Description
Book SynopsisDid your school encourage a life-long love of reading?
Children who identify as readers are three times more likely to have good mental wellbeing. A reading culture that permeates a school can transform it into a space where reading is supported, encouraged, normalised and valued. Creating a Reading Culture in Primary and Secondary Schools will help teachers and librarians to:
- advocate for the importance of a whole-school reading culture with recent research in this field
- select from a number of research-supported strategies underpinning a whole-school reading culture to tailor your school’s approach according to resourcing and priorities
- develop a clear trajectory for building and sustaining stakeholder engagement and resourcing, including securing external funding for related initiatives
- plan and manage a multi-faceted approach to enable real change within your school
Drawing on the author’s internationally-recognised experience in this field, this book will be essential reading for anyone looking to develop reading in schools.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Why a whole school reading culture?
- Reading and social and environmental supports
- Expired expectations and orphaned responsibility
- Reading beyond testing
- Benefits of reading engagement for literacy
- Literacy and cross-curricular learning
- Real world advantages
- The question of gender
- Sliding literacy, reading interest and reading frequency
- Read anything for literacy?
- The ongoing importance of paper books
- The importance of the school library
- Recovering from COVID-19 related literacy learning loss
2. Research-supported practices to choose from
- Opportunities for regular silent reading for pleasure
- Supporting choice
- Accessible and visible books
- Investment in school libraries and collection building
- Investment in qualified school library professionals
- Teacher modelling
- Engaging parental support Talking about books
- Creating and sustaining reading spaces
- Reading aloud
- Professional development and laying the foundation
- Promising emerging possibilities
- Activities to be subject to measures of effectiveness
3. Stakeholder engagement and resourcing
- Planning for initial and sustained educator and leader engagement
- Parents and guardians
- Grants for school based research initiatives
4. Implementation planning and change management
- Leading change in schools
- Assess the opportunity for change and empower others to commit
- Create and support a reading culture team
- Formulate and communicate a powerful vision of the change
- Plan for implementation
- Writing implementation plans
5. Monitor and strengthen the change process over time
- Evaluation
- More about goals
- Introduction to basic quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods analysis and data
- Getting quality evaluation data from children
- Quantitative analysis and data for schools
- Qualitative analysis and data for schools
- Mixed methods analysis and data for schools
- Determining baseline data needs and evaluation planning
- Boosting quality with academic partnership
6. Reporting
- Ethical reporting
- Professional outputs
- Media outputs
- Academic outputs
- Final points
Conclusions
