Reading - Practical Ways Forward

Extract from Alex Quigley's blog Sept 2024

Reading is complex. Improving it is slow, difficult, cumulative and needs to be well connected by design…(oh, and it’s also fun and amazing!).

There is no one solution to complex reading, but I think there are five key interlinked solutions:

1.        Get ‘learning to read’ right. It all starts early reading experiences, good phonics instruction and developing pupils’ phonemic awareness. They need lift the sounds from the page until it appears effortless. We know how to do this stuff really effectively – deploying systematic approaches to phonics alongside a rich diet of reading with and to children.

2.        Bridge to comprehension with reading fluency. The ability to read words along and start to deploy the appropriate pacing, stress, intonation and phrasing is ‘reading fluency’. Pupils need lots of practice of reading aloud and fluency. Happily, it builds nicely on phonics approaches and it bridges to lots of quality book talk and approaches that then build comprehension. 

3.        Do lots of wide, deep, rich reading, building knowledge of the world along the way. The recent focus on curriculum has foregrounded how children learn by building knowledge and connecting those schemas in helpful networks. The key here is reading lots. Reading lots of those ‘Goldilocks texts’ that aren’t too easy (otherwise what would you be learning), but not too hard either. I think we need to step away from the worksheets and five paragraph texts. Children need to read full books. They need to read stories and informational texts. If they overlap in 'reading clusters' all the better. Only then will they make the connections and deal with the complexities that stick long in the memory.

4.        Teaching reading comprehension strategies for tricky texts. There is sound evidence that when you are reading a ‘Goldilocks text’, you need to be strategic. You need to question, clarify, think hard about the author’s intention, and summarise what you think. These reading comprehension strategies can be deployed during reading. They don’t need to be over-taught (please don't teach summarising on Weds, then questioning on Thursday). They should be focused on the text at hand, helping steer some rich book talk as a helpful scaffold. Don’t get fooled by the marks scheme – these strategies are an only a scaffold to help build the aforementioned knowledge – they aren’t the requisite knowledge itself.

5.        Explicit and implicit vocabulary instruction. It can be very helpful to explicitly teach words like ‘deforestation’, ‘decline’ and ‘population’. These are high value words that initiate lots of connections and schemas of knowledge. You can teach word roots, word families, synonyms and antonyms. If we don’t forget to do lots of wide, rich reading, and we select the words to teach carefully. Of course, may words are learnt implicitly through reading lots. In addition, by teaching a small number of words explicitly, we help foster ‘word consciousness’ – a curiosity for words – that served children well when they read widely and do generalised reading assessments. 

Although peer tutoring can be used to develop many aspects of pupil progress, it is most commonly used to support reading.

Peer tutor training can take place over two days or two mornings, depending on the group and how familiar they are with concepts such as growth mindset, motivation, challenge zone etc.  Below are editable resources and a pdf version so you know what the original looked like if formatting goes awry.

Reading Progress and Reading Coach are two options available in Hwb to develop reading fluency.

Reading Progress enables teachers to set, assess and monitor progress through a range of texts - many already in the system or you have the option of uploading your own text.  Pupils can all be allocated the same text or different texts.  You can decide how strict you want the feedback to be.  Pupils record themselves reading their text aloud, then AI gives them feedback.  Pupil can re-record taking on board the feedback and choose when they are ready to submit their best version to teacher.  Teacher dashboard provides levels of engagement and progress.

Reading Coach also gives pupils a chance to practice their reading fluency, have AI feedback and improve performance, but the text can either be a teacher-set text or be designed by the pupil and AI generated, including the level of difficulty of the text.  Not yet sure how teachers can gain a dashboard overview of pupil progress in a class/school.  Pupils log in to https://coach.microsoft.com/en-gb with their Hwb log-ins.

Reading Coach could be a useful tool for pupils to develop fluency independently between more formal assessment of reading fluency in Reading Progress.