When the dust settles and the data is counted schools are often left scratching their heads as to why data around engagement with reading and reading age test scores are not improving.  If experience has taught us anything at The Literacy Engine it is that good intentions are not enough to build very much on in education.

Here we are going to take a look at some of the biggest Style strategies and attempt to add some Substance to them.

Key Vocabulary Lists

This is one of those strategies that permeates the education landscape so thoroughly that it would be difficult to find a school that didn’t have some kind of Key Vocabulary initiative built into its Literacy Strategy.  The problem is… what impact does it have?

Subjects diligently pick out key vocabulary from their schemes of work, assemble them into tables, lists and word clouds, stick them in books, on walls, online and even put them onto lesson by lesson slides.  But what happens when you ask students about them?  Can they discuss them in context?  Can they link them to other knowledge?  Can they link them to other words that sound similar?

If you are going to have key vocabulary lists as part of your Literacy Strategy, start by working out what you are going to do with them first.  What is the engagement going to look like for students?  How will you know if students have successfully learnt them?

Competitions

These are nearly always ineffective for one simple reason: most students just aren’t as bothered about them as we think they are.  It is a painful truth but as soon as we accept it we can start to think about what we actually want to achieve from a competition.

If we replace “reading” with something else, let’s say “running”, and then think about the competition we have planned, the flaws become more obvious.  The person who runs the most distance, the person who increases the distance they run the most or the person who goes running most often.  Some students are just never going to go out running no matter how great the prizes are and the competitions end up being rewards for the ones that like running.  Now swap the analogy back to reading and books and reread the paragraph.

Our good intentions end up having the reverse effect and even risk damaging the fragile relationship some students have with reading.

So instead of competitions, think in terms of rewards for milestones.  Completing a phonics intervention course, reading to an adult for 5 minutes, completing a whole book or contributing to a class discussion about a text are all significant milestones.  It takes careful planning to structure the rewards steps so that they are progressive, challenging and have impact but well worth the time investment over an ill fated competition that will engage a limited few.

Calendar of Literacy Events

You know the ones.  National Write a Poem About a Fish Week.  Global Haiku Month.  World Dress Up As Elsa or Iron Man Day.  Every well intentioned literacy group and organisation on the planet seems to have their own version currently.  But here’s the thing: You don’t have to be involved in them all.  You don’t even have to be involved in any of them.  A calendar of well intentioned events that look great on social media is going to do little to increase the literacy of your students unless they are built into your curriculum plans in a meaningful way.

If your students are currently studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream and you suddenly ask them to write a poem about a goldfish for International Goldfish Poetry Month, it probably isn’t going to move their knowledge of Shakespeare forward very much.  Nor poetry.  Nor goldfish.

We will deal with World Book Day when that time of the year looms large again but suffice to say that if your plans for that day don’t involve a significant amount of structured and deliberate reading, you have missed the point.

So instead of taking part in an event that has been crow-barred into the calendar, hold your own.  When you study poetry from other cultures with Year 8, hold your own festival of poetry.  Make it a celebration of both them and what they have been studying.  That will have far more impact than an over crowded calendar of events that look good on social media but have little actual impact on students.

D.E.A.R.

Drop Everything And Read… or more aptly named for some students: Drop Everything And Daydream Whilst Holding A Book Open In Front Of Me.  Let’s start this one with a massive caveat: Independent reading for pleasure is the single biggest indicator of success in education.  Students who read more independently are more successful in school.  So it makes logical sense that getting students to read independently more often must lead to more success right?  Well kind of.  But not really.

For those that find independent reading enjoyable and not too difficult it is great.  20 minutes where they get to plough into the book they are currently reading is brilliant for them.  But what about the student who struggles to decode at word level because of a limited phonics knowledge?  What about the student whose background knowledge is so limited that they struggle to comprehend the text even though they can read the words?  What are they getting out of it?

A far better use of D.E.A.R. time is to actually read to the group.  Even in KS4.  Remove the decoding and background knowledge barriers by reading a challenging text TO the group.  We call it “Interactive Read Aloud” at The Literacy Engine where the adult in the room reads a text, clarifies difficult concepts, explains vocabulary, adds background knowledge, checks for understanding and generally models what it looks and sounds like to be excited and interested by a text.  So instead of D.E.A.R., think about a more structured Drop Everything And Read TO THEM session.

Gimmicks

This is an area where social media has had a massive impact on the proliferation of certain things that have very little impact on learning..  The book corner, decorated as a fantasy forest with artificial plants and vines. Books in vending machines.  Posters adorning corridor walls proclaiming “We Are Readers” with the covers of several books on them.  Stuff that looks good but has little impact on a student’s ability to decode words or comprehend texts.

Now there is a massive caveat hanging over this section.  If you don’t have appealing places to read and students don’t know about books then they are even less likely to pick up a book in the first place.  Any efforts that can be made to improve those things are efforts well spent… within reason.  This stuff is the glaze on top of the cherry that sits on top of the icing on top of the cake.

Is spending funds on a vending machine the best use of that money?  Or would it be better spent on actual reading materials?  A class set of Treasure Island to read with Tutors.  A selection of diversity and inclusion themed books for the library.  A structured non-fiction reading programme for Tutor Time.  If your Literacy Strategy doesn’t provide structured intervention for those that can’t yet decode at word level, doesn’t provide staged and guided reading practice and makes no attempt to develop the disciplinary knowledge and skills needed to access text across the curriculum you should probably be starting there.

Lots of things are done in the name of “promoting a love of books” or “getting students excited about reading” that ultimately have absolutely no impact on either of them.  Experiment for yourself if you are still unsure.  Ask your Year 9 students which book they were inspired to pick up and read when they saw you dressed as Where’s Wally last year.  Check their reading age data after your half termly reading competition.  These strategies are often used with the absolute best intentions at heart however if they feature prominently in your literacy strategy it is probably time to re-evaluate what has an impact and why.