Ely cathedral. UK
How to
Read: TLT15
On 17th October, I travelled to Southampton for my
second year presenting at TLT.
I was talking about reading (not much new there), and,
specifically, how to read.
Reading, of course, is at the core of what we do as
teachers; and not just as teachers of English. More and more in my new role,
I’m coming to see that reading may be the only silver bullet
in education: beautiful in its simplicity, obvious in its
impact.
The reality is that our strongest readers read the most,
and our weakest readers the least:
the exact opposite what we need to see to close the gap
between our best and
worst performing students. This is not only true in their
home lives, but also in our classrooms. Anyone who has ever asked for
volunteers to read (including: me; guilty as charged)
is advantaging those strong readers, and further denying
reading from the weakest.
The gap in reading is not just a practice gap: it is also
a knowledge gap.
When we take our weak readers out of subjects to teach
them reading skills,
we are denying them that subject-specific knowledge that
will enable them to make sense
of a wider variety of texts. With the new strengthened
GCSEs,
students being able to read rigorous subject matter
independently is essential.
Of the three stages of reading, decoding, comprehension
and fluency,
I said the least about decoding, instead pointing people
to the awesome Katie Ashford’s blog,
where she gives plenty of great advice on
how to deal with students who cannot decode.
It is clear that too many students slip through the
decoding net at primary school,
and we at secondary school lack the expertise to bridge
that gap. This is evident in my experience
in even years 10 and 11; last year I
taught a student who would auto-correct unfamiliar words,
as she didn’t know how to decode and hadn’t been properly
taught phonics.
She would autocorrect so many words, she couldn’t then
understand the sentence,
so for example: ‘Alison leapt up bracingly from her meal’
she might read aloud:
‘Alison led up braking from her meal’, which makes
absolutely no sense.
Comprehension entails understanding what is written.
Using Willingham’s examples
from his excellent book Raising Kids who Read, often
reading contains an inference gap:
‘Trisha spilled her coffee. Dan jumped from his chair to
fetch a cloth.’
Expert readers automatically see how the first sentence
impacts the second;
novice readers might see these as two separate and
unconnected events.
Interestingly, though, the gap between those from low and
high income backgrounds
manifests itself after the decoding has been taught,
because comprehension, the second stage,
is largely predicated on background knowledge, which our
economically advantaged students
have in abundance (usually from wide
background reading).
Using Hirsch’s classic ‘Jones sacrificed and knocked in a
run,’
I explained that readers with high levels of knowledge on
a given topic do better on tests
which supposedly only test their reading ‘skill.’
And yet we are still persisting in believing our weak
readers simply need more training in generic reading strategies, often
withdrawing students from subject lessons to teach reading in isolation,
and
then wondering why their reading is not improving. In fact, the optimal way to
close
the reading gap is for students to gain a broad knowledge
of subjects across the curriculum.
So clearly, we need to put reading at the heart of our
lessons. Yet this is not an easy sell.
Citing my own trials of getting students to read aloud
(ranging from outright refusals
to early tears), I later that evening found there were
many out there
who considered reading aloud in class to be cruel. : (
Reply to comments about this post.
I welcome those challenges to this idea. It is all too
easy to do whole class reading badly.
Indeed, it is absolutely vital to consider the emotional
impact of such a policy,
and the way to make it work in your individual classroom
for your children.
Running a class where every child reads aloud is
difficult, make no mistake about it.
It depends on excellent pedagogy and the creation of a
warm, safe environment.
It requires constant vigilance and tight management. But,
crucially, it is possible.
Why read aloud with students, if it is so difficult?
First, so we know they can read.
I’ve heard of too many teachers at KS4 finding out their
students can’t read
to not put this top of my list of reasons. Next, so we
know they are listening during the lesson –
the knowledge you could be asked to
read at any time undeniably focuses the mind.
