Having scoured and searched for hours, you saunter into period one with the gem of an article that is not only appropriately pitched but also acutely relevant to your course. Inevitably, this will prompt inspiring discussions that will challenge deep academic thinking, expand students’ command of tier-three vocabulary and broaden their cultural capital. A hush drops in the class as, enthralled, they ravenously tear through every word while you patiently wait for sparks to fly. You chuck out one of your carefully prepared explorative questions; however, instead of the thoughtful insights you were anticipating, you are steamrollered by the infamous, dreaded three words – “I don’t know”.
Your comprehension questions have fallen flat and the students now stare blankly at you – lost, confused, frustrated. Rather than racing through complex concepts, you find yourself firefighting, trying to engage students, desperately seeking out the obstacle that has prevented them from accessing the text. Did the students struggle with the concepts? Were the tone and vocabulary inaccessible? Did the students have low resilience, poor reading fluency or were they simply not engaged with the learning? There are a litany of factors that prevent students from engaging with challenging texts but it is our role to support them, foster independence and teach strategies to persevere with reading.
As the EEF Guidance Report on Secondary Literacy outlines, “literacy is the key to academic success” with over 120,000 disadvantaged students entering secondary school below the expected standard of reading. It is therefore imperative that in our lessons, not only do we expose students with opportunities to read a range of academic texts, we also have to make these experiences of reading successful. As the Matthew Effect outlines, building positivity around reading engenders a greater love of reading which in turn will allow catch up to take place. Once we have students with low literacy feeling successful in class reading the texts we have carefully selected, we can start the process of supporting our disadvantaged students to thrive at school.
