Chapter 5 Creatively engaging readers in the later primary years

RESPONDING TO READING
Children’s personal and critical responses to a text are supported through the kinds of teaching outlined earlier. Creative teachers seek to enable children to become readers who ask questions of texts, and use each other and their understanding of the world to make multiple interpretations and personal connections. Such readers are enticed and prepared to imagine, to inhabit and to interrogate what they read and as a consequence learn to appreciate and understand the texts they read on several levels. Response to text can involve talk, drama, art, dance, photography, writing and use of multiple media to convey emerging meanings. Any discussion prompts and questions which teachers use need to focus on engagement and response first, leading to interpretation and consideration second. This will help to ensure that the pleasure principle is retained and reading fiction engages children as enquirers and problem-solvers. Teachers can also engage learners in discussion through Chatterbooks clubs, which, facilitated by The Reading Agency (TRA) ,can be run in schools or by encouraging them to join the Summer Reading Challenge again run by the TRA in local libraries, though schools too can get involved in order to avoid the summer dip in reading performance. See Chapters 4 and 8 for more details of response activities. Developing children’s response to increasingly complex texts across the years is not an optional extra but an essential element of fostering reflective, creative and critical young readers.

Formative assessment of a child’s reading and their responses is also essential element. This goes well beyond just ‘hearing a child read’ and putting a tick or comment in a record book. It includes oral feedback and might include self-assessment, peer assessment, such as reading partner comment books, and parents’ comments and observations. Encouraging children to self-assess and compare this with teacher assessment provides areas for discussion; any gaps between the two can identify next steps. Assessment of reading should also publicly acknowledge and celebrate reading success and endeavour, be it via a Mexican wave, a ‘happy teacher’ postcard sent home, a certificate in assembly or a book award.

Involving children in reading assessment is valuable, as the following example demonstrates. Simon was a fluent reader in the sense that he was reading at an age appropriate level. His automatic word recognition skills were good and he seemed to enjoy reading, but he read aloud in a monotone. His teacher taped him reading aloud, played it back to him and asked him what he thought. He was quick to identify that ‘I read in a boring voice’ and agreed a target with his teacher ‘to read with expression and pace’. His teacher ensured he had lots of opportunities to hear fluent expressive reading, including hearing her read aloud to the class, listening to story CDs, watching stories enacted on screen and matching him with a reading partner who modelled fluent reading. She gave him the chance to reread familiar texts to reduce some of the cognitive demand, build familiarity and deepen understanding of stories. She planned activities where he would have a purpose for using expressive reading in context, such as reading play scripts, taking part in choral poetry readings with actions, creating ‘radio broadcasts’ such as commentating on a playground football match, recording stories for younger children and so on. Simon often had an audience and having listened to his own recorded performances, he discussed his progress with his teacher. His improved oral reading was celebrated by his performance of an action poem in assembly, one which he performed with expression and passion.
Increasingly, children like Simon are being assessed against targets linked to specific learning goals/objectives, making the criteria for assessment clear and giving feedback against the target (Black et al., 2003; Clarke, 2005). Such an approach aims to help a child see where they are in their learning and how to move forward. Specific feedback such as this is important, but teachers must guard against teaching to the target and criteria in such a way that they limit the range of possible ways of learning and demonstrating that learning. A child’s target of ‘I can recognise how characters are presented in different ways and show this using evidence from the book’ could be taught and demonstrated in many ways: through discussion, role-playing characters and drawing or making puppets of the characters. It could also involve enacting a scene, through identifying ‘show not tell’ passages and talking about what they mean, and making character fact files, character pockets and so forth. Teachers must also be alert to the potential danger that in focusing on one or two targets, they miss other significant evidence of learning. A child may demonstrate an understanding of simile in their reading even though that is not their target.
In creative classrooms, teachers will balance the focused nature of targets with a commitment to an engaging, playful and wide ranging exploration of texts which foster skilled assured and independent reading.