Blog Post by Natasha Wallett
“Put up your hands if you enjoy reading”, I asked at the start of the year with a year seven class. No response. If ever there was a prime example of a ‘tumbleweed’ moment, this would have been it. And yet, we know there is so much to enjoy and learn from reading!
As an English teacher I have grown used to questions of “why do we need to learn about Macbeth?” or “what will this poem teach me?” In fact, on Friday, I was asked by someone in the same year seven class as above, “how will this help me to become a paramedic?” My answer varies depending on the question, but it always focuses on why it’s enjoyable to read and how being a ‘reader’ in itself makes for success, whatever aspirations you have!
For students, reading is something that is completed in lesson in order to pass an exam. Often, and I know from experience, elements of fun or pleasure can sometimes be removed owing to the fact that we analyse it to death! No matter what subject we teach, however, reading well is crucial to our students’ success, both in school but also beyond it.
And so, this year in English, we have trialled a weekly ‘reading for enjoyment’ lesson to combat the sense of boredom students sometimes feel when we read. In this lesson, students are read to along with elements of independent and group reading. There is no ‘exam question’ to answer at the end- purely discussion and questioning about character, plot and their overall perception of the book. Reading progression, instead, can be measured through STAR testing, which calculates reading progression in terms of students’ reading ages termly. In this lesson, we hope to reframe students’ opinions of reading as something that is not dull and tedious, but something that can be exciting and interesting. We want students to ultimately build character through their study of it.
So far, the responses to these lessons have been positive. Students ask, when coming to lesson “are we reading today?”, and when we aren’t, there are sighs! To get students excited about being read to, and about choosing books and discussing books, is really something we can be excited about too.
Alongside the reading lesson, a weekly intervention for our weaker readers has been taking place in year seven. In these sessions, enjoying reading itself has been a focus to try and challenge perceptions of what it means to read for pleasure. We know that students who find things challenging are sometimes prone to giving up. We felt that we needed to address this as early as possible to give our students the best possible levels of support with reading. This, we hope, will build more confident and skilled readers as they progress through education.
The intervention session aims to support students through reading collectively in small groups. The environment is supportive and provides space for discussion and clarification where needed. It also allows for tailored and targeted support for our readers. Students have been positive about this and see it not as an extra English lesson but more of a ‘club’, where we support, discuss and enjoy!
Whilst there are no quick fixes in terms of supporting and developing reading amongst our students, we hope that the strategies we are using to promote reading for enjoyment in and out of lessons will support and challenge our students academically, but also help them to build character and skills for life after school!
I hope that over time, asking students if they enjoy reading will be less of a ‘tumbleweed moment’ and more of an enthusiastic “yes!”
