The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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Reading: re-asserting the potency of the personal

In countries where the language of schooling predominantly focuses on measurable and often oversimplified notions of attainment, children can come to be viewed and discussed in relation to their current standards of performance, rather than as unique individuals.  In such audit-driven cultures the vital personal and affective dimensions of teaching reading and of being a reader can easily become obscured, and the potential for richly reciprocal reader relationships between children and children and between children and teachers reduces.

Yet it is possible to build human connections between readers and texts and to make the life-to-text and text-to-life moves which are core to reading in the real world. A balance needs to be wrought between teaching the skills of decoding and comprehension and fostering reading for pleasure. Such reading is essentially volitional, intrinsically motivated, child-directed and choice-led. It has making meaning at its heart.

In order to build reciprocal communities of readers who can and do choose to read and who think and talk about what they are reading, I believe we need to re-assert the potency of the personal in reading. Personal emotional responses include care, concern, sympathy, sadness, excitement, exhilaration, fear, boredom, anger and indifference, to name but a few.  Our responses motivate us as readers to persevere and to read on, or to exercise our rights as readers and step away. Either way our responses often prompt us to talk to others about our reading, whether it’s a worrying news item, an amusing text message, a surprising Facebook entry, or an unnerving novel. Reading opens up conversations between readers about their views and values, lives and experiences, it enables us as humans to consider who we are, what we and others stand for and what we feel about personal, social and cultural issues.

Such conversations cannot be left to chance. They are a crucial element in a rigorously planned and responsively executed reading for pleasure pedagogy that creates communities of readers. Pedagogy is one of CPRT’s eight priorities. Indeed as CPRT asserts, teachers need to

Develop a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance, with a particular emphasis on fostering the high quality classroom talk which children’s development, learning and attainment require.

But how is the profession to develop such a pedagogy for volitional child-led reading? And how can this be planned for and integrated into the daily fabric of school life when, as a deputy head told me this week ‘It’s not assessed, so frankly we find it hard to give any time to it’. While the profession undoubtedly wants to avoid ‘measuring the pleasure’, volitional reading demands careful nurturing, ongoing invitations to engage, imagine and be inspired. A planned reading for pleasure pedagogy is needed, based on evidence and principle. The UKLA research project Teachers as Readers suggests that this encompasses four core elements:  enticing reading environments (physically and socially), a rich read aloud programme, the provision of quality time for independent choice-led reading, and space and time for informal talk about texts .

In the UKLA study, many of the teachers (from 27 English schools) started by conducting an audit to determine the opportunities currently on offer for children to read for pleasure and the space made available to talk about their choices with one another and with teachers.  Most found that adults were the ones controlling the reading on offer to children. In particular, talk about texts was confined to the official literacy curriculum, to guided and shared reading where children’s responses were commented upon and evaluated according to the daily learning objectives. There were few real spaces for non-assessed relaxed reading conversations (in pairs or small groups), and few opportunities to talk informally about children’s responses (to literature or non-fiction), to discuss personal preferences, home practices or what being a 21st century reader might involve.

I fear this is still the case in many schools where literature is seen as a resource for literacy, staff are not encouraged to widen their pedagogic reading for pleasure repertoires and lip service is paid to children’s intrinsic motivation as readers. Too often extrinsic motivation rules. This may be evidenced through ongoing and high profile tests and targets, school-wide competitions about reading at home, and awards for those children who read higher numbers of books.  In such schools limited talk and creative interaction around texts is likely to be heard, constraining personal responses to reading.

In the Teachers as Readers project, teachers’ talk about self-chosen children’s books was initially dominated by a professional focus: they concentrated on what literacy objectives the book was good for (e.g. teaching character, plot, setting and specific language and literary devices) and often talked about how long the book would sustain a literacy focus and the amount of work it could generate. This talk was largely at the expense of mentioning the content or meaning of the narrative, or of how individual books affected them personally or might affect children.

In complete contrast, when the teachers discussed their self-chosen adult books, meaning and affect were foregrounded; personal views and emotional responses were voiced about both fiction and non-fiction and emerging social, cultural or moral issues were spontaneously discussed.  The teachers shared myriad connections to their own lives and in the process got to know more about one another – their values, families and life histories for example. This disconnect between talking about children’s texts and their own adult reading material was significant. It was fed back to the teachers, who began to re-consider what counts as reading in their homes and schools. Gradually, as they began to  read much more children’s literature, they came to talk about it as worth reading for its own sake – to be experienced, enjoyed (or not) and debated. Recognising that affect and engagement were crucial in motivating their reading, the practitioners began to share their own responses to texts in class and gave increased attention to children’s personal and emotional responses. They also set considerably more time aside for reading aloud.

