Small is Beautiful: Part Two

This is part two of my ‘Small is Beautiful’ series on the need to radically reduce the primary curriculum to ensure fluency in the core areas of reading, writing and maths.

In part one, I re-wrote the maths curriculum. It can be found here (along with a 60-second summary of the blog), but you don’t need to read it before reading part two.

Here’s a 60-second summary of this post (part two), for those in a hurry:

• Children in primary are not doing very well in reading (see stats below).
• The current curriculum wastes time on dubious comprehension strategies and encourages the belief that skills such as ‘inference’ can be divorced from content with no consequences.
• The research says that such comprehension strategies are useless after a few sessions and that nothing is gained by practising them further.
• There is zero evidence to suggest that children use these stategies outside of reading comprehension tests.
• The primary reading curriculum encourages the use of random, life-sucking comprehension sheets over life-enriching book talk.
• A simplifying of the curriculum could free up time and refocus teachers on the importance of teaching vocabulary and background knowledge, which make up the number one ingredient in successful reading outcomes.
• A child’s reading comprehension is only as good as their vocabulary. However, instead of fattening up children’s individual word-hoards, the current curriculum leads teachers down the garden path with superfluous, over-prescriptive objectives. Inane, unconnected activities are then created to tick these objectives off a tracker.
• The vocabulary gap between the richest and poorest students is staggering: by age 3, children from professional families hear 30 million more words than disadvantaged children, which affects reading and maths achievement at age 10 more than almost any other factor (including parent education and socio-economic status).
• A child needs to know an unbelievable 95% of words in a text in order to comprehend it. If we do not focus on the explicit teaching of vocabulary, children will struggle to reach this 95% figure and will not understand what they read. This will become worse as they get older.
• What the authors of the current curriculum failed to predict is that the more granular the detail in the curriculum, the more the teaching of reading becomes atomised into meaningless one-off exercises over holistic book-level instruction.
• Teachers’ questions will be guided more by tick box skill-development and less by what is interesting.
• While the reading curriculum is much shorter than the maths curriculum (covered in part one), it needs to be radically simplified to ensure true fluency and prepare children to delve even deeper into the mystical world of books at secondary school.
• In a nutshell, consider this thought experiment: two children sit down to take the Year 6 reading paper. One has a vocabulary of only 5,000 words but has done 5 comprehension sheets every day since Year 2, which have been designed to cover the skills of inference, prediction and summarising. The other child has read a LOT of books and has a vocabulary of 50,000 words, but has never had a lesson on inference. Which child will comprehend more?

Full version (with a proposed new reading curriculum) below:

The Reading Curriculum

What’s the problem?

Children in primary are not doing very well when it comes to reading:

• In 2017, the number of children who failed to master the curriculum is so high that the government deemed 52% an acceptable pass mark in the KS2 test. Getting half the questions wrong at the end of Year 6 was considered the expected standard.
• Around half of all children got 40% of the questions wrong (the real figure may be much worse than this — cheating on SATs is as easy as pie and we do not have a clue how many schools chose integrity over scores).
• Instead of entering Year 7 as confident masters of the printed word, our children seem to struggle when they go up to secondary school. This year, in 2018, 64% of pupils could not score more than 48% on their English Literature GCSE.

In this blog I will argue that the current primary reading curriculum, though well-intentioned, does two things to harm children’s reading outcomes:

1. encourages teachers to waste time on comprehension strategies
2. fragments reading instruction and encourages the use of extracts

What is the best way to ensure comprehension?

Well, let’s start with the worst way: spending the majority of teaching time trying to practise dubious skills such as ‘inference’ in isolation.

I can’t do better than Robert Pondiscio here:

Reading comprehension is not a “skill” like riding a bike or making free throws in basketball. It’s heavily dependent on the background knowledge readers bring to a text. Thus your ability to make a correct inference when reading about baseball, for example, does not mean you can make correct inferences when reading about a Japanese tea ceremony. There’s no abstract skill called “inferencing” that you can practice, master, and apply with equal effect on whatever you read.

And here’s Daniel Willingham making a useful analogy in his article, ‘Can Reading Comprehension Be Taught?’ (SPOILER ALERT: no):

Suppose you got home from Ikea with a desk to be assembled, and found the instructions said no more than “Put stuff together. Every so often, stop, look at it, and evaluate how it’s going. It may also help to think back on other pieces of furniture you’ve built before.”

These instructions don’t tell you how to build the desk — for that you need to know whether piece A attaches to B or C. Rather, it’s advice regarding what to think about as you’re putting the pieces together. That is what RCS (reading comprehension strategies) instruction does; it tells you what to think about as you’re trying to understand a text.

In short:

1. Reading comprehension strategies produce a small bump in reading comprehension tests (and nothing more).
2. In Pondiscio’s words: ‘Once kids get the big idea behind reading comprehension strategies— that a piece of text is trying to tell us something — there’s zero evidence that repeated practice of a strategy has any beneficial effect.’
3. Willingham concludes from the research that ‘Ten sessions [on reading comprehension strategies] yield the same benefit as fifty sessions. The implication seems obvious; RCS instruction should be explicit and brief.’

