The Lighthouse Diary 2019 #13: Reading And Differentiated Learning

Once a month, we cancel work and schedule a professional development session at the Academy. This January, we had a session on Reading Comprehension and Differentiated Learning. The facilitators were all in-house. Mr. Victor "Teacher Vic" Villanueva handled the session on Reading Comprehension, while Ms. Amor "Teacher Motie" Andal conducted the Differentiated Learning workshop. Teacher Vic is currently our English and Filipino  teacher, while Teacher Motie is our Learning Support teacher.

Teacher Vic was my professor in graduate school at the University of the Philippines Diliman. I was then enrolled in the Reading Education masters course where I took Reading in the Content Areas under his mentorship. For librarians who are looking at furthering their professional development in school librarianship, cognates in Reading Education make for a good match.

In Teacher Vic's session, I took away three things. One, coherence in the planning of lessons for students to learn reading skills is a requirement.  This would include the teacher's assessments both formative and summative. Two, a consistent skills building activity leads to automaticity. Reading is thinking and this thinking skill, to be sharp, polished and to continuously develop needs regular practice in the classroom and at home. Three, because Teacher Vic checks on our process of understanding his input, metacognition or an awareness of what happens as we learn is a skill that teachers need to apply in the classroom. Sometimes, modelling is na effective way to teach and learn. Teacher Vic did just that in his session.

From Teacher Motie's workshop, I realised the importance of selecting texts for different kinds of learners. She made us read three kinds of texts and written in different structures. There was little preparation for us, participants of the workshop, so, speaking for myself, I had to depend on my own skills and strategies. Imagine a high school student to read an academic article with little familiarity on the vocabulary of the subject and understanding of academic writing. A nightmare.

As the teacher librarian, I need to constantly communicate to teachers the many benefits they can get from using the library resources and services. Since I started in the Academy, our collection have been varied and differentiated, our online subscriptions lexiled and with readability indexes. We even have kits, games, posters and multimedia in our collection.

This question comes back to me, though: why is it that the library circulation reports, analytics and statistics are low?