It is 4:15am. My son is sleeping soundly and will do so all the way until 6:30am – a feat I never thought would be possible a year ago – and yet I have been awake since 2:15am. Heartburn, kicking, discomfort, needing a wee, desperate need for water, anxieties that are difficult to put your finger on: these are the sleep-stopping joys of the late stages of pregnancy. And at times like these, social media and Twitter can be a good friend in an otherwise lonely few hours.
Scrolling through my feed this morning, I chanced upon this link about children’s books from or about Native Americans from @Red_Tricycle – one assumes as an ethical parry to current Thanksgiving celebrations in America. The covers are visually enticing, and the content different, engaging, exploratory, enlightening for a British audience, especially a British audience of disengaged, low ability secondary school readers living in the suburbs of London. I begin an email to our school Librarian and, using the wonderful @JennyHolderLiv and @KSunray3’s Twitter feeds as my starting point, explore further… This lonely, dead time suddenly has excitement and purpose.
On my first maternity leave, my reading focused on a few key pedagogy, leadership and GCSE set texts, but I also pursued a superficial interest in reading for pleasure from a young adult perspective. I visited libraries up and down the country, browsing through texts that would compliment our current KS3 schemes of work; I visited a Librarian friend in America who introduced me to beautiful KS1 stories that we read to my then 4-month old; I researched ways in which we could use our reading lessons more effectively – what exactly could we assess in a 50 minute lesson with 28 students when we were also required to test spellings and check homework? Was it really possible to listen to every child in the class read over the term, assess their explicit and implicit understanding of a book we’d never read and ensure they were progressing through the magic Oxford Reading Levels appropriately? What were the main aims of these reading lessons anyway?
When I returned to work in January 2017, I marched into the Library, a woman on a mission.
Since then, we have overhauled our approach to assessing students’ progress with reading in these reading lessons, and tightened up the way we use our reading age data. This week, thanks to the support of a very wonderful sister who loves to do the nursery pick up and put dinner in tricky-to-reach-for-pregnant-women, floor-level ovens, I was able to attend our academy chain Literacy Strand meeting with our SEND and Literacy lead. This afforded us the opportunity to have a good old chat about the importance of these reading lessons to our whole school literacy focus (as well as the necessity of controlled crying and sleep training to the working parent), which really got me thinking about how far we have come in terms of using reading for pleasure to boost our students’ literacy, and how my maternity leave CPD had contributed to this. The data set of their progress at the end of last year is the best it has ever been, and this is what has made the difference:
- The spreadsheet I developed following my maternity leave research that encourages/ forces increased teacher engagement with reading lessons
- Improved use of the reading test data to inform interventions
- A very simple reading booklet kept in the Library for each student that removes the heavy task of tracking the number of books read at each level from teacher to student
- Improved culture around the reading tests, leading to more accurate data
- More accurate levelling of books in the Library thanks to the type of Twitter explorations I’ve done tonight that reveal sites like the Scholastic Wizard and age-ranged book lists like this one from Waterstones
- New books for the Library – partly informed by the lists I had collated on leave that I shared with our Librarian
- (Probably the most important of all) An amazing Librarian who cares passionately about and communicates with our students; is an absolute genius with our budget (check out The Book People for bargains); is very clever about how she entices students through the drip-feed of new, shiny books; is very well organised; works wonders with reluctant and needy teenage boys (possibly because she is a mother to three herself?); supports lessons by withdrawing small groups, listening to them read, introducing group readers and reading games, and sourced a free set of cushions to make our Library a more comfortable place to read! She is also great at holding babies and being wise about all things parent-related.
Where I have constantly disappointed myself, however, is in the discrepancy in my conversations with students about their reading. I now have four reading lessons on my timetable, one of which is top set Year 7, full of students with a 16+ reading age who are consuming Lord of the Flies, Emma (and getting very engaged in a feminist literary criticism of it!), The Princess Bride, The Secret Garden, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Help – and we have such wonderful conversations ranging from, ‘She’s annoying, isn’t she?’ to ‘Yes, the ending is rather anti-climactic and twee after Piggy and Simon’. In my other classes, though, I am falling flat: I look at the covers of books and say, ‘Is it good? I’ve seen a few of you reading it…’ or ‘What’s that one about? I’ve heard that it’s quite good…?’ Yes, I’ve read Coraline and Northern Lights and Skellig and the Chaos Walking Trilogy, but I’ve never read The Hunger Games, or The Giver or The Reluctant Journal of Henry Larson or Percy Jackson or Divergent or Wonder or The Reason I Jump or Dreaming the Bear or A Wrinkle in Time and, you know what, these books would take me about a day to read if I actually committed to doing so.
My next maternity leave begins in January, and one thing I’d like to do differently this time is to take a far more relaxed approach to those first few weeks of fatigue, cluster feeding and the general suitability of warm, inside spaces, to new babies. I’ll still need a project, though, that I consider a worthwhile investment in my mind, my sanity and my professional identity. I’m therefore going to take a leaf out of @JennyHolderLiv and @KSunray3’s extensive children’s and YA book collection and focus on reading my way through all the wonderful texts that I have seen my students devouring this year, and more, so that I can continue to encourage the reading for pleasure that is so important upon my return. Would a book a day be too high a target?
Jenny Holder’s fantastic blog about reading can be found here.
The Crowded Shelf and #TalkingTexts are also great places to go for literary inspiration and book club discussions.
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