Part One: active reading strategies
Reading to learn is at the centre of our students’ academic experience. So what we do with a text in the classroom and how we support reading should be at the heart of our pedagogical tool box.
But what pedagogical tools are we going to use to unlock the treasures of the text? And, crucially, what will work for you in your subject?
These are questions I’ve been exploring with staff at my school during our work on disciplinary reading. It’s a fascinating area of learning and teaching and we’ve come a long way in our thinking and practice.
Reading to Learn is a vital strand in our Disciplinary Literacy strategy, foregrounded in both the School Development Plan and department curriculum documents. We also include it as one of our school’s Ten Tenets of Top Teaching, providing this overview,
Reading to Learn
From subject-specific texts – use active reading strategies to develop students’ ability to read complex and challenging academic texts, with explicit attention to disciplinary text features.
This is the first of two blog posts which will focus on the output from our Reading to Learn strategy. I’ll be sharing some resources and explaining briefly the principles that lie beneath the approaches. All the tasks have been used in the classroom. Some have been designed by departments, others have been developed collaboratively with me. They illustrate a variety of ways to tackle Reading to Learn which I hope you will find useful and applicable to your context.
Underlying this work is my aim of building up teachers’ pedagogical knowledge to allow them to make effective choices in the classroom. There is no one-size fits all approach to Reading to Learn as the disciplinary context matters. Teacher expertise and autonomy matter.
It’s an ambitious approach that requires staff to think hard about how to teach reading, and their subject content, as a core offer of their curriculum.
We have a thriving learning and teaching culture which propels us to reflect and think about what we could do better. You can see from the snapshots shared below that we all take responsibility for teaching reading.
Our planning tools
We plan for teaching reading with the ‘Before – During – After’ frame which may be familiar to many of you. It’s a useful support to guide our practice. In the Reading tasks below you should be able to see how this works in practice.
Here’s an outline.
| Before Reading | Spark curiosity and support the reading challenge ahead! For example, make predictions based on titles or visuals, present challenging vocabulary, link to prior knowledge, play some audio-visual material linked to the content. |
| During Reading | Choose a strategy to ensure learners engage actively with the text. Model how you want students to practise this strategy using I do – We do – You do; chunk up the text. |
After Reading | Create an activity to ensure learners process the new information. Complete an information transfer activity using graphic organisers, answer questions, summarise, debate etc. |
| Learning Talk | Give students space to discuss, consider and enjoy the text, building confidence and understanding. This should happen at all three stages. |
A science teacher explained their thinking about this process as,
‘Introduce the text – get learners to interact with it – then do something with the information – then apply what they’re learning to practise and consolidate.’
That’s succinct.
The Purpose of Reading – learning context
But what we want students to do with the text ‘Before-During-After’ will depend on our answers to these questions.
1. Why are students reading this text? What is the purpose of reading it today? How does it fit in the sequence of my lesson?
2. What is the purpose of reading this text within this scheme of learning? How does it fit in a wider cycle of learning and teaching? Within the wider curriculum journey?
Let’s take a look at what all this means in practice. In the snapshots that follow, you can see departments are using texts for different purposes, and are therefore adopting different active reading strategies. Most of the examples demonstrate generic approaches that can work with different text-types, in different subjects.
Snapshot – Music Year 7
All our Key Stage Three lessons start with a Reading activity, either private reading or teacher-led.
This is a piece of subject-specific reading which complements the current Scheme of Learning (SoL). At regular intervals in the term, the Music department set aside time for this type of Reading task.
True / False statements are an excellent way of engaging students in a text and supporting comprehension. You can design them so that students have to use inference skills to work out the answer from the text. Learners highlight evidence in the text to support their answer and correct any false statements. Discussing answers with a partner generates good discussion about the text.
Our EAL Lead has a brilliant tip for making these statements: always put in some outrageous / funny statements to provoke a reaction – ‘well that’s obviously not true because the text says ….’
Snapshot – Geography Year 11
Many disciplinary text-types may be visuals, or a combination of both image and text. This task uses the Reciprocal Reading strategies of predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarising to help students analyse a graph. The visual is taken from a GCSE exam paper.
