What was your motivation to move away from streaming?

Principal Leanne Webb says:

“When I first came here, I couldn't believe it because English level 1 had four different classes. The top stream, they did the full range, the second one down, they only did this number of standards and so on and so on down to the bottom one that did hardly anything. We had it in math’s, and we had it in science. And of course, you know what happened was the kids that ended up in the fourth-tier class, they did it for one year and achieved very little and they couldn't progress, so we stopped.” 

What was the approach you took to making the shift?

South Auckland secondary school, Aorere College (1650 pupils) has been using RT3T for the past 10 years. Due to its significant impact, the school has committed to providing all Year 9 students with three hours of RT3T a week for four weeks, to learn and practice RT3T thinking, metacognitive, and teamwork skills. 

“There isn't a miracle cure. There are strategies that work well, and they make a difference. But it's not like you can go: ‘OK, we can get them to this level – bang. Let's push this switch and they will be there.’ But it's a commitment, that as a school we make to developing the literacy and so reciprocal teaching has been part of that wider awareness of literacy requirements for secondary school students. And it's an effective one, and it's one that the kids quite enjoy and it's a short-term intervention and that's important too because you don't want to be doing an intervention that's going to be taking you two years. Ravinder’s got the programme down to a six-to-eight-week intervention.” 

Director of Literacy, Ravinder Kaur adds:

“When we first introduced RT, each junior English class was rostered to a special room for an RT lesson, with the classroom teacher and a teacher aide supporting the specialist teacher. All the teachers in the school underwent PLD.”

At first Ravinder saw RT3T as just another reading strategy, but it was once she had fully engaged with the training that she realised it was also about team building, co-operative learning, and equity leadership that she became such a strong advocate.

About a year after starting with RT3T, Aorere College began to make some adaptations. While they still have three periods of RT a week for four weeks, instead of the students always coming out from the junior English classes, they now come from one English period, one social science period and one science period. That way teachers don’t feel they are falling behind in covering content. Four classes a term receive the training. Another change has been rather than going to a specialist room, the RT teacher and the teacher aide join the students and classroom teacher in their room. There the students are divided into six groups, with three groups doing RT training for 30 minutes, while the other groups do a flip activity before swapping over. Ravinder also provides training for the full staff and for any beginning teachers.

To gain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of RT, Aorere College undertook literacy observations across the whole school, and gathered student voice. They found it fascinating that when they asked the students what strategies they were using, they could hear the RT skills coming through. For example: ‘we clarify and then we summarise and we re-read and use context clues.’ 

Ravinder has also made a connection between DMIC (Developing Mathematical Inquiry in Communities) and RT:

“They complement each other and go very well together – the numeracy and the literacy – we’re talking about the same things, the clarifying, the understanding and then the reasoning. It really works.”

‍What does success look like?

 “I have personally found RT to be really beneficial, and probably one of the leading strategies that I think really works in a school – it's that ownership of a role, it's someone taking on the role of teacher – they get to be the teacher. They get to work in groups, and everyone takes on an active role. There's not one person that isn't doing something. I think kids really like the simplicity of it; teachers get chance to see the potential in students,” says Ravinder. 

“They take ownership, and they take responsibility. Students become more skilled at understanding and retaining information from the text…. The other thing I observed was active engagement. So, students may tend to actively participate rather than passively read (and) this engagement keeps students focused and interested – they're learning how to work as a team."

"I have also observed that when students do RT in a particular subject, they take the learning from that subject to other subjects as well. The learning is transferable. Our classroom management is a lot better, so I would say better classroom dynamics.”