Guangyuan School Reading Education Workshops Review

 

February 2023

On January 5 and February 3, 2023, the Foundation co-operated with the local partner the Guangyuan Lizhou District Education Bureau to hold the first and second sessions of the reading education workshop for teachers respectively. A total of 75 teachers from our Guangyuan School Library Project members and the Lizhou District Rural Micro School Alliance participated in these two online workshops.

 

The Foundation was delighted to host Ms. Wang Yi-feng to share her expertise with our Guangyuan project teachers. Ms. Wang helped this group to understand the value of children's books and feel the joy that we can experience from reading quality children picture books. This training lecture provided further support for our Guangyuan school teachers so as to broaden their reading horizons and understand how to encourage students to read and then to discuss what they learnt from reading those books.

 

Here is the detail of the 2 workshops that were held -

 

No.	Date	Theme	Training   Objective
1	January 5 (Thursday) 9:00am – 11:00am	How to ask good questions？	How do teachers ask good questions and  facilitate discussions with students after  reading
2	February 3 (Friday) 9:00am – 11:00am	How to design reading extensions？	Understand reading class and discuss the  four levels of reading communication

 

Workshop 1: How to Ask Good Questions?

At the beginning of the workshop, the Ms. Wang asked three questions, which triggered the teacher's thinking and communication. First, how did the problem arise? Second, do you like questions? Why? Third, does the question make sense? Teachers fully expressed their ideas based on their own reading and personal teaching experience. The lecturer concluded:

• Questions require thinking, and thinking generates ideas;

• Ideas are viewing, and viewing generates opinions;

• Opinions have different appearances—identification, reflection, confusion;

• Readers = Viewers;

• If the teacher wants to be able to ask good questions, he must unload "teaching" and return to "reading".

 

Workshop 2: How to Design Reading Extension?

To kick off, the lecturer again used questions to promote better communication with the teacher, asking "how does the teacher define his role when getting along with the students?" She advocated that when the teacher is the real self, the students are willing to be the real self. During the workshop discussion, everyone discussed four open-ended questions in the children's reading class: "Who is the protagonist?", "What has been read?", "How to talk?", "How to proceed?". Teachers discovered that children's reading lessons can be so varied.

 

Ms. Wang emphasized that reading is the process of thinking:

• Thinking needs to be independent rather than isolated. Independence is the experience and will of the thinking individual, which will not be erased, diluted or discriminated against.

• Thinking also requires cooperation, so that you can see multiple viewpoints, and when you collide your own independent thinking with other thinking, you will either appreciate or criticize, or sigh in agreement or disagreement, etc.

 

After the experiencing the two workshop trainings, the teachers expressed that they have benefited from these discussions, and they look forward to future workshops, which will not only improve their own reading literacy, but also allow the teachers to share these learnings with their students.

 

Lecturer Profile:

Wang Yi-feng (Miss Xingxing), was invited by many social organizations as a reading training lecturer in Taiwan and Mainland China, and she founded Chengdu Little House Reading Space in Sichuan in 2021.