Experienced primary teacher, school leader and author.
Feel free to DM if you are looking for professional development relating to reading.
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Oct 2 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
It amazes me just how common it is for primary schools to have countless reading for pleasure initiatives while at the same time teaching reading lessons that are little more than years and years of tedious SATs preparation.
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I promise you that those hours and hours of modelling and practising how to answer 'inference questions' and 'retrieval questions' are an inefficient way to achieve better SATs scores.
This way of teaching reading is bad news even on its own cynical terms.
Sep 22 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
"Students who read above average on ORF are likely reading too fast to make sense of what they are reading."
I worry that this quote is not an accurate or productive framing of what is known about the relationship between fluency and comprehension in developing readers.
I think we need to be wary of suggesting that pupils with above average WCPM are likely to have comprehension issues.
I can imagine teachers interpreting this quote by thinking they need to actively slow down the top quartile (or even the top half) of readers based on WCPM.
Jun 4 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I've spent the last few years working with hundreds of schools, enough to spot some patterns and (I hope) to write some useful threads over the coming months.
Here's the first one...
In my opinion, what do primary schools commonly get wrong with their reading lessons? 🪡
When I talk about reading lessons, in this case I'm not talking about phonics, story time, spelling, etc, despite the crucial contribution these make to reading development.
I'm talking about the (usually) daily reading lessons that have their own slot in the timetable.
Mar 5 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Ofsted have released their English subject report. Some brief thoughts on my first impressions...
gov.uk/government/pub…
Yep. Kids need to feel prepared for KS2 SATs, but this should not dictate how children are taught for the preceding half of a decade.
Feb 24 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
I have nothing like the expertise to justify offering advice, but that hasn't stopped me before, so assuming we are talking about writing to inform...
1. Write a one-sentence summary of the entire book, each chapter and each paragraph *in advance*. Some people can just throw words at a page and then tidy afterwards, but in most cases this leads to flabby, infocused writing.
Dec 16, 2023 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
In the most basic terms, reading lessons involve a mixture of reading text and responding to it (i.e. discussing text or producing written responses).
And I think that in many (if not most) primary schools the balance between these two things is *way* off.
A thread... 🪡
At the start of my career, I was encouraged to teach reading using a carousel of guided groups. This was hugely inefficient and involved kids being placed into attainment-based groups, something I hated. Thankfully, I soon began teaching whole-class reading instead.
Dec 2, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
A thread on reading aloud while pupils follow along in their own copy of the text... 🪡
I sometimes come across confident claims that pupils following text as a teacher reads aloud is *a bad idea*. The Reading Framework seems to agree, though without any references to back this up:
Nov 19, 2023 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
This is a totally understandable comment, and I sympathise with the person making it. It's worth unpacking the issue a little, so I hope they'll forgive my retweeting them.
Before I begin, I just want to say that it may well be the case that the person I am retweeting knows loads about reading development. But the tweet reminded me of an issue I think is worth discussing, hence this thread.
Oct 15, 2023 • 26 tweets • 5 min read
A thread on common misconceptions about phonics & reading fluency, how they are spreading and the issues being caused for schools and, ultimately, the children within them:
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Let's start with part of the checklist for English hubs relating to phonics provided by the DfE. Point 5 says that phonics should be continued until pupils can read fluently:
Jul 16, 2023 • 27 tweets • 5 min read
I hope you'll forgive the quote-tweet reply, but I wanted to reply at length with a thread.
To start, I reckon for years the most popular way to teach reading was carousel guided reading (i.e. children - usually grouped by attainment - working in small groups without any adult support for most of the week).
Apr 26, 2023 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
Here are 7 practical tips on how to make links across a curriculum. There's no meaningful research into this, so it's basically just my opinion:
1. Start by planning out the key concepts of each subject, and look for overlap. For example, a concept like 'migration' might be pertinent to both a history and a geography curriculum. >>
Nov 3, 2022 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
My potentially controversial answer is that, in my experience at least, many teachers themselves arrive to the profession without a strong grasp of how to punctuate and without a clear view about the importance of sentence construction. (I was no exception to this.)
Teachers' punctuation is mostly correct, but it is often based on a solely implicit understanding that comes from lots of reading. This means that mistakes occur in teachers' modelling, and the use of punctuation is often taught using phrases like 'a comma shows a breath'.
Oct 12, 2022 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
Forgive the quote-tweet, but this requires a few tweets in a row for a sensible reply to good questions.
First, a caveat: I can only base my answer on my understanding of the research and, more importantly, the time I have spent working with struggling readers at primary level.
1. In terms of 'first, fast and only', this refers very specifically to how we teach pupils to initially recognise words. Both the research and my experience strongly suggest that pupils *really* need to learn to decode throughout each word.
Sep 24, 2022 • 12 tweets • 7 min read
@nylesojj@DougLemov At heart, reading comprehension is an incredibly complex domain. There are no shortcuts beyond ensuring pupils know lots about words (including how they interact), texts and the wider world. This means that 'accelerating progress' is all about the breadth and depth of pupils'...
@nylesojj@DougLemov ...experience with texts chosen for their content and variety, alongside the development of their understanding of the world.
Quite a lot of the schools I see have come to the conclusion - or usually been guided to it - that the route to accelerated progress is answering...
Sep 17, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Fluency assessments seem to be increasing in popularity, so I think there are a few things that people should consider. Here are five tips and a blog:
1. Kids should just feel like they are reading aloud to an adult.
They shouldn't see you overtly marking what words they got wrong, not least because this will be off-putting and will undermine the assessment.
Aug 15, 2022 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
If pupils need to use context to identify words and build their orthographic expertise - and "three-cueing" teaches pupils to use context to identify words from the very beginning of reading instruction - isn't three-cueing a sensible idea?
No. It is not.
Here's why... 🧵
Imagine a pupil encountering a word like "magician".
What we need this pupil to do when they meet a word like 'magician' is to attempt to decode the word all the way through and then to use context to "correct" their mispronunciation. Perhaps they first read it as "magick-i-an".
Aug 14, 2022 • 27 tweets • 4 min read
A thread on phonics and how the discussion of it sometimes lacks a bit of nuance, leading to misconceptions... 🧵
Some people state that the aim of phonics teaching in practice is to explicitly teach pupils the entire "code" of correspondences between phonemes and graphemes that exists in the English writing system.
This leads to misconceptions, I think.
Jul 4, 2022 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
A silly thread about teaching reading comprehension: 🧵
Imagine you've been given the task of exploring a vast forest with a group of kids who have never been anywhere like this before. The coach has dropped you off, and now you have a few short hours to help the kids appreciate the majesty of such a place.
Apr 30, 2022 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
I'm not going to name names, but there are independent assessors out there diagnosing dyslexia and then making recommendations of things like coloured overlays and learning words by sight as whole units. It's hugely frustrating and damaging.
Just read a report by one such 'specialist' that seems to be based on an outdated view of dyslexia as defined by a discrepancy between underlying ability and reading ability.
Apr 30, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I am a massive fan of @jimalkhalili's work (especially The Secret Life of Chaos), but this is very wide of the mark. Firstly, the suggestion that science curricula don't include study of the disciplinary knowledge of science is plain wrong... theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Secondly, the idea that there is a dichotomy between knowing science facts and being able to think critically about scientific claims is misplaced. For example, bogus 'flat Earth' claims or conspiracy theories about climate change are not successfully debunked through supposed...
