Scotland: Sue Ellis on teaching reading
Posted: Sun May 24, 2015 12:19 pm
Professor Sue Ellis is a high profile academic working at Strathclyde University as co-director of the Centre for Education and Social Policy. Here is a snippet from an article in this week’s Times Educational Supplement Scotland.
The advice seems to be that if you can’t decode, it will be fixed like magic, by making reading more exciting or just by giving you different books to read, which, erm, you can’t read… No wonder we have a literacy problem. Teachers are already good at giving children worthwhile and exciting experiences through books – what teachers need is pedagogical subject knowledge about how to actually teach reading effectively to ensure that every child can read any book they choose – what could be more exciting than that?No more ‘input-outputs’
According to Ellis, schools need access to better data on literacy focusing on what matters most – pupils’ comprehension, decoding fluency and engagement – at a point in the year that is useful. Schools also need to become better at analysing that data. This means moving away from what she describes as “the input-output approach”, or “if they are bad at x, you give them more of x”.
“If a child is poor at decoding – reading slowly and stiltingly – the solution might not be for them to read more with the teacher,” Ellis explains. “It might be that you need to make reading more exciting, make them see it as something they do out of school, or provide them with more books – not reading-scheme books.”
The aspiration of Curriculum for Excellence that every teacher – regardless of subject specialism – should be a teacher of literacy has not been realised, Ellis argues. Teachers have to be able to create a learning mix that works, but studying literacy development and teaching is not always a major plank in initial teacher education, she says.
Ellis wants the General Teaching Council for Scotland to review whether sufficient weight is given to literacy teaching in teacher education programmes. Some institutions allocate just 20 hours in a four-year degree – four times less than others.