Strategies

Actions

Identifying the target reading skills to develop in students at KS3

After making reference to the curriculum documents like the Curriculum Guide and the TSA Skills Descriptors, teachers identified the following reading skills they wanted to develop in students at KS3:

-	identifying main ideas
-	identifying details that support a main idea
-	identifying general and specific information
-	skimming and scanning
-	predicting the content using the book cover, picture cues, prior knowledge and personal experience
-	predicting the likely development of the text
-	identifying main ideas
-	working out the meaning of unknown words and expressions
-	using knowledge of features of different text-types and writing conventions
-	using linguistic and contextual clues
-	understanding the use of referencing skills, for example, pronoun referencing
-	making inferences

Doing Curriculum mapping

Next teachers looked into the reading passages to identify a few reading skills to cover in each textbook unit chosen.  It was found that some reading skills like skimming and scanning are likely to repeat themselves in all reading passages and so teachers had to make conscious effort to develop one or two extra ones with the teaching of each new unit.

Another discovery teachers made was that there were some discrepancies between the reading skills identified right at the beginning of the school term and those identified at the time when teachers had to do an intensive study of the unit to work out the teaching plan.

Working out the teaching plan for each chosen unit

Teachers then took turns to write up the teaching plans for the reading lessons.  With six units selected from a total of eight in the two textbooks, each teacher had to be in charge of two units, one for each term. 

They had to write up the teaching objectives based on the  reading skills they had decided to cover in the corresponding units they were responsible for, list out the teaching steps needed to achieve the objectives in the lessons, suggest the possible teaching and learning materials to use, e.g. task sheets, worksheets, Power Point presentations, etc.  

Drafts of the above and their initial ideas would be tabled in the meetings for discussion with the other teachers.  Suggestions were invited and improvements made, followed by sharing of work among them after all the refinements. 

Even though only two out of six units were chosen for lesson study each year, teachers wrote up teaching plans for all units and underwent the above process.  The only difference was when lesson study was done, they had to agree on a time period when the same lesson could be taught by different teachers in sequence to see what problems would arise and how adjustments could be made.    

Doing lesson study to see how the teaching plan is put into classroom implementation

Two periods of time were chosen for each school year with each learning loop spanning over one to two weeks. 

At other times, teachers just taught according to their own schedules and shared their reflections in the co-planning meetings.  With each lesson study, they had to decide the teaching sequence and find a lesson time when one teacher was teaching and the others were free to observe in order to engage in professional exchanges afterwards.  If necessary, they had to rejig their lessons.

Pre- and post-reading tests

Video-clips of classroom teaching

Interviews with teachers involved in the project