Reading in roles - Collaborative reading task (with free resources!)

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Reading can often become a very isolated activity in the schools. Regular classroom reading sessions are great for getting kids in the habit of reading, but children are social creatures and too often, such sessions involve sitting in silence with a book the child may or may not find interesting. Not many skills being developed there!

Reading at GCSE level and beyond requires a range of skills. Students have to read for meaning (hidden or otherwise) and form opinions. They will have to question a text, summarise it, clarify it to themselves and the examiner, and even make predictions about what the text implies will happen next.

You don't have to wait until the students are studying GCSE English to teach these skills... you can start as early as primary school!

Ever heard of the reciprocal reading roles? 
If you're a subscriber to our magazine, you'll be familiar with this reading task as it's often featured in the free cross curricular project plan published with each issue.

The purpose of this activity is to encourage active thinking and reading through close examination of a text. This can be fiction, non-fiction, a short story, an extract from a novel, a historical account - anything you like!

This activity can be used by primary teachers in Years 3-6, and also in secondary schools, in years 7-9.

Here's how it works:

1. Split your class into groups of four (five, if absolutely necessary, but four is preferable).

2. Assign each student with the group a reading role. The roles are:

• SUMMARISER – Think beyond what actually happens in the text. Identify the three most important events/details. Why are they important? Are they connected in any way?
• QUESTIONER – Pose at least three questions which look at the text in depth. Try to ask open, challenging questions. Address confusions that will encourage thought and provoke discussion. 
• CLARIFIER – Make a note of any words or phrases that will need to be checked. Are there any ideas or issues that need to be clarified to make the reading clear and easy to understand? To help to clarify, can you think of any ways that this section links with other sections and what you already know? 
• PREDICTOR – Identify at least three text-related predictions, based on how your response to the text is developing. This will help your group to articulate what will happen next.

If there is a fifth group member, he or she becomes the group director, ensuring all the roles are undertaken conscientiously in the group.

3. Hand out the reading roles cards (these can be downloaded from our website here). These explain what each role entails in more detail. They will need to be cut out, beforehand if more convenient, and folded so they stand like place names. The tabs on the outer edges can be folded inwards to increase stability.

4. Each group member reads through the text from their assigned perspective. They work independently, taking responsibility for their own role, but in a collaborative way, discussing their findings with the group and making links between each role.

5. Students record their findings by contributing to the group record sheet (download this here). This grid can be photocopied at the end and distributed to each member for a permanent record.

You can download an alternative collection sheet here. This splits the main aspects of the text down into sections (i.e. key people, actions, locations, links). Students can then categorise their summary/clarifications/questions/prediction according to each area.

You many need to spend some time beforehand explaining the reciprocal reading roles to your students, but it won't be long before they've gotten the hang of it! This activity can be used over and over again, as students take on different roles and develop a wide range of reading skills, ready for use later on in their schooling.

This activity was designed by Jane Jones. Jane creates the cross curricular projects included for free with each issue of Creative Teaching and Learning magazine. You can subscribe to the magazine here.

Interested in our cross curricular projects?

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Projects available for purchase include:

• The Princes in the Tower - A historical investigation

• Investigating local history

• Mysteries of the Middle Ages

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• The Titanic
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A treasure hunt for the digital age

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A QR code

Creative teaching need not be about play-dough and paint, but can simply be taking advantage of the learning opportunities that technology can offer - even relatively simple ones.

In this post, we share an exciting series of lessons based around the idea of a treasure hunt using student-generated QR codes. The lessons make use of Solo Taxonomy and were designed and first implemented by Rachel Jones, a teacher and blogger with a penchant for all things creative.

Engaging older learners

Rachel is an A Level sociology teacher, so she works with older students - often those who found school difficult and are hoping for a fresh start at Sixth Form.

Aside from the play-dough and paint (which she does use - along with ball pits, parachutes and 3D essay plans!), Rachel likes to indulge her geekier side. She designed this QR code treasure hunt to self/peer teach Feminist approaches to inequality, and replaced lesson plans that, the previous year, Rachel reveals, had included a 34 slide powerpoint.

The following outline was featured as part of a longer article for our magazine. You can purchase the full article here. It also featured as part of a post from Rachel's own blog, 'Create, Innovate, Explore'. You can view her original blog post (which features loads more exciting ideas for all kinds of treasure hunts) here.

Lesson one 

One student's 'treasure map'
(Image: createinnovateexplore.com)

Students were divided into small groups of two or three and given an area of Feminist enquiry into inequality to become experts in – for example Hakim, the pensions gap, and so on. Rachel gave them an hour and a half to research the topic and then create a 'treasure map' (a Solo style station) with QR codes that would enable other students to research and become experts in that area. 

"The classroom was soon filled with learners utilising their own devices to research and then create resources for the use of other groups," she says. 

By the end of the lesson, all the groups had produced QR codes (Rachel recommends www.qrcode.kaywa.com for generating the codes) that linked to relevant web-based or student-generated content. 

They had achieved the unistructural phase of learning. 

Lesson two 

The students arrived with a QR scanner already downloaded onto their devices. They then worked round the room using the QR stations to complete a grid that covered the content of the specification.

Rachel was amazed at the quality of the content that the QR codes led to. She says: "Students had not only linked them to web content, but had also created podcasts, infographics, and even a twitter account (for a dead Marxist Feminist) to assist their classmates in their learning.

"The beep noises the phones make when they scan the codes made my classroom sound like Tesco checkout, but the students were totally engrossed working round the various stations to ensure that they completed the grid."

