Research School Network: Tutor Reading: Version 1.0 – why reading aloud may not be enough Part 2 of our blog series covers the launch of Greenshaw High School’s Tutor Reading programme and the lessons learnt.

The first blog in this series explained the reasons why Tutor Reading seems like a promising approach for schools to adopt in order to improve their pupils’ reading ability. This set of reasons led us to introduce a programme of our own in 2018.

This blog details our experiences of implementing tutor time reading over the past four years – what we have done, the problems we have encountered along the way and how we tried to solve them as best we can.

It also outlines the problems that we could not solve, and which made us eventually realise that reading aloud may not be enough to improve all pupils’ reading ability. We would need to do some other things to improve our pupils’ reading, particularly for our weaker readers.

The third and final blog in this series will explain how we evolved our model of Tutor Time Reading to incorporate these additional mechanisms that support reading comprehension, and enabled us to provide a more equitable reading experience for all our pupils.

For now, let’s look at the issues we encountered in the year after launch.

Challenge 1: Too much, too soon

At first we were probably too ambitious, maybe a little too idealistic and definitely a bit too naive.

We introduced tutor reading across Years 7 – 10 in September, a month when there is so much else to contend with.

Not only would it have been better to phase in tutor reading more gradually, it would also have been better to dial down the ambition for the reading curriculum too.

With hindsight, books like Treasure Island are too hard (and possibly too uninspiring) for most teenagers, and while high quality reportage sounds great in theory, it tends not to work so well in practice.

It was probably also a little unwise, at least in our context with nearly 330 pupils in a year group, for every tutor group to be reading a different book at the same time.

Not only does this approach make it hard to centrally provide support, but it is a logistical nightmare managing the handovers and administration.

Challenge 2: Reading fluency

Like other GLT schools, we followed the model where the tutor does the reading and the pupils follow along with their bookmarks (or rulers).

These two seemingly simple ingredients take a lot more time and support to get right than you might think, particularly at scale.

There is a common view that since teachers are graduates, reading aloud to pupils should be easy and even joyous! However, in reality, many teachers are not confident readers, and even some of those who are, still find it hard to read to pupils in this way.

While this is completely understandable, listening to a monotone voice each morning, stumbling over tricky words and complex syntax, is a painful experience.

Fluency is not only one of the active ingredients designed to support comprehension, it is also an essential aspect of what makes reading pleasurable.

Despite providing ongoing training on improving fluency and offering audiobooks as a possible option for less confident readers, we were never able to get to a place where all of our 45 or so tutor groups experienced the same quality of reading each morning.

Challenge 3: Following along with the text

All GLT schools insist on pupils using a bookmark or ruler to track the words on the page as the tutor reads. As with all teaching strategies, this requires a great deal of training and support to get this right in every classroom.

For some, asking pupils to follow written text alongside spoken word overloads working memory and is therefore undesirable. This critique (shared by some of our staff) makes a great deal of sense, as does the belief that pupils should be free to listen along as they see fit.

However, the problem with this approach – which for us is a very big problem – is that in most cases, the pupils who are not actively listening to the text and who are not focused on the reading, are the very pupils who need the reading support the most.

So whilst there is a valid argument about cognitive overload, the need to ensure all pupils are paying attention to the reading – matching sounds to symbols; seeing new vocabulary and spelling – ultimately overrides idealistic notions of the arresting power of stories.

In many cases, where pupils are not following along, they are not sitting there immersed in the imaginary world of the text, but rather not listening at all. Often they are engaged in subtle forms of opting out, packing and unpacking pencil cases, or just sitting there with books closed and minds wandering.

These are often the pupils that our Tutor Reading programme was specifically designed to support – the ones who do not generally read for pleasure and who do not typically have homes where books and reading are championed: those who need to develop their reading.

Training teachers how to address these quiet off-task behaviours in suitably non-evasive and efficient ways – whilst maintaining the continuity of the reading – takes a great deal of time and a set of very clear teachable strategies.

As good as it gets?

Although we faced challenges, we noted and learned from our mistakes in the year following our Tutor Reading programme’s launch.

We provided ongoing training and support for our tutors and got to a place where we could say that most of our tutor groups were being read to each day to a pretty reasonable standard. Most, but not all.

Even in our best tutor groups, where the reading was strong and the engagement was total, there were still signs that not all our pupils were benefiting from the experience of reading daily. Some were still struggling to comprehend the text.

We were doing well but something was missing.

Then the pandemic came along and completely changed our approach to tutor reading.

That is the focus of our next blog.

Phil Stock