Curious to know more, I contacted Willingham and asked if there was any evidence to suggest that the effects of reading comprehension strategies extend beyond reading comprehension tests, or if there were any studies that show children using these strategies independently when reading for pleasure.

His answer: none.

What the research says about how to improve reading comprehension

The research is very clear on the matter: a child’s reading comprehension is only as good as their vocabulary.

According to the literature, succesful reading instruction should look something like this:

And here’s what many schools actually do, encouraged by the the bloated reading curriculum:

What the current reading curriculum incentivises:

At the moment, we have a reading curriculum that incentivises teachers to fragment their reading instruction into discrete skills and then use the majority of teaching time to practise those skills.

If a curriculum says you will be tested on ‘inference’, ‘prediction’ and ‘summarising’ then guess what…people will practise ‘inference’, ‘prediction’ and ‘summarising’, irrespective of the text or the vocabulary gap in their classroom. In this model, the text being used too often takes second place to the skill being practised.

This encourages one of cruellest practices known to mankind: the use of random, life-depleting and genuinely wearying comprehension sheets (many of which come from ancient and awful pre-National Strategies textbooks) designed with nothing more in mind than the misguided practice of dubious ‘skills’.

I should stop here and make a full disclosure: I have been as guilty as anyone of this crime. I am not, repeat not, trying to shame anybody. Rather I am merely trying to point out the error of my ways in the hope of preventing further tragedies.

What should a reading curriculum incentivise?

First and foremost, it should incentivise the reading of books. Glorious, mysterious, life-changing books.

There is of course a role for extracts. Fluency, decoding and reading-speed can all be greatly helped by the use of extracts. However, our default should be reading at the book level, with extracts used only when they give the greater payoff.

Secondly, a good primary reading curriculum should prioritise and reward the teaching of vocabulary. Remember the maxim; engrave it on your heart: a child’s reading comprehension is only as good as their vocabulary.

The consequences for reading lessons should be clear: after reading together, steer your questions overwhelmingly towards vocabulary and knowledge acquisition.

In his magnificent book, Closing the Vocabulary Gap, Alex Quigley powerfully demonstrates the devastating effects of the vocabulary gap.

Consider these two facts alone:

1. ‘From birth to 48 months, parents in professional families spoke 32 million more words to their children than parents in welfare families, and this talk gap between the ages of 0 and 3 years — not parent education, socio-economic status, or race — explains the vocabulary gap at age 3 and the reading and math achievement gap aged 10.’
2. A child needs to know a staggering 95% of words in a text in order to comprehend it (for those who haven’t read Alex’s book, the section where he goes into this in more detail is worth the purchase price alone).

So, once decoding and fluency are no longer the major stumbling blocks, the majority of time in reading lessons should focus on vocabulary development (in fact, the entire primary curriculum should be orientated towards this).

This is not to say, of course, that teachers should no longer discuss or generate inferences when working through a book with their class. Of course they should. In education, the treasure is always in the question.

However, if the reading curriculum mirrored the research, ‘comprehension questions’ would be liberated from the shackles of skill tickboxes and focus on what is interesting, as well as those passages which shed the most light on the trials and tribulations of what it is to be human.

✋ Goodbye to ‘prediction on Monday, inference on Tuesday, summarising on Wednesday.’

👋 Hello to meandering discussions and filling up children’s word-hoards with the jewels of language.

The more rapidly children expand their vocabulary and background knowledge, the more they will comprehend the next book.

With this in mind, here is my revised primary reading curriculum:

A Revised Primary Reading Curriculum

Children should be taught:

• to apply phonic knowledge and skills as the route to decode words
• to respond speedily with the correct sound to graphemes (letters or groups of letters) for all 40+ phonemes, including, where applicable, alternative sounds for graphemes
• to read accurately by blending sounds in unfamiliar words containing GPCs that have been taught
• to read fluently, leaving primary school with a reading speed of at least 100 words per minute.
• to understand new vocabulary in order to gain good comprehension of age-appropriate texts.
• to read a wide range of books and poems and discuss the elements that make them of interest to the reader.
• to ensure children encounter challenging books and poems (please notice what this does not say. It does not say: “Ensure that children only ever read books they find challenging.”)

In addition, children should be encouraged to:

• develop a habit of daily independent reading.
• develop an appreciation of reading.

That’s all folks! From one hundred and twenty-three objectives down to nine.

I will just end by emphasising one thing, in case it has been lost in translation:

The objectives in the current curriculum are not inherently evil. Many of them are worthy pursuits. However, if we simplify the objectives to focus on fluency and vocabulary in the context of thrilling and immersive book-talk, the rest of the objectives will come on their own, like bees to a flower.