Research School Network: Reading Goals: Developing a Shared Approach to Purposeful Reading Liz Renshaw, Head of English at Kingsbridge Community College, focuses on the importance of setting a clear purpose for reading
—
Blog
Reading Goals: Developing a Shared Approach to Purposeful Reading
Liz Renshaw, Head of English at Kingsbridge Community College, focuses on the importance of setting a clear purpose for reading
Share on:
by Devon Research School
on the
Liz Renshaw
Liz Renshaw is Head of English at Kingsbridge Community College and an Evidence Advocate for Devon Research School.
The ability to read and understand complex text plays a critical role in our students’ success, not only in terms of their academic outcomes but also in relation to their wider life chances on leaving school. Indeed, in ‘Closing the Reading Gap’, Alex Quigley argues that reading is the ‘master skill’ as it is so vital in unlocking access to the curriculum. As such, training teachers of all subjects to use active reading strategies in the classroom, especially to support our most disadvantaged students, has been a key focus over the last year. When developing our CPD to support this, our focus has been on small steps that can be introduced on a general level before being refined by different subject areas to support disciplinary reading. The use of reading goals has been one of our starting points.
Quigley, A. (2020) Closing the Reading Gap. London: Routledge.
What are reading goals?
Put simply, a reading goal is merely a question (or pair of questions) that lets students know what information to focus on as they read a text. So, students reading Lady Macbeth’s initial speeches in an English lesson might be set the reading goal ‘How does Shakespeare show that Lady Macbeth is a powerful character here?’ while a reading episode in an Art lesson might have the reading goal ‘What different influences shaped Gaudi’s work?’. The questions themselves aren’t revolutionary: as teachers, we (usually) have a pretty good idea of what we want students to pick out from the texts we give them to read. What’s important, though, is sharing that focus with students before they read.
Examples of reading goals
Why reading goals?
Setting reading goals links to Recommendation 3 of the Secondary Literacy Guidance Report: ‘to comprehend complex texts, students need to actively engage with what they are reading’. When students are given a focus for their reading before they read, it turns reading into an active problem-solving task. This may be particularly useful for less skilled readers, providing a way of deciding which information to pay close attention to.
Reading goals support a metacognitive approach to reading: students are encouraged to ask ‘What am I looking for?’ and ‘Does this link to the reading goal?’ as they read. Teachers can ‘think aloud’ and model this active reading approach for students before building independence.
Reading goals also focus teachers’ attention on other aspects of the texts they choose to read with students. For example, having a clear, focused reading goal can help teachers to identify core vocabulary to gloss to support comprehension, and can act as a guide towards selecting key sections of a text for paired or choral re-reading as fluency practice.
Planning and Implementation
Introducing our whole-school classroom reading strategy comes after a significant amount of whole-school CPD building up teachers’ knowledge of both the foundations of reading and its importance. This led the way to teachers being receptive to adapting classroom practice and implementing our shared reading strategies.
Initial CPD time was dedicated to exploring the purpose of setting reading goals – why do we do this rather than just ‘read and ask questions’? It was important for teachers to see that implementing reading goals could help students to engage more closely with the curriculum materials that they were reading, support teaching of their subject content as well as broader reading development. This was followed by exploration of examples and non-examples from a range of curriculum areas before providing time for colleagues to work collaboratively in department teams to identify shared texts and create reading goals for them. (See the example of one of our training resources on reading goals below.)
Having this time helped to translate this from a generic strategy into discipline-specific forms. For example, as an English department, we are writing GCSE curriculum materials which teach students to set their own reading goals based on question phrasing, while maths colleagues discussed whether a common reading goal of ‘What maths do I need to use to solve this question?’ might support students to break down the more challenging word problems that often prove difficult.
Uploaded: -
171.7 KB -
pdfOpens in a new tab
Example of a training resource on reading goals (from Education South West)
