The Faster Read

Watch experienced teachers talking about the Faster Read project

• Video transcript

  Start of transcript.

  Julia Sutherland, from Sussex, speaks: I'm Julia Sutherland...

  Jo Westbrook, from Sussex, speaks: ...and I'm Jo Westbrook and we're from the University of Sussex.

  Julia speaks: 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.

  Jo speaks: 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.

  Julia speaks: 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.

  Jo speaks: And the choice of text is crucial. They should be challenging, culturally diverse, typically contemporary novels, where students see themselves positively represented.

  Jonny Pearson, from Sackville School, speaks: 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.

  Emily Evans, from Bohunt, speaks: One of the greatest benefits of the Faster Read programme 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:

  "Dio 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.

  Lauren Haywood, from Peacehaven Community School, speaks: 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.

  Jonny speaks: 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.

  Emily speaks: 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.

  Lauren speaks: 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.

  Jo speaks: Many primary, secondary and alternative provision schools across the
  UK are using this approach for Key Stage 2, 3, GCSE and even A-Level.

  Julia speaks: 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.

  Jo speaks: So try it out and let us know how you get on.

  End of transcript.