6 Pedagogies and classroom practices

The challenge for educators is to teach children how to read as well as to teach children to want to read. Reading for Pleasure is a nuanced aspect of the curriculum; there are no educational programmes or set activities through which to teach children to enjoy reading. However, instead, a love of reading can be nurtured through a broad, but coherent, strategy that focuses on developing children’s intrinsic motivation.

In the Teachers as Readers (TaRs) project, Professor Teresa Cremin and colleagues from The Open University (2014) worked with 27 schools in England across a year researching volitional reading. As a consequence they developed a Reading for Pleasure framework that impacted upon children’s desire to read.

Watch the following short video, in which Professor Cremin describes the research findings.

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Transcript: Video 1

TERESA CREMIN:

Well, I've been involved in several research projects and led some of them that look at Reading for Pleasure in various ways. The two I want to profile here would be interlinked studies. Phase one was about a large national survey of 1,200 teachers in England. And what that explored was what they read for pleasure and what they knew of children's literature. The key finding from that was that their knowledge of children's literature was very scant, very limited, insufficient arguably to develop readers in school and develop children who want to read for pleasure.

So our second study worked alongside teachers-- alongside 45 teachers from 27 schools and we explored what difference it makes if a teacher has a wider subject knowledge, a richer repertoire of children's literature and other texts. What difference it makes if those teachers position themselves as reading teachers, teachers who read, and readers who teach and who explore that interplay. What difference it makes when those teachers have a developed knowledge of their children as readers in class.

And the findings also suggested that a significant taking responsibility for a Reading for Pleasure pedagogy was also impactful on young people's attainment in reading but also their pleasure in reading. And if those kind of strands of our findings were woven together, we found that in those classrooms teachers developed richly reciprocal communities of readers where there was give and take, conversation around reading, sharing of texts, and pleasure in it. We summarised it in this book around reading for pleasure and tried to articulate the key findings from that work in here.

End transcript: Video 1

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As Professor Cremin explained in the video, the research found that in order to effectively develop children’s Reading for Pleasure, teachers need to focus on:

• their knowledge of children’s literature and other texts
• their knowledge of children as readers
• a Reading for Pleasure pedagogy, comprising:
  • social reading environments
  • reading aloud
  • informal book talk
  • independent reading time
• themselves as reading teachers
• reciprocal and interactive reading communities.

An effective Reading for Pleasure framework extends beyond the school gates as the ultimate goal is to encourage and enable children to choose to read in their own free time. To make this possible, schools, parents, librarians and community organisations must work together to build positive, reciprocal and interactive reading communities; you will read more about nurturing readers in homes and communities in Session 7.

The research discussed so far in this session demonstrates the connection between Reading for Pleasure and educational attainment. However, the benefits of being an engaged reader in childhood reach far beyond academic outcomes. You will examine some of these wider benefits in the next section.