In India, the National Reading Day is observed in honour of PN Panicker's legacy of promoting reaning in Kerala which led to making the state with highest litecy rate in the country, informs Sri Prakash Vidyaniketan, Vishakhapattanam, through a facebook post and organizing a webinar on 'Art of Reading' by Sanjana Kapur of Amar Chitra Katha (see inset pic).
The CBSE has directed the affiliated schools to hold online reading activities and competitions to promote reading habits. However, such directives make the whole affair ritualistic and full of tokenism, feel meaningful educators since promoting reading is a serious matter of training and deep learning linked to information processing skills.
According to my experience, at least 30-hour training is required at the school level with senior students to initiate intentful reading skill of outlining skill with follow-up to make a dent. Outlining of contents of a topic requires reading with intent and shedding wordiness by identifying brief phrasal contents of the topic.
The skill to develop reading habit has the following three steps for deep processing and practice: (1) Reading the text with intent; (2) thinking and revisiting the content for underlining; and (3) Rewriting in phrasal form. It is the first stage and reading to learn and transform the print materials into self-learning materials which should be mastered with 30 hour practice under the guidance of a trainer.
After, 30-hour training, the classroom can be flipped through reading the next day's lesson-related textual material daily at home and getting your problems removed in the classroom. Two-to-four pages' outlining is sufficient as daily home-study to establish reading culture. It is a basic reading skill to honed and turned into habit for text-based flipping of classroom
Advantages:
Relates the theme of the unit to the previous unit.
Connects the previous knowledge of the learner with the new knowledge,
Acts as an advance organizer for classroom learning
Helps in revision and recapitulation of main learning points in a logical sequence.
Provides the opportunity to students scan to to extract the information and piece together the essential information.
Makes you self-learner by highlighting important ideas and acquiring lesson-related vocabulary.
Has potential of flipping the classroom through textbooks and library as a resource of learning
In Jaipur, a read-to-learn session was conducted by educator Dr Lalit Kishore which involved reading of paragraph; underlining key-words and phrases; information processing from book and non-book resources; writing hyphenated key-words and phrases; and recalling the words.
A 30-hour assignment with half-an-hour daily practice of the skill was given to participating middle level students to hone the skill.
Comments