoyment survey has allowed me to measure both the small and big changes. The presentation below does exactly that. Each slide contains the comparative data gathered from time point 1 and time point 2. Underneath the graphs I have analysed the shifts in more detail. It is important to note here that although this was a whole class inquiry I have only anaysed the data gathered from the 26 students present at both data collection times. I have gathered data from a cross section of students. The biggest and most noticeable change towards the benefits of reading for enjoyment are the mindsets of our students. 

Link to presentation

We adapted our timetable to incorporate RFE as a valued and visible part of our program and by that I don't mean we just made a time slot for reading. We discussed books, created book chains, created our own student led holiday reading challenge (explained in more detail in this post), introduced the Leaders in the Library initiative (explained in more detail in this post), shared our weekly RFE tips at our school assemblies and invited our whanau to share our journey. Reading for enjoyment needed to be visible so I spent the year capturing and displaying photos of our learners actively reading. The idea behind this was that if we couldn't see ourselves as readers change would not happen. Additionally we made and displayed posters to encourage others to RFE. 

One of the most successful ideas we tried was to put the data we gathered back in the hands of our learners. As a class we analysed the initial RFE survey findings and came up with ideas as to how we could change the deficit we had towards RFE. This was how the LS2 Reading Challenge was born. Our thinking was that if our learners had ownership of the challenge they would have more skin in the game. Following on from this we decided to capture the time spent RFE. This post explains this in more detail. What surprised us as teachers was that simply being transparent with the amount of time spent RFE motivated our most reluctant readers to come in before school and open the cover of a book. 

However not everything we tried worked. When we began this journey as I mentioned earlier, we created our own RFE challenge. This started with a hiss and a roar but Dianne and I quickly realised that our students preferred to read and talk about their books instead of completing follow up challenges. Not wanting disengagement to raise its head we let this idea fall by the wayside. It's not something I wouldn't try to use in the future but was something that didn't work this year.  

Did our focus on Reading for Enjoyment increase student self efficacy and capability in Reading? The qualitative data discussed and analysed in this post indicates that we most definitely increased our student's motivation to read which tells us that barriers have come down because we took the time to make something that was not the norm become the norm. By walking the walk and talking the talk we removed the fear of failure that fuels low self efficacy and showed our learners that RFE opens the doors to a wide variety of learning opportunities.