Drawing on a range of experienced teachers, the University of South Australia (UniSA) program is providing ITE students with a plethora of tips and pointers that would ordinarily require years of classroom experience to gather.
Developed in conjunction with the SA Department of Education, the authentic and interactive videos show in detail how accomplished teachers engage their students with reading.
From deciphering the meaning of new words, to understanding inferences within a text, the videos reveal how the experts progress through a class book or novel with a group of students, highlighting the strategies for reinforcing learning, checking understanding, and assessing progress.
English and literacy expert Dr Jill Colton tells EducationHQ the new initiative presents an excellent resource for these future teachers to sharpen their expertise.
“Preservice teachers can be quite good at saying, 'I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this and I’m going to do this, and it will engage the children, the children will enjoy it, it will be fun’.
"But we’re saying, 'you actually have to have really strong theoretical rationale for what you’re doing – you have to take it back to knowledge about what it means to read and how people learn to read'.”
Colton says the initiative offers an invaluable training tool.
“When you’re a preservice teacher it can be daunting to apply what you’ve learnt in class to the classroom, so having access to real recordings of practicing teachers working with their students, is extremely valuable.
“The videos are designed to show how a teacher works though a text with a group of children, how they might prompt understanding, deepen knowledge, and respond to student questions.
“They are also enhanced with tips and insights that emphasise and further explain the strategies a teacher may be using, helping pre-service teachers see and reflect on the good practice that is evident in schools.”
The videos, which cater to children in Years 2, 6 and 8, as well as Kindergarten-aged children, are now embedded in UniSA’s ITE programs.
What exactly constitutes ‘good practice’ in reading instruction has been hotly contested for decades, with the so-called ‘reading wars’ dominating the school literacy landscape.
A report from the Grattan Institute titled, The Reading Guarantee: How to give every child the best chance of success, calculates that for those students in school today who are hardest hit by poor reading performance, the cost to Australia is $40 billion over their lifetimes.
The decades of disagreement Colton agrees, have been costly.
“There’s policy around how reading should be taught and then there’s knowledge about good practice that has come from different evidence and research, and unfortunately I think it all got a bit tied up in the ‘reading wars’, which really haven’t helped,” the UniSA academic says.
“Rather than people looking at, ‘what are the best ways to teach reading?’, people have wanted to settle on one way for all, but I think there’s different ways of teaching reading.
“I think sometimes we’re told to do it this way, and this is the best way, and this is the only way, and it may not be the best way in that particular context.”
The resource draws on a range of evidenced-based techniques and methods, and on what has worked well for the featured teachers.
“So it’s not a one-size-fits-all, that’s really important,” Colton says.
“It’s targeted towards specific children and specific year levels. It’s structured and based on really good knowledge around what it means to read.”
Colton says her team was not only keen on showing their students a broader range of ways that teachers teach and assess reading, but also for the new resource to be really interactive and top-notch in terms of production values.
With the aid of new pop-up tech (H5P) and the university’s highly credentialed media team, the result is a highly polished resource.
“So the preservice teachers might be watching the teacher doing what they’re doing, and they can stop and read the pop up, which explains what [they're seeing].
“So that way, they’re seeing the teacher doing something … and we connect the theory with the practice.”
Colton says the feedback from preservice teachers so far has been extremely positive.
They’ve really commented on the fact that it’s not out of a text book, she says.
“They’ve said: ‘We’re actually seeing what real teachers are doing’, and because we also include interviews with the teachers, and they talk about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, the students can see, ‘Oh, all right, is that how you do it?’
“Teaching is such a relational, kind of happening-in-the-moment thing, isn’t it. You plan for it and then you do it with people.
“I think being able to act it out, being able to practice it, being able to see it demonstrated, to me, that’s really important.”
