Supporting children to learn to read is a serious business that we know quite a lot about.
All the evidence suggests that effective teaching starts with being responsive to how a pupil reacts to what is happening in the classroom. We might call this responsive teaching, data-driven instruction, adaptive teaching or even intervention.
Regardless of the terminology used, what matters is that schools have a systematic, well-described process in place for supporting all pupils to develop their reading skills.
Within this systematic approach, there will be different pedagogies and approaches to teaching, depending on the age and phase of the pupil. But, in general, a systematic process might start by adjusting the classroom provision a little for a couple of weeks or providing extra short bursts of small group teaching.
Next we might decide that using a scripted intervention would be beneficial and use trained teaching assistants to deliver these programmes with pupils. After that, we might provide a one-to-one programme of support for a pupil or work with specialists to ensure that the provision is appropriate.
Interventions to support reading
Regardless of which adaptations to teaching we put in place, two basic principles apply.
Firstly, there is absolutely no point in providing an intervention of any sort, at any age, unless it targets the area that the pupil finds challenging. This means that we need to carefully gather information that will help us to understand what those areas are.
Assessment data will be valuable, perhaps from a standardised and norm-referenced assessment (but beware of using reading ages), as will observations of the pupil as they read aloud, and their responses to reading tasks.
As a rule of thumb, we also have some indication of the types of challenges that pupils may face at different ages, and this can help to fine tune our information gathering.
For example, for many children starting school, extra support to develop their spoken language may be appropriate. Perhaps they find it hard to distinguish between sounds in speech (known as phonological awareness) or to follow a narrative or instructions. For many of these children, an adjustment to the classroom environment (with more songs, rhymes and story-telling) will be adequate to help them to tune into the sounds in speech and access whole-class phonics teaching.
In contrast, by Years 7 and 8, it is more likely that students will need support with understanding text - particularly if they have not reached age-related expectations in Year 6. In this case, the Year 7 and 8 students may benefit from rich dialogue around texts to develop their understanding of written language - perhaps using a process.
The second basic principle is that, when considering the effectiveness of an intervention, there are two possible positive outcomes. The first positive outcome is that the pupil thrives within the adaptation and makes good progress. The second positive outcome is that although the pupil does not thrive, we now know far more about that student and can fine tune the adaptations to teaching further.
This is known as a “response to teaching” or “response to intervention” (RTI) approach. It is a well-recognised pathway to providing support for pupils, in a systematic manner, which gives a structure for the identification of learning needs that the classroom does not accommodate.
With these two principles in mind, we can structure our teaching with the pupil at the centre of the decisions that we make. Our students deserve no less.
Megan Dixon is an associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University
