From the Reading for Pleasure Symposium I had to dash to Worthing for the NATE South East Teach Meet, where I was presenting a kind of research in progress summary which I have summarised below:
Stop Murdering the Books was my rather fanciful, emotive imperative, and a kind of working title for the research. I explained the way the project started to take shape in 2014 with planning for the new National curriculum. Substantial pressures on English teachers to combine motivation of readers with attainment of high scores in public examinations along with the limiting factors of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS; 2001-2009) and reductive reading strands of the Assessing Pupil Progress framework (DCSF, 2008)had maneuvered the department that I was at the time Head of, into a position of declining reading engagement. I had a suspicion that there was something wrong with the way we were teaching and prioritising reading, but at that stage it was a misgiving and quite unformed. We considered that a possible reason for students’ reluctance to read might be literature teaching itself, ‘especially if novels are viewed as set texts instead of narratives written to be read for pleasure’ (Cliff-Hodges, 2015: 93). Literature texts tend to be read in very particular, constrained ways and ‘as part of a highly complex process of cultural induction, social stratification and occupational qualification’ and I was keen to unpick that a little as part of our general thinking as we built a new curriculum.
Our English curriculum had also been built on the assumption that children arriving at secondary school are already able to read independently: which invites the question of what exactly is being taught in terms of reading skills and comprehension at KS3, and translates into a reading paper at GCSE, where 50% of all current GCSE papers in presented as a test of ‘reading’. As Cliff Hodges puts it, ‘‘many schools not appear to treat the middle years as simply a waiting room for examinations, not a living room in which to grow up’ (Cliff Hodges, 2017, 46).
At the same time I was researching and heavily involved with NWP (this was a significant link as Simon Wrigley was presenting on exactly that just before me!) and I was absolutely convinced that the reason we didn’t teach writing very well was, in part, to do with not identifying as writers. I think the converse might be true of English teachers in relation to reading. I haven’t met many English teachers who don’t identify as readers. We all get really excited about books. And I wondered if there was something inherently problematic in that. Perhaps the whole knowing about reading might be blinding us to some theoretical and pedagogical realities about teaching reading. I referenced Make It Stick: ‘The better you know something, the more difficult it becomes to teach it’ (119)
But there is another, perhaps more important side to the project which considers the relationship between theory and practice in relation to the teaching of English. Robert Scholes in Textual Power articulates this clearly when he says, ‘I know that many teachers feel the concerns of theory are beyond them, or irrelevant to their problems’ (x) argues that ‘practice is never natural or neutral; there is always a theory in place, so that the first job of any teacher of criticism is to bring the assumptions that are in place out in the open for scrutiny’ (x-xi). This notion became one of the central ideas of the research and one of the core components of what ended up becoming a kind of reading manifesto for participants. Scholes, back in 1985 was arguing for an overhaul of English itself, suggesting that ‘We must begin our efforts at rebuilding by asking what we mean when we proclaim ourselves teachers of literature’ (11).
Gibbons, in 2017, asks the same question, following what he identifies as twenty years of political deprofessionalisation in education which has threatened to obscure any requirement for a personal philosophy, ‘to be a genuinely effective teacher of English...one needs to have a clear sense of what English is, what its purpose in the education of children should be, and the ways in which this is best effected in a given classroom, at a given time, with a particular group of pupils’ (3) … without such a foundation...it is someone else’s philosophy or ideology which is ‘merely enacted rather than understood, and in the worst cases it is confused, incoherent and damaging for both teachers and learners’ (4)
Shortly afterwards we were invited to participate in the pilot study for Jo Westbrook and Julia Southerland - the faster read project, the results of which were quite astonishing. Part of the deal of the research was that teachers got some reading CPD and it had a profound impact on those who were involved. Like me, they were asking themselves why they didn’t know certain things about reading processes.
The final ingredient in my thinking was my students’ reaction to my lovely book arch.
Although I kind of find an excuse to put this into any presentation that I do, it’s actually really important to this one, because I spent my half term making it, my children sorting the books in to the right piles, husband and me drilling holes through them and threading them on a specially engineered steel frame, and actually when my Year 11s walked in on the morning they said, ‘Miss, you’ve murdered the books!’. Now, they were joking but it got me thinking about all the implicit messages about reading that are present in our school, and even within curriculum decisions.
We conducted a little bit of an audit and found all sorts of ways that reading was being unintentionally marginalised. I’ll happily talk to anyone over coffee about some of those findings. But to cut a long story short we were in a mess and I wanted to do something systematic to sort it out. I was over the quick fix.
