When simplicity looks too simple

I had a lovely conversation recently with Amy Staniforth and Stuart Pryke about Iceni Reads, a new whole-school reading initiative. What struck me most was not its complexity, but its simplicity.

Every day, pupils will hear a high-quality, challenging book read aloud by their tutor. And that’s it. There are no worksheets or routine comprehension exercises. There’s no requirement for pupils to read aloud themselves, and no elaborate resource packs. Just an adult, a group of young people and a good book.

I think there is something important here, because in education we can sometimes become suspicious of things that look too simple. If something is going to make a difference, we assume it must involve considerable preparation, lots of activity or something we can collect afterwards as evidence.

But activity is not the same thing as learning. Sometimes the apparent simplicity of a practice is precisely where its power lies.

When an adult reads aloud, pupils can access texts they might not yet be able to read fluently for themselves. Their listening comprehension can take them beyond their independent decoding. That means we don’t have to restrict pupils to material that matches their current reading age. We can take them into richer language, more demanding ideas and worlds they might not otherwise encounter.

The ambition sits in the text, and the support sits in the way pupils encounter it.

This is one of the reasons I think reading aloud is such a good example of high challenge, low threat. Some young people have learnt to associate reading with exposure. They might be asked to read a paragraph aloud, stumble over a word and worry that everyone else has noticed that they are struggling.

So one of the most important messages we can give them is very simple: you don’t need to do anything except listen.

There is still an expectation, because they do need to listen, but they don’t have to perform. They aren’t simultaneously being asked to decode, answer questions, write something down and demonstrate that they have understood. The intellectual challenge remains high while some of the unnecessary threat disappears.

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There is another lesson in the Iceni approach too. Amy and Stuart have thought carefully about what not to add. There might be a quick recap of where the class got to yesterday. There might occasionally be a word which genuinely needs explaining before it becomes a barrier to understanding. But they are resisting the temptation to stop every few minutes and interrogate the text.

Because much of our vocabulary develops through hearing words in context, and much of our understanding develops by staying with the story, sometimes we need to let the text breathe.

I think this principle has implications well beyond reading. One of the difficulties with good ideas in schools is that we keep adding things to them. We find something useful and then attach a worksheet, then a tracking sheet, then some success criteria and then a monitoring process. Then an expectation that somebody produces evidence that it happened!

Eventually the activity surrounding the thing becomes more substantial than the thing itself. It ‘s worth asking occasionally: what would happen if we kept the main thing the main thing?

There is something else about shared reading which is harder to measure but no less important. When everyone is listening to the same story, something collective happens. I’ve been in classrooms where the atmosphere changes. The concentration is different, because everyone is, temporarily, in the same place.

And pupils begin to have something in common to talk about: a character, an event, a line that made them laugh, a book they want to read next.

At Iceni, that is already beginning before the programme has formally started. After hearing that Year 7 would be reading The Hobbit, some pupils asked whether they might read The Lord of the Rings later in their school careers.

That seems to me a rather wonderful sign.

We sometimes talk about building a reading culture as though it requires an enormous strategy. Perhaps part of it is much simpler: put ambitious books into young people’s lives, give them someone who will read those books with them, protect the time, don’t make them prove something every few minutes, and let the reading breathe.

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Until next time

Mary