Reading Reconsidered: A Practical Guide to Rigorous Literacy Instruction

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It’s all very well saying that reading was on our school development plan, but what was it that we wanted to change? We knew why we had to have it as a focus, but needed a clear whole-school picture. In the national curriculum, the programmes of study for reading at KS1 and 2 consist of two dimensions: word reading and comprehension (both listening and reading).

We knew that the children in our school start significantly below where they should be in terms of speaking, listening and language development. Comprehension skills develop through pupils’ experience of high-quality discussion with teachers, as well as from reading and discussing a range of stories, poems and non-fiction. Reading fiction and non-fiction I started off by reading the Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance reports on literacy in EYFS, KS1 and KS2. I also found the following three books incredibly useful: Secondary Year 6 leavers - Covid-safe transition activities and ideas It's been a chaotic year but Year 6 children still deserve the best ending to their primary journey All pupils must be encouraged to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live, to establish an appreciation and love of reading, and to gain knowledge across the curriculum.

National curriculum KS1/2 reading

It breaks the process down into four stages: explore, prepare, deliver, sustain. Reading for pleasure and reading & writing The Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Putting evidence to work’ guidance report was a really useful starting point for implementing change. Teachers read to children but it wasn’t consistent across year groups and books were seldom finished. If teachers want to ensure maximum achievement in reading and maximum readiness for college, text selection deserves greater attention and intentionality. This does not mean that every book needs to be selected using a ‘maximum value for learning’ calculation. Some should be; we hope many will. Choosing others sheerly for the pleasure of it or on a lark is fine as long as the overall portfolio of books is intentional and balanced.”

We decided that reading needed a dedicated, non-negotiable space in the daily timetable. Distinct reading and literacy lessons We carried out a staff survey, asking questions about how often teachers read to their class and which text types they chose. We also surveyed pupils and asked then if they enjoyed reading, which types of texts they liked and if they read at home.In addition, we decided that reading lessons would be separate to literacy lessons, with word reading and comprehension taught in the former, and writing skills taught in the latter. Shanahan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chi­cago, and has led the US Government’s National Reading Panel. Recently on his blog, he fielded aquestion about the effectiveness of whole-class reading approaches, where one student reads aloud while their classmates follow thetext Good reading comprehension draws on linguistic knowledge (vocabulary and grammar, in particular) and knowledge of the world. Shanahan’s point is that reading aloud is valuable insofar as it improves students’ reading fluency, which is strongly associated with comprehension (e.g. see the EEF’s most recent guidance on literacy at key stage 2). But, Shanahan argues, students need large volumes of practice to improve reading fluency – taking turns one-at-a-time is ahighly inefficient way of providing this. To fit our school’s context and our pupils needs, we adapted his suggestions, enabling us to include a more diverse range of text types.