4 Teachers’ knowledge of children’s reading practices

Research has found that when teachers develop their knowledge of children as readers and are aware of their interests and out-of-school reading practices and preferences, it helps them to foster children’s reading and build reciprocal and interactive communities of readers (Cremin et al., 2014). Using student voice to promote reading engagement for the economically disadvantaged, and indeed all students, is also of considerable value (Ng, 2018).

Katharine Young is Assistant Head Teacher at Elmhurst Primary School in London. Elmhurst has been developing a culture of Reading for Pleasure for several years and won the ‘Whole School Award’ in the Egmont Reading for Pleasure Awards 2019. In the following video, Katharine discusses the benefits of educators getting to know children as readers.

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KATHARINE YOUNG:

We think it's really important to allow our teachers time to get to know their children as readers, because if they don't, they won't be able to make sure that they're making tailored recommendations for that child, you won't be able to have any idea whether the child is reading something that is the right thing for them. We want to make sure our teachers put the right books in the right children's hands wherever possible.

I think sometimes teachers know children's reading proficiency quite well. They know their test scores, they know how proficient they are at answering questions, but they don't always have that in-depth knowledge of children's reading habits at home.

And sometimes it can be quite fixed on books, sometimes it doesn't acknowledge the huge variety of reading that happens, and sometimes I think particularly in our setting, we sometimes think that some of our pupils come from a quite reading poor background. But actually when you find out more about home reading, you realise actually there's lots of oral storytelling going on, or children are reading a lot online.

And we need to make sure that our teachers know that about our children, so that they can build on that, and make sure that those recommendations really push children out of their reading comfort zones, as it were.

So to allow our teachers to get to know children's reading practices, we have lots of different strategies. Some of them are formal, in that we insist that all teachers do them, and others are much more informal.

So for example, every term we do a reading survey, and in that reading survey children will answer questions about their reading in written form, and teachers will conference with every child in the class to get to know their children better. It means that there is a minimum expectation of what teachers know about their children's reading practices. On top of that though, we will always encourage further exploration into children's reading practices. Often informal, we encourage lots of informal book talk, not as a kind of scheduled book presentation about something that a child's read at home necessarily, but more just a snatched conversation, just in registration or in the corridor even. And we encourage that kind of peer-to-peer recommendations too, and teachers will observe that as time goes on. We've also done in the past things like Reading Rivers, a 24-hour reading, and again, that starts to help teachers and children to recognise the reading that they do, even if it's not a book-based bit of reading.

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Finding ways to share and discuss children’s everyday reading practices will prompt both you and the children to broaden what counts as reading. It will also help you pay more attention to the individual choices and preferences of young readers and thus be able to offer more finely tuned support for the development of positive reading identities as discussed in Session 2.