How and why I do ‘whole-class’ reading in my History lessons

As I blogged about previously, we have moved towards using booklets this year. Now, I may have to adjust this as we move forward this year due to the reprographic costs, but for the time being they’ve been a really important part in making teaching post-COVID manageable.

A key part of the booklet strategy has been to incorporate lots of whole class reading into the lessons. By this, I mean, as a class, we read through an extended piece of text while individual students (as well as me) read portions of the text aloud. This has become a massive part of my lessons this year and is a significantly greater proportion of them than in the past.

Now, it’s taken me ages to find out what the best way of doing this looks like. Having taught for over 10 years, and despite every school I’ve worked in having a literacy co-ordinator of some description, I’ve never had any training on what good practice in whole class reading should look like. And yet, for subjects like History and English, where reading is an intrinsic part of the discipline, it feels like something that we should have a very clear view about. Again, this to me is one of those very granular areas of teaching that whole school ‘in the hall’ CPD could tackle very effectively rather than having nebulous, low impact sessions about topics like ‘questioning’.

If I had to guess, I think whole class reading has been seen for a long time as one of those ‘boring’ teacher-led activities that needed to be drummed out of lessons for the sake of more ‘edu-tainment’, hence why such little attention is given to actually learning how to lead it and do it properly.

So, to cut to the chase, below is a basic guide to how I do it. At this stage I once again need to give credit to Jo Facer’s excellent book Simplicity Rules which was invaluable in solidifying my own thinking on this (and much of this is basically cribbed from that book):

• I choose someone to start the class off.
• I will pause that student when we reach a tricky word, or maybe a bit of prior knowledge that they won’t know about, so we can clarify.
• We then resume reading. I will then change the reader at some point. This will be at the end of a sentence, but not necessarily at an obvious ‘change point’ like the end of a paragraph. This is to keep students on their toes and make sure all are paying attention and not having the embarrassment of having to admit they lost their place because they weren’t paying attention.
• I will always make sure students read a good chunk so as not to disrupt the flow too much.
• I will also read bits myself to model what good ‘reading aloud’ should sound like, particularly if the section might be challenging for the class in question (e.g. if I’ve got some academic history that I’m using with a Year 7 class).
• If I’ve got reluctant readers, I might signpost in advance that I’d like them to read something, even if it’s just a sentence.
• If a student mispronounces a word, I will say it and then ask the student to say it back like I did, making sure not to move on until they’ve got it right.
• Adding line numbers can be really useful to facilitate this if you’re reading from text you’ve put together yourself on a Word document (although I tend not to have this as I have narrow margins to save photocopying budget — I teach in Yorkshire, what do you expect?)
• I might stop at the end of a paragraph and ask a student to summarise the key point from a paragraph (a la Tom Sherrington’s excellent blog on ‘checking for understanding’). The benefit of the booklet approach here is that it has freed my headspace to remember to ask better questions and use approaches like this rather than worry about which sheet I’m handing out next, or whether I’m on the right PowerPoint slide, or a million other things that used to distract me in my ‘old style’ of teaching.

Things I don’t do:

• Change the reader every sentence as it disrupts the flow and means that meaning is lost.
• Let students choose readers through methods like ‘popcorn reading’ as that then descends into a whole class popularity contest and distracts from the thing that we’re reading.
• Make the order of the reader predictable so students can figure out when their turn is and what bit they’re reading, so that they lose sight of what’s being read in the moment.
• Let the higher attaining students race off ahead on their own. Even though that’s an obvious impulse, I also remind them that they’ll miss important explanation and clarification if they shoot off on their own.

The benefits of this, to me, are as follows:

• Students benefit from practicing reading aloud — it’s an easy way of developing their public speaking skills a little bit.
• I can quickly assess the reading competency of different students in a fairly basic way, useful intel for me in thinking ahead in my planning for future lessons.
• It’s an easy way of ensuring everyone is encountering all the information they are required to know which will then boost their chances of forgetting less of it (thinking here about Graham Nutthall’s point about students needing to encounter information at least three different times to have a chance of remembering it in the long-term). If I ask students to read independently then there’s a good chance some of them won’t get to that information.
• It avoids the problem I often have when I set students tasks where they need to independently read some text to answer some questions or complete a table, and then loads of students say they can’t find the answer to Q3 because they’ve not bothered to read beyond the first line or two of the opening paragraph (or that they struggle to read beyond that first line or two which is an even bigger problem).
• It’s a really ‘inclusion-friendly’ strategy as it ensures that all learners are able to access potentially challenging material in some form, even if they themselves are not strong readers.

So take the reading below, on Huguenot migration to England for Year 7 pupils, as an example:

When reading through this, I know I’ll need to pause to briefly explain the Reformation and the Catholic/Protestant split as students haven’t encountered this. I’ll probably need to correct their pronunciation of ‘Protestantism’ as Key Stage 3 students always seem to get this wrong. I might get the first reader to stop part-way through paragraph 2. I know words like ‘refugee’ and ‘massacre’ will need some potential clarification. At the end of paragraph 2 I might ask another student to identify the key learning point from that section. In paragraph 3 I know that I might need to pause to briefly explain some bits there about the Glorious Revolution and what ‘Orange’ is in William of Orange because someone will almost certainly ask about that. Later on we’ll need to alert students of the links between Britain’s economic development in the late-17th century and the nascent industrial revolution of the 18th century. All of these opportunities to stop and expand provides a good opportunity for higher attaining students to show off what they know a little bit to keep them hooked into the task.

The reading is then followed up with some written activities inspired as ever by The Writing Revolution. See below:

[Again, a great little tip here is the ‘dotted lines/block lines’ approach to distinguish between when you want notes (dotted) or when you want formal writing (block lines).]

So, whole-class reading is perhaps a very old school approach but one that I think needs much greater status in the majority of classrooms. If you’re a trainee teacher or NQT and you’re sat staring at an hour of teaching that you’re lacking inspiration on how to fill, then this is an absolute winner! Especially in the COVID world, I think it’s a terrific low-prep, high impact activity that you can generate rich discussion and high levels of interactivity.