For me, 'Reading for Pleasure' is a desirable consequence, but getting everything right to support learning is complex and nuanced. Here are four key considerations:
1. When it comes to learning to read, we need to reconsider the relationship between SKILL and WILL:
The CEO of Sony Entertainment, Michael Lynton, once said something incredibly striking:
"The book is the greatest interactive medium of all time. You can underline it, write in the margins, fold down a page, skip ahead. And you can take it anywhere."
But, alas, reading for pleasure is on the decline.
I've just finished reading Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire to my son. I downloaded the film for him to watch on the way out to our holiday destination; 5 minutes in, he looked up, disappointed. "Dad- this is going too quickly."
I could have cried happy tears. All those nights reading small chunks, and me worrying if he'd lose interest, all those nights reading seemingly less crucial or exciting parts of the story.
On reflection, all those times he (rather irritatingly) interrupted me, asking questions, clarifying, seeking knowledge and predicting what was happening next was him sharing his process with me. How fortunate am I?!
Far from boring him, these nights were creating, building, and enhancing the suspense and enjoyment. Remember, this boy is glued to his iPad, with quick-hit dopamine videos streaming far more often than I'd like. Yes, he still reads to me, too, but positioning him as a reader and a lover of a book such as this is, in my view, equally if not more important than obsessing over decoding (hat tip to Teresa Cremin).
We need to give learners a way of understanding the relationship between skill and will through the lens of fiction, non-fiction and through different subject areas.
2. There is no doubt that quality professional development needs to take centre stage:
I love going into Bedrock's schools and delivering CPD on this topic.
Indeed, we should be ploughing so much more into teacher professional development in this area; at the moment, I wonder if vocabulary (and reading as a distinct focus) is in danger of becoming one of those heavyweight things like Assessment For Learning that everyone is aware of, but always at risk of lethal mutation or superficial acknowledgement. Dick Allington's brilliant work has really made me reflect on my own teaching techniques for struggling readers (including my own son's travails with reading fluency this year). Expertise, level of challenge, and continual engagement with meaning-making in classroom scenarios are vital literacy interventions.
This is not about new strategies or fads; it's something more transcendent about the way we understand reading at its core: I took some time this morning to read an incredible book by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis called Strategies that Word: Teaching Comprehension for Engagement, Understanding, and Building Knowledge.
They stress the importance of seeing reading as an inherently interactive experience. I love their observation here:
"The fact is that all readers space out when they read. Kids need to know this, or they risk feeling inadequate when it happens with them. When meaning breaks down, experienced readers slow down and reread, clarify confusions before they continue, and apply appropriate strategies to cruise down on the road. They might ask a question when they need more information. Perhaps they infer a theme from a character's actions. Or they might activate their background knowledge when reading an editorial and disagree with the author's premise"
No one ever shared this with me or made me feel like this was completely normal.
I spoke with the wonderful Sarah Davies recently about the need to underpin reading, writing and oracy with a more holistic understanding of fluency; it strikes me that we need to encourage learners to embrace stopping, going back, re-reading (even highlighting) previous information: I do this all the time!
3. The most successful readers are reflective rather than tacit:
Recently, Mary Myatt and Elizabeth Draper have both extolled the findings of recent studies that found that reading challenging, complex novels aloud and at a faster pace repositioned 'poorer readers' as 'good' readers, giving them a more engaged uninterrupted reading experience over a sustained period. Poorer readers made a surprising 16 months of progress compared to the average readers, who progressed at an average of nine months.
Reading is a highly personalised experience, but when we're looking to provide something on a class level, the following are evidently supportive:
- Not positioning or labelling pupils in evidently 'remedial' groups
- Using graphic organisers such as event wheels, timelines, and family trees to visually represent the developing 'whole' text
- Planned activities requiring collaboration and sequencing of images, for example
When it comes to encouraging pupils to be reflective in their reading, it's not exactly a stretch to stretch to see how the strategies outlined in the study actively promote these healthy thought processes (in time, perhaps the absence of scaffolds and support would lead, over time, to pupils creating these types of understanding themselves).
In essence, we need to make sure they know it's OK to stop, go back, check, reflect and clarify meaning. It. Is. Not. Failure!
4. Comprehension is a knowledge-building activity:
I loved Susan Neuman's work on knowledge underpinning comprehension, and it made me reflect upon this relationship. Cervetti, Jaynes & Hiebert's model is interesting here:
Credit: Heinemann blog- knowledge and comprehension
Teaching is more impactful when it builds and capitalises on content knowledge (there are all kinds of interesting research on genre specificity here, by the way).
Whether fiction or nonfiction, reading is taking in information that we then assimilate, whether it be a moral, an opinion, or a deeper understanding of issues related to a topic.
Irrespective of your standpoint here, one thing is irrefutable: we need to make the process of reading more explicit, so the process of assimilation is as concrete as possible. When we talk about 'reading for pleasure,' 'drop everything and read' or 'speed reading' we must think of the tools we want learners to take away from their experience with reading.
I think we do a great job of this in our own platform - indeed, I've written about the science of Bedrock Learning's own platform when it comes to making the implicit explicit in three parts:
- The Science of Bedrock's Platform
- Bedrock and Cognitive Science
- Mapper, Disciplinary Literacy and Cognitive Science
We're thinking all the time about how we can support support teachers to bring it into their classroom (not to mention Ellie Ashton's Classroom Hub).
More recently, I've designed a template and embedded it into our resources area to support literacy leaders in collating insights from Knowledge Trends to share across the curriculum. The editable template is actually designed on a PowerPoint slide to allow leads to collate words across our blocks to then easily share with secondary practitioners across the school.
I'd like to read more about Wilkinson & Son's Transactional Strategy Instruction, share my thoughts on this and how it might work across a school. For now, our essential point of departure needs to answer these two questions:
- How do we make the implicit explicit when it comes to reading? (And let learners know that messiness is OK- and in many ways to be encouraged!)
- How can we give learners tangible experiences and strategies to support theirownnavigation of texts when reading independently?
I'm truly down the rabbit hole now, and don't want to come out!