(Reciprocal Reading strategies are outlined in the Education Endowment Foundation document, Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools).
The task was designed by me to model how these reading strategies can work with a visual. It isn’t necessarily in a classroom ready format – Geographers, please modify!
It was adapted by our Geography staff and used to teach the Demographic Transition Model. They liked it as a scaffold and felt it worked really well.
Snapshot – Blended Learning / Remote Learning
With some urgency, the challenge of lockdown put discussions about the teaching of reading, writing and oracy in the spotlight. We had a Remote Learning Group, practitioners from across the school, who met and had several fruitful conversations about supporting literacy skills in lockdown. There was a significant focus on setting tasks for our SEND learners and establishing what good practice might look like remotely.
One of our talented Lead Teachers designed this template for Reading to Learn (for use with students who didn’t require more specialist support). It was popular across the school as teachers could drop in some text, ask students to complete the sheet and ‘turn’ it in. The following ‘live’ lesson, teachers could go through it and address any misconceptions they had seen.
In English, we adapted the template and used it for introducing poems from our KS4 anthology.
Here’s a completed Science example from a Year 11 student.
Snapshot – Design Technology Year 7
Our DT department’s literacy priority with year 7 learners is to make sure they learn the names of workshop equipment. They have designed a sequence of activities which teach this vocabulary via visuals in combination with their practical experience in lessons. Students have to read images and the words, completing several starter tasks over a series of lessons. Oracy tasks are built into the process too.
Note – to support our struggling readers, we have a whole-school approach to breaking down new words into syllables as you can see here; teachers also have a phonics sound board to use with the small number of students who are receiving a phonics based intervention and who may need further support.
Snapshot – Information Technology Year 7
Reading on a screen places demands on our students that shouldn’t be overlooked. Good readers are able to skim and scan around website pages, flick their eyes up and down, jump from one page to the next – and retain information. This is much more tricky for struggling readers. A priority for ICT teachers is to help students develop skimming and scanning skills.
In these examples, teachers model how to skim and scan to find information, explaining their thinking out loud. They follow-up with short tasks that require students to practise these reading skills, perhaps as a ‘We do’ then a ‘I do’, guided to independent practice. These are also great starter activities.
In the lesson, teachers navigate the website pages ‘live’; the screenshots below are taken from some slides that were made in order to share the strategy with wider staff.
In Summary
These are just a few examples of active reading tasks from across the school which I hope illustrate what I set out at the start,
‘There is no one-size fits all approach to Reading to Learn as the disciplinary context matters. Teacher expertise and autonomy matter.’
I’d like to point out that some of these tasks were adapted for learners who require different support from others. For example, chunked up more, presented with more white space etc.
I work closely with our SENCO and EAL Lead so that staff see how our approaches are mutually supportive, how our messages reinforce each other. We ask staff to consider this question in order to think through the lens of disadvantage when planning.
What different support might I need to offer students with literacy barriers, including our EAL learners?
The output shared here is a result of an ongoing disciplinary literacy strategy involving all staff, departmental literacy leads, designated CPD time and very specific outcomes. At some point I’ll write in more detail about the leadership, vision and strategy.
Part Two – coming soon.
Is there more to say?
Yes. Quite a lot.
While all of the above tasks offer essential reading support for learners, the application of these active reading strategies doesn’t go far enough if it’s the only way we approach Reading to Learn. It leaves other disciplinary aspects of reading unattended to.
Perhaps you’ve noticed something that I’ve mentioned but not yet addressed here.
In Part Two, I’ll cover another way of thinking about texts and the teaching of reading which is more disciplinary and provides an even richer learning experience for our students.
It could be your superpower; I think it might be ours!
Thanks for reading.
You might like to read my post Read like a Mathematician. Or the post about teaching Critical Language Awareness in English. Plenty of food for thought.
Resources: Here’s a Dropbox link to the tasks embedded in the post plus a few more examples. Feel free to download but please do acknowledge the work of my school.
