Plan For Reading as inspired by Teaching Walkthrus

 Hi there my lovely readers,

Today I wanted to provide a little reflection about elements of teaching that I have recently tried after flicking through a new book that was provided by my school.

There are many sections of 'Teaching Walkthrus' (Sherrington and Caviglioli) that hold value, the first that has peaked my interest as part of being our departments literacy advocate is the section 'Plan for Reading'. This double spread talks through 5 ideas of how you can ensure you embed more reading time into your curriculum without any subject specific context allowing teachers of any subject to adapt them accordingly and therefore it can promote literacy in all lessons in a meaningful and positive manner.

As a school, we have adopted an 'affix of the week' approach in morning guidance. This helps our learners to break down any words they do not understand into its parts, to try and make sense of it independently, such as the suffix 'ology' meaning study of. This technique helps them to know what to do if they don't understand the wording of a text or question immediately. Learners also have to spend time finding words with the 'affix' in them as well as the meaning of those words as part of a group task. This builds their vocabulary but also widens their reading skills too.

One of the ways I have interpreted the 'plan for reading' is to really embed it into your planned scheme of learning. For example, if you start a new topic that may have lots of new key words, this is a fantastic opportunity to offer a reading task that can be discussed as a class and help provide context for those key words. This doesn't necessarily have to be every new topic, or done on a weekly basis, but it could certainly be a strategy for learning to add to your teaching toolkit.

I have recently trialled this in two new topics with my Y9 students. After completing their usual starter tasks while I completed the register etc, I then provided some independent reading as an introduction to their new topic. Once for equivalent ratios, another for multiplying and dividing numbers that are given in standard index form (different topics and weeks of course). I asked learners to read this to themselves, underlining any words / phrases they didn't understand, then after a few minutes as a class we discussed the text, defined some of the terms that learners didn't know and added some context as to how they could be used. Within the text I also provided images of worked examples so that learners could build links between the text and the maths that they would be carrying out later that lesson. Finally to finish of this activity, I asked learners to summarise the text in their own words in no more than 4 sentences. 

I noticed that this seemed to ground the learners straight away, it removed a lot of the 'teacher talk' and promoted learners to grasp concepts on their own. By placing the ownership of the initial learning onto the students, they seemed to behave more positively, and pay more attention. 

After each reading task, I simply needed to go through a few worked examples, and the learners were able to get on with tasks to practice and therefore solidify their learning. I soon realised that more of the learners in the group were able to access their questions more easily without support from myself as they had a true understanding of their learning. It also meant that learners nearer the back of the room had a 'crib sheet' to consult before asking for support, particularly with us all now teaching from the front (Covid-era of 2020).

Towards the end of the week, I then threw a mini definitions test into the lessons, to see if they had remembered anything from the beginning of the week, this was without asking them to prepare/revise and I was happy to see that many of the learners were able to recall the information well. 

Initially, I was sceptical about this technique. I felt that reading prose would take up too much valuable learning time, but it actually worked extremely well. It reduced the pressure on myself at the front of the room, but also gave the opportunity for a class discussion and the sharing of different ideas. This helped learners to piece together the information in a way that was more memorable to them, ask questions about the material and as a result carry out deeper learning than they would achieve from having to listen for 10 minutes and copy down some examples. Learners were more engaged and as a result progressed through the set learning objectives more quickly throughout the lesson.

There are many other ideas I intend to try with different year groups over the coming weeks and months as part of 'plan for reading' but also as part of 'deliberate vocab development' and also 'say it better', so watch this space for further updates and reflections about my teaching practice.