So, with my incredibly dedicated department team of 14, I invited them to join me in a piece of collaborative research that would actually involve all of their school based CPD for the duration of a year - six twilight sessions, in effect, and half of them decided to join in. In simple terms we talked a lot about our reading histories, experiences and identities, and then we read a lot about reading theories and current reading research.
The study considers the theoretical and pedagogical reading knowledge of secondary English teachers teachers and how this might connect both to reading strategies used and habits developed in the classroom at Key Stage Three (KS3) and Key Stage Four (KS4), as well as to students’ volition for wider reading for their own interests and pleasure.
It invites teachers to explore and investigate their own practice explicitly, and, in collaboration with colleagues, to consolidate classroom approaches rooted in the evaluation of their own experiences.
But - It is a relatively small scale study involving seven teachers based within a single institution, over the course of two years of investigation.
As part of that reconnaissance phase we investigated library loans from the school library. Now I am well aware that it is impossible to draw clear conclusions from that kind of measure, but the drop is horrible! (Here I had a slide which showed, for example, over a four year period how Year 7 loans had dropped from nearly 1000 to around 300! And we also surveyed students about their reading habits and attitudes towards reading and got some horrible answers there, too.
And it all came in the middle of stark headlines about declines in reading for pleasure that we are so familiar with. So there was some tiny consolation in the fact that it wasn't just us, but not much.
So, these were the research questions that we came up with. Our aim was to generate a secure methodology for the teaching of literature, underpinned by application of reading theory, in order to increase motivation, develop good wider reading habits and thereby increase reading for pleasure amongst our students.
1. Can instructional contexts and pedagogy in the secondary English classroom and across the Department be developed to improve students’ engagement in reading through teacher engagement with theory and research?
2. What changes in reading habits can be observed as a result of improved teacher knowledge and practice in the English classroom?
After reconnaissance, we moved into the 'manifesto' phase. Having done all this reading and discussing and thinking it was time to implement in the classroom.
All teachers in the study reported that their strategies for teaching reading changed significantly. One noticed, ‘greater emphasis on whole class reading creating an atmosphere where books are talked about’. Another revealed greater confidence and ‘being open with students about my own emotional response to what I am reading them. I have used this as a way of opening out a wider discussion around male emotional literacy! I am also more conscious of talking to students about why I have chosen the texts that they are reading. While engaged in the rapid reading of texts, my conversations with students are more focused on their own responses to the texts, how they are making meaning, how they are predicting future events and "reaching back" to earlier parts of the novels’.
Changes for a third teacher included, ‘extensive use of reading journals and reading jars, more sustained periods of independent reading, discussion to make reading processes explicit, rapid-reading, greater use of visual organisers, digging down into reading histories, consciously valuing reading, more choice about texts, a focus on personal understanding and engagement, and greater use of text as springboard for writing such as found poetry and recreative tasks’.
This is my favourite comment so far. ‘It was nice for it to be recognised in, I suppose a formal or even kind of official way that what you would consider I suppose to be enjoyable classroom practice, gaining some credibility. You know, justifying having a good time in your classroom reading, rather than feeling as though, that something concrete has to be shown for all of this. You know, it’s nice to have what you feel to be right...endorsed.’ I was interested in this legitimacy and agency to do the things that you feel you need to do in the classroom, that make sense and feel right and the idea that research and theory actually supports this. The problem that we always encounter though is the exam at the end of it. No longer burdened by SATS at KS3 but still that dichotomy between reading for pleasure and reading for study. And it is a dichotomy, so this is what our manifesto set out to address.
At its core were two things that we all felt were supremely important. That teachers would move towards being conscious of the theories and ideas that were informing their reading teaching and cultivate the ability to articulate them. Also that discrete time would be created for both reading for pleasure and reading for study,
Then participants were free to choose from three areas - things that they were effectively signing up to do under the broad banners of reading 'more', reading 'better' and reading 'writer'.
Reading MORE is underpinned by Julia Sutherland and Jo Westbrook and the rapid reading team. It isn’t rocket science. If students are going to get better at reading then they need to do more of it. Of both kinds.
Read BETTER includes modelling, teaching strategies explicitly, using guided reading groups and shared talk, but also making access visible, perhaps by: Not keeping an ‘obvious’ record of book distribution for class readers; giving away ‘old’ departmental books for students to keep
Read WRITER involves making reading and writing links continually, teaching one through the other, and going 'meta' whenever possible: Encouraging students to actively identify the moment of ‘entry’ into fictional world in different texts, for example, or to become familiar with some of the theories themselves.
I did begin to go into some other findings, but I shall save those for another blogpost.
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