Reading Within the Curriculum
While Reading lessons are built into the curriculum time, the academy also have two Teaching and Learning techniques, linked to The Barrington Way, to ensure that students are given regular opportunities to practice reading in all subject areas.
The two techniques are:
- Accountable Independent Reading
- FASE Reading
Accountable Independent Reading
“Reading independently is ultimately how students read on exams, in college, and in their adult lives, so it is especially important to give them lots of practice in doing so.” Doug Lemov.
By providing students with opportunities to read independently in lessons, teachers are preparing students for academic success in all subject areas – because all subject areas require some independent reading to be successful – as well as being successful in life after Bishop Barrington.
How Accountable Independent Reading work at Bishop Barrington
For Accountable Independent Reading to be successful, there are three requirements:
- 1st: teachers will assign smaller amounts of text to read or shorter durations at first, which can be increased over time when teachers know that students are confident at Accountable Independent Reading.
- 2nd: Students’ understanding will then be assessed to find out how effectively / how much students have understood.
- 3rd: Reading will be embedded into the lesson, as a tool used to help students make progress and learn, so that it is not a separate activity, but it links and connects the rest of the lesson, and to ensure that reading is embedded in the curriculum.
FASE Reading
“Giving students, especially developing readers, frequent opportunities to read aloud in addition to reading silently is a great way to hold students to account when they are reading… When students read aloud, they are able to practice fluency, decoding, and most of all prosody-the art of using rhythm, intonation, and stress to connect words into meaningful phrases.” Doug Lemov.
“FASE Reading…is a system for student read-aloud that maximises the value and viability of this crucial activity, allowing you to build on students’ fluency and enjoyment of reading”. Lemov
- F – Fluency: “reading and comprehension require fluency”.
- A- Accountability: “the only way we can truly know if a student is reading is if they are reading out loud.”
- S – Social: reading provides a shared experience and contributes to “building a sense of community and belonging”.
- E – Expressive: “to read aloud well if to make meaning audiable, to breathe life into a text…”
How FASE Reading works at Bishop Barrington
Before the lesson, teachers will read the text and determine if there are any barriers to students’ understanding the extract or passage and plan who their readers are going to be. For example, if there is a particularly complex part of the extract or passage, would it be best for the teacher to model this section.
During the lesson, teachers will ask students to read out loud, one by one, following an unpredictable pattern. Teachers will keep the duration unpredictable and must not reveal the identity of the next reader. This will prevent students from opting out.
