What is the 'Faster Read'?

The Faster Read 

• Video transcript

  I'm Julia Sutherland and I'm Jo Westbrook and we're from the University of Sussex.
  The faster read approach involves reading two novels in a term at a faster pace and
  immersively with few interruptions to engage students in the narrative arc and develop
  whole text comprehension, interpretation and engagement. It's particularly beneficial for
  struggling The advantage readers are either Key Stage 2 or Key Stage 3 who may
  never have read a whole book. It includes explicit modelling of reading strategies to
  support students to monitor their comprehension and overcome sticking points to
  understand the narrative, for example questioning, inferring and making connections. It
  also uses groups reading aloud together expressively in a safe space, asking each
  other questions and using the strategies to interpret and enjoy the text. - And the
  choice of text is crucial. They should be challenging, culturally diverse, typically
  contemporary novels, where students see themselves positively represented.
  - The selection of our paired texts is a really important process. Ultimately,
  students in our classroom need to feel known and valued, and part of that is being
  able to see themselves in the stories that we read and engage with in lessons. Take
  these two texts, for example. You've got The Hate You Give and Jane Eyre, two
  really quite well -known texts. And ultimately, reading them back -to -back, six weeks
  for Jane Eyre, six weeks for The Hate You Give, gives students the opportunity to
  immediately compare these texts, to immediately analyse structurally with really quite
  high -level interpretations and they do that naturally. It's not a process where we
  are as teachers giving them the tools to do it. It's just very simply the reading
  them in conjunction with each other that allows them to make those inspired
  comparisons. Ultimately the selection of two complementary texts allows our students to
  broaden their understanding of the world, culture, politics, history. It allows them
  to explore two texts thematically and really challenge themselves.
  One of the greatest benefits of the faster read program is that you get to do
  expressive reading with your class. This is how I might do it. So reading a book
  like now is the time for running. D .O. calls innocent. Are you there? I'm right
  behind you. Keep crawling. Don't look back, slowly I say, as the barbed wire bites
  my brother. Keep as close to the ground as you can. One by one, we crawl through
  to the other side. Lennox holds back the wire until all of us are through. Sweat
  is running down his face. He takes out his shirt and quickly puts it back on. We
  all do the same. The man who helps innocent in the river has not come through the
  barbed wire. All we have now is Lennox. Now, I would read in that style for
  approximately half an hour, maybe even longer. And I wouldn't pause the reading to
  ask comprehension questions. I would wait until a particular point, maybe at the end
  or the start of the lesson, where I may say something like, "So how is Dio
  treating his brother at this moment? What's going on for Innocent?" Comprehension
  questions that then help students really guide their way through the novel. The most
  important thing is that reading, I can use my voice as a way to aid comprehension.
  We can also then start to think about the narrative arc. Moving to the other bonus
  which is the fact that back -to -back reading means students really get a sense of
  the structure and the excitement of the novel. They come back into the classroom
  wanting to know exactly what's going to happen next and really with their own
  questions as well.
  - A really important part of the fast to read is reading in groups. So giving
  students a variety of reading experiences and having them reading groups helps build
  their confidence. So reading out loud to each other and giving them some autonomy
  over dividing up reading parts, et cetera. Another great aspect of group reading and
  dialogic talk is having the reading strategies explicitly. So you could have them for
  example on a key ring like this where you have the reading strategy on one side
  and the definition on the other and when students are reading they can use this to
  identify what reading strategy they're using and then you can have really rich
  discussions about why that strategy is important and how it makes them a better
  reader.
  - I enjoy the fast read because our students enjoy it. They share in the reading
  process. They engage with character and plot development. They have that shared sense
  of a journey. And I think that's really, really important because they don't get
  that anywhere else, I don't think, in school. For me, when they have asked those
  questions, they've had that excitement or that sadness or that moment of emotion
  within the classroom and they leave the classroom talking about the text that they
  are reading, that's a wonderful, wonderful moment. I was lucky enough to be part of
  the original study nine years ago and since then I've taken that approach to all of
  the schools that I've worked in. I find that it really chimes with what English
  teachers naturally want to do. We want to read texts and we want to read them as
  full texts as well. What I found is that students have really captured that
  excitement in their own reading. They've gone off to find those authors or find
  those themes in other books so it's inspired students to get excited about reading
  and for me that's really precious. We've been doing the faster read here now for
  nine years because this school was originally part of the original study and since
  then we've, because it was so transformative for our teaching and for engagement of
  students, we've actually designed our whole key statutory curriculum around the faster
  read. So at the beginning of year seven, eight and nine we have two novels per
  year group because engagement was the biggest thing that we noticed straight away and
  we had lots of reluctant readers, lots of readers who don't see themselves as a
  reader actually or have very negative views about reading and they went from from
  hating reading to running into the classroom saying are we reading today are we
  reading today and being really excited about reading and talking about reading outside
  of lessons so that's really amazing and that was very immediate but then the other
  benefits are the group reading in our student voice they've all said that's their
  favourite thing about the faster read. It's helped them become more fluent readers,
  and it's helped them become much more confident at reading out loud in front of
  their peers. So that's been a really important part of it. And then the last thing,
  I think, which we noticed a bit, took a bit longer for us to notice this, but the
  analytical writing at the end of the unit was really strong because,
  although they'd spent most of the lessons and then, dialogically discussing things.
  That meant that they were actually really immersed in the text, rather than stopping
  to write little paragraphs all the time and being out of the text. They were
  immersed in it. They'd comprehended the text really well and they enjoyed it.
  So they were able to actually write about it on a deeper analytical level. And
  especially because it gives them a sense of the whole text quickly, they're actually
  really more confident at writing about structure which typically our students are
  weaker at. The reading ages have gone up as well, it's been good for all readers,
  not just weak readers. The group reading, building resilience and confidence and made
  them better analytical writers and obviously they love reading which is the biggest
  thing out of it. Many primary, secondary and alternative provision schools across the
  UK are using this approach for Key Stage 2, 3, GCSE and even A -Level. Some schools
  are reading as many as four to six texts in every year at Key Stage 3, which is
  18 books by the end of Year 9 and they say that their students are bucking the
  national trend and opting to take A -Level English Literature because they love
  reading. So try it out and let us know how you get on.