"There was a surprising amount of peer support and sharing of information," she adds. "All students completed the grid, which was a demanding amount of material."

This was the multistructural phase of their learning.

Image: createinnovateexplore.com

Lesson three
According to Rachel, "this was the day the sun first came out and so we decided to decamp outside." Before doing this however, she gave each group  a giant hexagon and told them to summarise their initial unistructural learning onto it. The students then took the hexagons outside and spent time as a whole class moving the hexagons around to create evaluative links between the theorists.

"This was more complicated than it sounds, and took some negotiation between the different opinions and evaluations of individual learners," Rachel says.

This negotiation, and the evaluative skills that it required to reach a collaborative conclusion, made up the relational and extended abstract phase of the learning. 

"It encouraged the learners to think beyond the information presented and utilise learning from other modules and even areas outside the formal learning of the course," Rachel explains.

Try it yourself!

This type of treasure hunt can only be successful if all your learners have access to the technology to create and undertake it. You can run into problems if they are sharing phones or devices, so you need to ensure that you plan effectively around this issue. 

However, Rachel concludes: "Because the students knew other learners would need their information to complete the task, they were invested in the quality of their output which resulted in some amazing finished pieces and an enjoyable learning experience for my class."

Visit Rachel's blog for more exciting ideas and resources for creative teaching. 

Snapshots, Twitter and tiny people

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Photography teacher Jane Hewitt inspires her student to look at the world from a different perspective, putting the power of creation and creativity in their hands!

Allow me to introduce ‘Bert’ he’s only a couple of centimetres high but has such a story to tell!

Meet Bert!

He didn’t start out with a story, but simply as an inanimate prop for my GCSE Photography group who were trying to recreate images in the style of Slinkachu, a modern street artist based in London who creates tiny scenes using these ‘little people’ and then abandons them on the streets for people to find.

I began by trying to do some of these images myself – call me a coward if you like but when I’m trying something new or something that is outside of my comfort zone, I prefer to try in private away from 30 or so sceptical pairs of eyes!

I duly set up ‘Bert’ in the middle of my lawn and lay down to take my images (not sure what the neighbours thought!). He is so small it was easy to find a range of places for him – in the middle of a patch of clover, perched on the fence with a spider’s web behind him, in a puddle so you could see his reflection. You can see how small he is and the whole fun of these tiny people is to create ‘worlds’ for them.

In some lessons pupils used plasticine or scraps of card to create scenes, but I have seen images where sugar or custard powder was used for a beach scene. For just £2, I managed to buy an old metal traffic light, which was part of a discarded train set at a local antique store. Look around your kitchen … liquorice allsorts make a great climbing mountain, cups and saucers make seats, tea bags make backdrops – the only limit is your imagination. The book Microworlds, authored by Mark Valli & M Dessanay, gives some inspiring ideas.

Liquorice allsorts make a great climbing mountain

On showing these images to my KS4 students, they immediately started to talk about these tiny toys as people with a history – he had to have name – hence ‘Bert’ and it was sad that he had everything that he owned in the three colourful bags on his bench. They then couldn’t wait to examine the other people – I’ll just introduce you to ‘Gladys’ who is my own favourite! She has a shopping trolley full of objects – you have to study closely!

Meet Gladys!

She has a shopping trolley full of objects

The Photography students had to physically create the ‘worlds’ that these figures inhabit – but I have done this with a Year 7 class where they have created worlds with words and written their stories on Twitter. @TheHeadsOffice is a wonderful supporter of creativity and Julia Skinner, founder of the 100 Word Challenge, suggested that we could in fact use these as stimuli for our stories. Visit the website www.headsoffice.co.uk to see the weekly 100 Word Challenge for creative inspiration.

Combining a visual stimulus that pupils can control and manipulate, with a rigorous, but fun, written challenge can produce really imaginative results. Students were amazingly creative – below is an image of Bert in winter – set up in the classroom using a sherbet fountain and an old pinecone. 

Sherbet and pinecones put Bert in deepest winter!

The GCSE Photography students’ task was to research, design, record, manipulate (using Photoshop) and then analyse. The Year 7 pupils worked in pairs, to choose their little person and create their character and world. I ‘scaffolded’ this by agreeing the criteria – name, age, occupation, a secret they had and their best moment ...the possibilities are endless. To take this to the next level we began to link our people together – thinking about how peoples’ lives become interwoven. We joined pairs together and began to link stories – did they go to school together? Had they had an argument in the past? Taking it to the next level we created their village – using a flat sheet, masking tape and post it notes (thanks to the wonderful Dorothy Heathcote for that inspiration!). Who lived where, worked where, where did Bert meet Gladys? What do we need in our village?

So, where do I get these figures? Well they are model railway figures made by a company called Preiser – you can get them from Amazon or eBay (they start at £3.99). There is a huge range – I buy the finished ones but you can buy them unpainted and be even more creative! The size of the figures means that they are unsuitable for young pupils but older ones think they are ‘awesome’ (not my word!) and are happy to be creative. Take them outside and use natural backgrounds, create and draw your own world, find a world in a book and use that image as a background. Be warned – this is seriously addictive! 

The material in this blog post was taken from the article, 'Snapshots, Twitter and tiny people' by Jane Hewitt, published in Creative Teaching and Learning, volume 2.4.

An intrepid little person discovers the dangers of the school pond!

A guitar is used as a prop here

Coca Cola makes a great lake, as one student discovered

A little man takes cover

One student used sugar and lollipops to create a retro beach scene