Reading Recharged
Carousel guided reading and whole-class reading Carousel guided reading is a strategy for teaching reading that has been used in primary schools for decades. As a teacher, you will most likely be familiar with this time-honoured approach and may even remember being taught to read in this way when you were at school. Carousel guided reading aims to help children become confident, independent readers, and develop the seven core reading skills mentioned in the introduction to this book: retrieval, inference, summarising, understanding vocabulary, prediction, commentating and authorial intent. Traditionally, guided reading would take the form of small-group instruction and be highly differentiated based on reading level and individual needs. Carousel guided reading, when done properly, involves much role modelling and interrogation of a text. More recently, however, a new form of guided reading has been growing in popularity in UK classrooms, known as ‘whole-class reading’ or ‘whole-class guided reading’. Whole-class reading, as I’ll be referring to it, has very similar aims to guided reading, but has subtle yet significant differences. In this section, I’ll explain the two approaches in a little more detail and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each.
What is carousel guided reading? In carousel guided reading sessions, the teacher focuses on teaching reading skills to a different group of children each day. Sessions take place daily, often in addition to a literacy lesson on writing. Children are usually grouped into their reading levels and taught in these groups. While the instructor focuses on one particular group, the rest of the class is engaged in a carousel of reading activities that are often differentiated for their abilities. The activities are age- and ability-appropriate. For example, in a Key Stage 1 (KS1) guided reading lesson, each table may have different activities, such as phonics games, verbal phonics practice, a written phonics activity, comprehension tasks and follow-up tasks related to the text being studied. In a Key Stage 2 (KS2) classroom, you may have a range of different activities on the go that require children to develop their skills in areas such as retrieval and summarising. The teacher will spend time with a different group each day to further hone these skills. The planning that goes into carousel guided reading, as well as delivering it effectively, can be challenging. The quality of activities must not be diluted but often is. Poor carousel teaching may see children complete time-filling activities like wordsearches or practising handwriting and this can be detrimental. When the carousel model is done well, however, it can be very useful and is certainly worth its weight in gold in the classroom. As with whole-class reading, planning and time management are crucial. When using this model, the teacher must also find a way of removing the ‘ceiling’ for children’s attainment. Carousel guided reading can be effective if the tasks are progressive. The activities in this book can be used within a carousel lesson to help with this. Children will have the opportunity to develop a range of skills within a week and will also be given the opportunity to have one-to-one time with the class teacher. In this time, they may read aloud to the teacher and have any misconceptions addressed directly. As well as these activities, children should be regularly exposed to exam-style questioning. You can also support children by giving them reading sentence stems (or sentence starters), as a way of scaffolding book talk and encouraging meaningful conversation. For example, an inference sentence stem might read ‘I think the character is feeling _______ because in the text it suggests…’, or a summarising sentence stem might read ‘I would describe the character as ________ because in the text…’. These are useful ways of ensuring the children are referring to the text when giving an answer.
What is whole-class reading? Like carousel guided reading, whole-class reading is a teacher-led session to build understanding and comprehension. In whole-class reading sessions, children are given the same core text and asked to practise a specific reading skill, taken from the National Curriculum. The whole-class reading model steps away from the guided reading carousel and one benefit of this is that it allows for more teaching time for every child. In whole-class reading, all children receive continual instruction and support. In the carousel model, the teacher works with a different group of children each day. Take a class of 30 children. The teacher sits with six children each day to develop a skill. That’s only 20 per cent of the week that each child gets with their teacher in reading lessons. In whole-class reading, you could also argue that the teacher can ‘plan for progress’ much more as they have fewer activities to plan. Therefore, they can remove the ceiling that is often there with the carousel approach. Children who struggle with fluency and comprehension can often be given texts of diminished quality in carousel guided reading. The whole-class reading model is very much against this. All children are on a level playing field and can be 2
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Reading Recharged © Alex Barton 2021
05/07/2021 12:43