Also, reading aloud helps us as teachers to check for
understanding, something impossible
when students are reading silently at their own pace. But
finally, because reading aloud
is probably the most enjoyable thing you can do with a
class.
One recent example: when year 7 went on their ‘outward
bound’ trip, I was the lucky teacher
of history with three periods to fill for those ‘left
behind.’ A mixed group of around 18 students
of vastly differing ability, I didn’t want to press on
with the planned lessons, but also didn’t have
a bank of ‘rainy day’ history lessons as a first year
teacher of this subject. In my desperation,
I photocopied about 30 pages of Gombrich’s History
of the World(recommended to me
in the summer by both Daisy Christodoulou and Jonathan
Porter) and threw together some comprehension questions. The first lesson was
fine, but I was really concerned about the double:
two hours of pure reading
and writing. And guess what? It’s probably the best lesson
I’ve ever taught. No joke – I wish someone had come to
see it. These children were utterly,
utterly engaged in a way I’ve seen only rarely, in the
most remarkable teachers’ classrooms.
They adored the stories, and their curiosity led to a
wonderful class discussion
and some impressive paragraphs.
It was not always thus. Previously, I would use ‘guided
reading,’ where my students
read at different paces in groups, thus ensuring no
misconceptions could be ironed out,
and again advantaging those strong readers.
Moreover, I previously did not read aloud well to
students, as I have written about here.
So, I was held back by my own low expectations, and it
was the children themselves
who set me on the right track: they wanted to read, and
they seized that moment
to show me they could do it.
But how can we do it every lesson? Doug Lemov has the best answer I’ve found
with ‘Control the Game.’ I went through each of the
components of this: be vague about how much children will be reading, keep the
reading duration unpredictable but short at the outset,
move swiftly to the
next reader with limited words (‘Stacey, pick up’, or, in my class, ‘Stacey’)
and take over and model reading of tricky passages. At
the start of my time in a new school,
I tweaked this: we did snake around the class,
for two weeks in fact. What was lost in terms
of students checking out and not following in this two
weeks was made up for, I think,
in that it set the expectation that every child would
read in every one of my lessons.
For unconfident readers, they got used to this
expectation with the predictability.
It also gave me two weeks to suss who was
going to push back on reading,
and deal with them individually.
(Interestingly,
my year 10 middle ability class proved harder to get reading than my year 11
set 7 class, who frequently bound into my room shouting
‘are we reading today miss?’)
Only once the whole class was secure in reading (and only
a sentence each time)
did I move to selecting students, but even now they are
only reading a sentence,
though I am moving away from that.
The implications of this kind of teaching are that teachers
need to spend their planning
thinking more about the questions they will need to ask
students to ensure
they have understood, along with which vocabulary
students will struggle with
and how they will gloss those words and check students
have learned them.
From the mechanics of reading I moved to the motivation:
reading is highly emotional,
and I shared methods I’ve written about extensively on
this blog in the past
to build a reading culture in a school, such as sharing
one book, sharing
reading lists
and delivering
reading assemblies.
Once again, I would like to thank my warm and encouraging
audience, who indulged me
in my anecdotes and engaged with the ideas with gusto.
Much love also goes to those who listen
and challenge in the room and after: it
is only through such thrashing out of the ideas
that we come closer to being the best teachers and
professionals we can be.
You can TCR software
and engineering manuals for spontaneously recall –
or pass that exam.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what
I’ve read.
I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve
read.
Introduction to Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
A practical
overview of
Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
How to choose a
book. A Turbo Charged
Reading YouTube
Advanced Reading Skills Perhaps you’d like
to join my FaceBook group ?
Perhaps you’d like to check
out my sister blogs:
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com gives ways for you to work with the
stresses of life
www.ourinnerminds.blogspot.com
take
advantage of business experience and expertise.
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com
just for fun.
To quote the Dr Seuss
himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the
more places you'll go.”
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Your opinions, experience and questions are welcome. M'reen