Primary and Secondary
Feature: Coming Out of The Reading Closet
Coming Out of The Reading Closet
How to raise the profile of reading in your school Alison Powell reports on a whole school project that aimed to get everybody reading – and succeeded! Your English teacher obviously does it. Your head of school does it too. Your favourite Science teacher, the school janitor and your PE teacher do it (though you’re not sure whether they do it together). They do it their bedrooms, on park benches and even in the bath. Turns out most of your friends do it as well. Sometimes at night, in secret, under the covers ... there’s even a rumour that the school guinea pig is at it. Perhaps it’s time you owned up too. It’s time to admit it: reading is cool.
48 | NATE | Teaching English | Issue 4
Unleashing the geeks At Chew Valley School this past year, readers across the entire school community have been encouraged to come out of the closet and confess to their unbridled love and passion for the printed word. Teachers have been standing up in assemblies: ‘My name is Miss Powell and I am currently reading a brilliant book of poetry by Glyn Maxwell.’ Students have been assisted in setting reading pledges (sometimes in overtly dramatic manners, standing behind their chairs, with hands on hearts). There have even been competitions to see which tutor groups can read the most books in a term and who can raise the most money in a Readathon.
We all know that environment is key. If you create an environment where reading is a normal part of everyday life, and you make it OK to talk about it openly, without fear of being made to feel like a freak or a geek, then more and more people will own up to doing it. In fact such enthusiasm has been drummed up for reading this year at Chew Valley School that according to Gareth James, head of English, ‘students are now swapping recommendations, library lending has skyrocketed and a recent author visit was one of the most popular events we’ve ever had.’ Everyone, it seems, is into reading. The school’s success at raising the profile of reading has mainly been down to a dedicated team of teachers, a willingness on the part of the school community to participate and an overriding positive attitude. You won’t hear any whinging about how ‘it’s a nightmare getting students to read these days’. Instead the repeated mantra is a positive one. ‘Everyone loves reading.’ And the evidence is all around you as you walk through the school corridors. Whether you’re in the Art, Science or English areas, you’ll be able to find out not only which books staff members are reading but also what they have pledged to read over the next term or school year. The Reading Pledge This is largely as result of the whole school Reading Pledge scheme. The Reading Pledge, like most brilliant ideas, is a simple one. Each member of the school community pledges to read something and then displays their pledge publically. Gareth James came up with the idea of pledge when he was off school with a broken ankle. Sofa-bound, and perhaps under the influence of strong painkillers, he decided it would be a great idea to try and read a book a week for the following year. Having enjoyed the sense of personal achievement that his own reading pledge offered, Gareth invited the rest of the school to join him. In a lively assembly, complete with gory x-ray photos, he asked students in every year group to set a reading pledge of their own. Perhaps their own challenge might be to read all the Alex Rider books by the end of the year, or to read one book from cover to cover by the end of the term. It didn’t matter. It was the sense of stepping outside of personal comfort zones that mattered – pledging, in the presence of others, to read something. Copies of the prestigious looking certificate (pictured) were handed to every student during their English lessons. They were encouraged to set themselves a challenge that would require effort and that they would be proud of achieving (i.e. not a book they’d read before or a series of books they could read in an afternoon). These were then displayed around the classrooms and corridors of the English department. Phase two of the Reading Pledge was to invite staff members across the school to join in. They too were issued with Reading Pledge certificates, though in this instance they were laminated so they could be displayed on classroom doors and updated with staff member’s current reads. For example, Jon Walford, head of Science, has pledged to read all of the Man Booker Prize winners. He hasn’t set himself a time limit, but at the moment, he’s tackling The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. ‘Students do ask about what I’m reading,’ he says. ‘Some of them have asked what the Man Booker Prize is. Others will ask what a book is about or whether
I’m enjoying it. It’s opened up the idea that Science teachers read books too!’ Every wall in the school now bears the message that reading is normal and that everybody does it. The Year 7 Reading Challenge The Year 7 Reading Challenge was a project I worked on with the school librarians. The intention was to build on the Reading Pledge and add a little competition to the whole thing. Again the idea was simple: to work in tutor groups to read the tallest pile of books in a term. The results were surprising and exciting. I kicked off the challenge in an assembly to the year group in which I talked about comfort zones and how we can only grow in life by stepping outside of these zones. I explained that their challenge was to work as a whole tutor group to read the height of an average year 7 student (a height that we agreed was 150cm after measuring several students!) in the space of one term. Students were invited to establish rules for the competition. This was kept simple by referring them repeatedly to the comfort zone concept. For example, one student asked whether she could re-read a book for the challenge. ‘No,’ came the response from her peers, ‘that’s in your comfort zone.’ All tutor groups meeting the 150cm challenge would win a certificate and the tutor group who managed to smash through the challenge and read the tallest pile of books overall, would be rewarded with a trophy and a tub of illicit book worm sweets. Having established a new school record, they would also take ownership of the library’s collection of Guinness World Record books for the final school term. Each tutor group was allocated a column in the library where their reading achievements were recorded. As they finished a book, students completed a short questionnaire about characters, setting and plot. Then, satisfied that a book had been properly read from cover to cover, the librarians photocopied the spine
“Students are now swapping book ideas, library lending has sky-rocketed, and a recent author visit was one of the most popular events we’ve ever had.” NATE | Teaching English | Issue 4 | 49