As part of Nagoya International School’s work to support learning and expose teachers to different pedagogies, NIS hosted two weekend EARCOS workshops that involved two published authors.
Debbie Miller, author of Reading with Meaning, and Stephanie Harvey, author of Comprehension and Collaboration, joined a packed room of over 60 participants from all over Asia, who flew in during February and September. The school was fortunate to have both Ms Miller and Ms Harvey continue their work in the classrooms beyond the weekend sessions.
Ms Miller’s tone throughout her two-day conference—“Reading With Meaning: Creating Cultures of Thinking and Understanding”— included discussions about the reading workshop approach, creating thoughtful classroom environments, sample lessons and output from her previous work with students, and two days of demo lessons with second grade students from NIS.
Ms Harvey’s conference—“Reading is Thinking: Comprehension, Collaboration, and Inquiry”—focused deeply into concepts that directly relate to the school’s recent shift to the PYP (the IB Primary Years Programme). With a stress on displaying different kinds of inquiry as well as teaching students first and foremost to think, Ms Harvey presented examples of the kinds of real thinking that students should be doing in classrooms every day, including making annotations to “track” thinking within a text, continually asking and answering questions, and engaging in thoughtful conversation with peers.
Participants from other schools throughout Asia were also glad to have the opportunity to spend time at Nagoya International School for both weekends. Teachers left classroom doors open, and workshop participants could be found browsing in and out of classrooms, snapping photos, and talking to NIS teachers about their work. One participant, a second grade teacher from Tokyo, commented, “Your school really is doing some wonderful things and should be commended for it.”
— WENDY FOREMAN
