Choosing the right text

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

exposed to high-quality literature. Of course, this can also be the case with carousel reading if planned well, but it can be harder to achieve. Follow-up tasks can be streamlined in whole-class reading but the core text is the same for everyone. This streamlining can be done quite subtly. For example, a retrieval question may be given three multiple-choice answers rather than none.

Both carousel guided reading and whole-class reading should not be the only teaching of reading you do in your school. Topic and literacy lessons should be infused with reading opportunities too and class novel time, as I explain on pages 8–9, should be ever-present on your daily timetable.

Decoding versus comprehension

I’ve entitled this part of the book ‘Decoding versus comprehension’, but in reality, these two skills must work in tandem in order for high-level comprehension to happen. Traditionally, both of these skills may have been developed and practised in carousel guided reading sessions, whereas whole-class reading tends to focus much more on comprehension itself. Despite the collaborative fluidity of these two skills, I believe the practice of decoding is best done outside of the guided or whole-class reading lesson. Instead, it should occur in ‘interventions’, with emphasis on phonetical understanding of language for the children who require it. This does not mean we shouldn’t listen to children reading in reading lessons, in fact quite the opposite, although it shouldn’t be the primary concern. I believe our primary concern should be comprehension.

What is decoding?

Decoding is the ability to apply your understanding of letter-sound relationships, as well as letter patterns, to correctly pronounce written words. Children can then apply their understanding of letter sounds and patterns to read new, unexplored vocabulary. The National Curriculum states, ‘Skilled word reading involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Underpinning both is the understanding that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken words.’ Decoding is taught through phonics in the early teaching of reading, often when children start school. There will be a lot of focus on decoding particularly in KS1 and perhaps even lower KS2 to build confident word-readers.

What is comprehension?

Comprehension is the ability to turn letters and sounds into meaning. It is the skill of processing text, understanding its meaning and then commenting on this through a contextual understanding of the world. The National Curriculum states, ‘Good comprehension draws from linguistic knowledge (in particular of vocabulary and grammar) and on knowledge of the world. Comprehension skills develop through pupils’ experience of high-quality discussion with the teacher, as well as from reading and discussing a range of stories, poems and non-fiction.’

As the curriculum states, accurate and high-quality comprehension requires an understanding of linguistic knowledge. Therefore, those who require additional support with decoding language need to be given a healthy diet of word-reading interventions systematically. Decoding is a vital part of teaching reading. In his book Reading Reconsidered, Doug Lemov (2016) writes, ‘Teachers who don’t teach decoding as part of their curriculum often don’t think about it. It can be a blind spot for some upper elementary, middle and high school teachers. However, because its mastery is a prerequisite to all reading comprehension, decoding is vital.’

This streamlined support will enable all children to develop their comprehension skills of retrieving, inferencing, predicting, summarising, commentating, understanding vocabulary and authorial choice within a guided or whole-class reading session.

Bridging the gap between decoding and comprehension

Firstly, children who struggle to decode require specialist support to develop this skill. If a child comes up to KS2 unable to decode, teachers must ask the question why. Is there a special educational need that should be considered here or is there a resistance to or disillusion with the phonics scheme that has been taught to them? The teacher must always ask: is there another way? There are many primary English specialists who can support you with guidance and ideas but planning one-to-one, high-quality interventions will be of huge significance. These interventions must have an exclusive focus on word reading rather than comprehension.