2 Balancing RfP with reading instruction

It represents a genuine challenge to balance nurturing the will and the skill to read, to raise educational attainment and to create engaged communities of readers. In accountability cultures, the backwash of assessment places pressure on teachers, reducing the time available to support RfP. This often constrains the experience of struggling or less engaged readers, particularly boys (Hempel Jorgensen et al., 2018). Early phonics instruction and the development of children’s comprehension are essential elements of quality provision, but your reading curriculum also needs to encompass dedicated time to foster RfP.

The reading instruction and Reading for Pleasure agendas are not, however, incompatible. Far from it, they are complementary and both require careful planning to ensure a rich reading curriculum.

High-quality phonics teaching involves a structured, systematic approach that is consistently applied. High-quality comprehension teaching involves instruction in the use of a range of strategies so that children have the skills and the knowledge of how to apply them independently. The RfP agenda is more open and less structured than the reading instruction agenda, but it is no less rigorous. When undertaken seriously, responsibly and with strong staff knowledge, a rich pedagogy and sustained commitment over time, children will reap the benefits.

Activity 1 Overcoming challenges to developing a Reading for Pleasure culture

Timing: Allow approximately 15 minutes for this activity

Make a bullet point list of the key challenges you have encountered and that your school faces in fostering a rich RfP culture and ethos.

Next, listen to Shahed Ahmed, executive head teacher of four schools in Multi Academy Trust in Newham London, reflect on the need to retain a balance between the will and the skill and how he achieves this in his school. As you listen, make a note of the key strategies Shahed has put in place to develop a Reading for Pleasure culture, and in particular his attention to sustaining a focus on children’s choice-led reading.

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SHAHED AHMED:

The important thing is not to put the kids off Reading for Pleasure. I think too often in schools, we've kind of really banged on about reading for inference and reading for comprehension and answering the SATs questions, when we lose sight of the fact that the most important thing is that we want to get children reading because they want to read.

They find it fulfilling. And then all of those other things-- comprehension, answering SATs questions-- will come, just because they're wanting to read, and they read a lot out of interest. So it's really, really important to get a balance of both the decoding of reading, reading instruction for comprehension, and Reading for Pleasure balanced, so that you're actually catering for all those things. Getting the children to read for pleasure in my opinion, it's more difficult than teaching them how to read, the mechanics of reading in the first place. Because children have got so many different distractions nowadays. There's the mobile phones, there are computers, there are games, there's television.

The minds in this digital age are pulled in several different directions. So I think first of all that's probably a really big challenge, it's first of all, how on Earth do we get children to want to pick up a text or a reading book and to read?

And the way that we can do that in school, is by having a really strong reading culture in the school. So the way that we've done this, is by making sure there's someone who can lead on that, someone who's really passionate about teaching themselves.

Who can work with teachers across the school, work with the other adults across the school, and help them, because the other challenge is obviously that a lot of our teachers nowadays themselves won't necessarily have all the up-to-date knowledge of children's literature.

What sort of books the children like now, not what we liked, sort of 20, 30 years ago, but what do children really like reading now. So that's another challenge. To get the teachers knowing what it is that children's interests are, and what sort of books they like to read.

And the other thing is money obviously, so you need some funding. You need some funding in order to be able to maybe pay someone to lead the Reading for Pleasure drive in the school, you need to have books both in classrooms, and the real importance of having the library that children can go to.

Obviously they can be going to the public library, but also the library you know, nice library place. It doesn't have to be a room, it could be in a corridor if you haven't got a room, but any space where you can have some really good attractive books facing out for children to be wanting to read, and for teachers to direct them to reading those books.

So it's a combination of kind of really getting that sort of consistent culture going and sustaining it, because you could have some sort of activities, flash in the pan for a few weeks and the whole school is buzzing, and everyone wants to be interested in Reading for Pleasure, come back to it six months later, a year later, and it's all dissipated. So the real challenge is driving this sort of culture, and then sustaining it year in, year out.

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While the goal of reading instruction is for each child to achieve the ‘expected’ standard set by policy makers, the goal of RfP is not only for each child to develop positive attitudes and dispositions towards reading, but for them to become lifelong readers. There is no need to polarise these agendas, but it is vital that headteachers, like Shahed, and classroom teachers recognise their significantly different orientations, the interplay between the skill and the will, and the necessity of working towards a balance between them. In order to assess the efficacy of your finely tuned balance, it is important to monitor and track the impact and influence of your reading curriculum on young readers.

If your goal is to ensure that you develop children who not only can but choose to read, widely and frequently, then addressing the challenges of leadership, staff knowledge of texts and readers, funding and ensuring quality book provision in attractive library spaces are all essential. It is also crucial to allocate ample time for this.

With a clear understanding of the educational and wider social and emotional value of recreational reading, you will want to design your curriculum accordingly and allocate space within the timetable to all four strands of RfP pedagogy as discussed in Session 5. Timetabled spaces can be called: Reading Aloud, Drop Everything and Read (DEAR time), Book Blether, or Relaxed Reading time. But, avoid naming them as ‘Reading for Pleasure’, as this tends to ‘require’ pleasure and suggests this will only occur at that time. In working to create a rich reading ethos and culture across the school, you will find space and time in assemblies, on the playground, in the corridors, in the library and so on where Reading for Pleasure and being a reader can be shared and celebrated.