Reading aloud offers an invitation to children to engage, imagine, predict and participate in the classroom community of readers; though much will depend on the quality of the text, who chose it, and the teacher’s capacity to bring it vividly to life, as well as whether it is read as a precursor to related writing activities.  It is not an ‘extra’ to be included if time allows or the children’s behaviour is deemed satisfactory.

This crucial pedagogic practice has personal, social and cognitive benefits and offers an externalised model for silent, independent reading, enabling children to experience the patterns, language and tunes of texts which they could not yet read independently.Significantly, the shared experience of being read to draws the class together in a kind of bonding time and establishes ‘texts-in-common’ whichprompt interaction. Other ‘texts-in-common’ emerge when teachers and children and children and children recommend reading material to each other; such two-way recommendations also trigger conversations and connections. Whilst these chats may happen in the interstices of the school day, making time to touch base with others and voice your thoughts and feelings about a text helps build connections between readers. These opportunities for personal interaction, reader to reader, offer invaluable support and help create a reading culture.

Reading Teachers – teachers who read and readers who teach – can often draw on a wide repertoire of children’s literature and other texts and their knowledge of the young people as readers. They are better positioned to reach out to individual learners and share texts that will interest and intrigue them, this is a much underrated professional skill which can make a profound contribution to the development of individual readers. Their classrooms are often characterised by informal text talk and book gossip as readers swap, recommend, debate and discuss their reading. Additionally Reading Teachers may foster wider human connections and empathetic responses to the plight of others. As Neil Gaiman, the children’s writer, notes:

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

EmpathyLab, an exciting new social action start-up led by Miranda McKearney (ex CEO of the Reading Agency), is exploring ways to nurture children’s empathetic innerstanding through words and stories. As the team argue, children’s social and emotional skills are increasingly recognised as vitally important for their wellbeing; they represent the basis of sound relationships and a trusting classroom ethos and can be fostered through talk and interaction about texts, potentially leading to social action. Their team’s work with schools has myriad connections to CPRT’s aims for primary education. As Robin Alexander’s recent CPRT submission to the House of Commons Education Committee reminded us, these aims focus on the individual – their wellbeing, engagement and autonomy, and on the relationship between self, others and the wider world – in particular encouraging respect and reciprocity and foregrounding the role of dialogue in learning.

Reciprocity and interaction are key markers of reading communities. In these, teachers share something of themselves as readers and as humans and make the time to find out more about the children and their everyday reading lives. They might do this through undertaking Reading Rivers (where children and teachers create collages of their recent reading in all its diversity), and build upon the variety documented by widening the range of reading material welcomed in class.  When children are invited to bring something of their reading selves to school, are offered engaging spaces and dedicated time to read their self-chosen texts, and experience texts read aloud evocatively, then the boundaries between reading in school and beyond begin to blur and reading discussions become more shared. In such communities there is a high degree of informal interaction around reading and a sense of reciprocity – of giving and receiving as readers, and as individuals.

We need to re-assert the potency of the personal, the essential reciprocity of human relations and the significance of affect and interaction in reading and in learning.

If you are interested in these issues, do consider joining UKLA’s research symposium Reading for Pleasure: What next? at the OU Camden, London, on March 23rd 2016. Cutting-edge research will be shared from colleagues in Oslo, Sheffield, Nottingham and Manchester, and there will be opportunities to debate research, policy and practice with the CEOs of BookTrust, the Reading Agency, the Reader Organisation and the NLT.

For other CPRT blogs by Teresa Cremin click here and or/download CPRT’s book Primary Colours.

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Learning from difference

Based on a review of research evidence, our forthcoming report, commissioned by the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, concludes that current national policy is limiting the capacity of the English primary education system to respond to pupil diversity. In so doing, it is failing to build on many promising practices that exist in schools.  As also shown in CPRT’s recent report on educational inequality from Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen, all of this is tending to create further levels of segregation within the system, to the particular disadvantage of learners from minority and economically poorer backgrounds. The report provides an analysis of the factors that are creating these difficulties, taking into account underlying population diversity and the impact of recent changes.

