On October 13th 2018, I had the opportunity to present at a conference which was specifically for ‘new’ presenters. Thanks to @HeyMissSmith, I was able to share the work I have done at my school, Hamble Primary in Hampshire, and also share my beliefs around the teaching of comprehension and why (in my opinion) some children struggle with reading. And by reading here, I mean the comprehension of the text, not decoding.
Here, I have outlined briefly why I believe this is important alongside the presentation that I gave at the New Voices conference.
When we teach writing, we know how to talk through the metacognitive processes so that children can hear our thoughts and so learn what their brains need to do in the generation of a piece of text (how to choose vocabulary, structure sentences etc – we model how to make these choices). What do we do for reading? We ask questions about a text. When a child can’t answer that question, be it inference, retrieval, summarising… what do we do? Point out where to find it in the text? Tell them what an appropriate answer would be? When we then give that same child a new piece of text, how have we helped them so that they can answer the same sorts of questions?
I spoke to teachers and was getting the same responses – unseen texts are a problem. Children can answer questions well if they know the text, have discussed it in class or with a friend, if they are familiar with the story or issue being written about, but then give them a new text and, without any intervention or discussion, they struggle. Not all children of course; fluent readers, maybe the top 20% of a class, will be fine. But the majority could not draw upon any strategies, skills, that help them with comprehending texts.
So I decided to try to do something. Change the way we think about how we teach comprehension. I believe that teachers need to model the mental processes that we use as fluent readers (and we don’t even realise that we are doing these) so that children have a bank of strategies they can draw upon and apply to any text to help them understand what they are reading.
This is what I wanted to share with fellow educators and, thanks to New Voices, I did.
How to teach the skills needed for reading – New Voices Presentation
Subsequent blogs will feature the specifics of how we teach each of the comprehension skills, how I made this accessible to all the teachers who were to be delivering this, and lots of ideas for tasks which help children practise applying these skills.
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