Reading Reconsidered: A Practical Guide to Rigorous Literacy Instruction

Product Information

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: Teachers read to children but it wasn’t consistent across year groups and books were seldom finished. Our vision was to prepare pupils for university and college, where they’ll mostly be reading non-fiction articles.

urn:lcp:readingreconside0000lemo:epub:f2e6a5f1-e2d0-466c-bb1a-1a86008ee213 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier readingreconside0000lemo Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s25r3txmmnw Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781119104346 We knew that the children in our school start significantly below where they should be in terms of speaking, listening and language development.Overhauling the way we taught reading had been on our school development plan for a long time, but other things became a priority and it kept on getting pushed further down the list.

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.

Classic texts

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. For Shanahan, preferable alternatives include reading in pairs, where students alternate after each paragraph, choral reading, where students and teachers read the same section of the text simultaneously, and repeated reading, where students read the same passage multiple times. In all cases, Shanahan argues that students read more and have greater opportunities to improve fluency, citing studies reviewed by the US National Reading Panel (NIHCD, 2000

It breaks the process down into four stages: explore, prepare, deliver, sustain. Reading for pleasure and reading & writing 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. Discussions about whole-class reading can be muddied by terminology. Names for whole-class reading include ​ ‘Round Robin Reading’, ​ ‘Popcorn Reading’ and ​ ‘Control the Game’. The latter is advocated in Doug Lemov’s popular ​ ‘ Teach Like aChampion’ series and, most recently, his book ​ ‘ Reading Reconsidered’. 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.” Every day, each teacher would read to their class for 15 minutes without any interruptions – just simply modelling ‘how to read’. In KS2, we planned for reading to take place after break between 10.30am and 11.15am, followed by literacy until lunch at 12.15pm.The Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Putting evidence to work’ guidance report was a really useful starting point for implementing change. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-06-02 02:24:24 Associated-names Driggs, Colleen, author; Woolway, Erica, 1979- author Autocrop_version 0.0.13_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40529816 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier We decided that reading needed a dedicated, non-negotiable space in the daily timetable. Distinct reading and literacy lessons After spending time in classrooms and holding discussions with teachers, it was clear that we didn’t have a consistent whole-school approach to reading. Our end-of-KS2 results have been above the national average for many years and children were reading, so change didn’t seem urgent.