The primary school system has, of course, long had to respond to demographic change – not just inward migration, but within-country migration and population growth. Likewise, schools themselves have had to find ways of educating children from very different backgrounds within the same institution and in the same classroom. Indeed, the most apparently homogeneous classroom is in fact diverse simply because no two children are identical in educational terms.

The most overt markers of difference, such as ethnicity or social class, are simply indicators of the underlying diversity that characterises schools and classrooms. Rapid changes in patterns of diversity, whether they are attributable to migration, population growth, gentrification or any other cause, are important because they present immediate challenges – and opportunities – to the school system. However, the presence or absence of such changes does not alter the fundamental task of schools to educate children who are different one from another.

We believe that it is encouraging that schools now enjoy an enhanced level of autonomy that provides space for them to determine their own responses. They are less beholden to central initiatives, less constrained by detailed curriculum and pedagogical guidance, and more likely to be operating independently of local authority oversight. There are, therefore, undoubtedly opportunities for schools to respond to the diversity of their populations in creative ways. However, our concern is that national accountability requirements are as powerful as ever, limiting creativity and risk-taking by their focus on a narrow conceptualisation of the purposes of education.

We are also concerned that alongside the reduction of external constraints there is far less of the support to schools that went with them. Schools are more likely to be working in isolation, or as part of academy chains, federations and other networks that may or may not provide effective support. Moreover, whilst school budgets have been protected, they have failed to keep pace with rising costs, and the distribution of ‘additional’ funding does not match the educational challenges facing schools as their profile of pupil diversity expands. In this context, much depends on what individual head teachers choose to do – and what the accountability systems will allow them to do. As a result, the school system is a more fragmented one, in which substantial social segregation is reflected and reproduced.

In the report we go on to explain that despite the barriers created by national policy there are primary schools that find creative ways of responding to diversity. In order to build on these promising developments, there is a need for radical new thinking that will encourage greater collaboration and experimentation across the education service. This requires a recognition that differences can act as a catalyst for innovation in ways that have the potential to benefit all pupils, whatever their personal characteristics and home circumstances.  In terms of national policy, this requires a move way from narrow definitions of the purposes of education as criticised by the Cambridge Primary Review, CPRT and, most recently, in Robin Alexander’s submission to the current House of Commons Education Committee enquiry into the purposes and quality of education in England.  There is also a need to create a system in which schools are no longer divided one from another, and from their local communities.

With this in mind, we propose a different way of responding to learner diversity, one that is viewed in relation to what we describe as an ‘ecology of equity’.  By this we mean that the extent to which pupils’ experiences and outcomes are equitable is not dependent only on the educational practices of their schools.  Instead, it depends on a whole range of interacting processes that reach into the school from outside.  These include both the ways in which the local school system operates to support or undermine individual schools, and the underlying social and economic processes that shape the experiences of children and their families.

This suggests that in responding to pupil diversity it is necessary to address three interlinked sets of factors that bear on the learning of children.  These relate to: within-school factors to do with existing policies and practices; between-school factors that arise from the characteristics of local school systems; and beyond-school factors, including the demographics, economics, cultures and histories of local areas.  In the report we consider each of these in turn in order to develop our argument as to what needs to happen in order to strengthen primary schools’ capacity for responding to pupil diversity.

The introduction of this new thinking has major implications for national policy. In particular, it means that those who are closest to children and their communities must have the space and encouragement to make decisions about how all their pupils can be best educated. Crucially, it must allow practitioners to explore new ways of working without fear of the consequences if outcomes are not immediately improved. It should also encourage greater collaboration between schools in order to make the best practices available to a wider number of pupils. This, in turn, requires the development of an intermediary layer capable of interpreting national purposes at the local level; of promoting the networking of schools with each other and with other agencies; and able to learn from creative developments at the local level and feed them back into national policy.

Mel Ainscow wrote this blog in collaboration with Alan Dyson and Lise Hopwood. All three work at The University of Manchester Institute of Education.  Their jointly-authored CPRT research report ‘Primary schools responding to diversity: barriers and possibilities’ will be published early in 2016. It complements the CPRT report from Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen ‘Mind the Gap: tackling social and educational inequality’ which we published last September. 

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Cambridge Primary Review Trust - Email: administrator@cprtrust.org.uk