End of year: the best bits
Well hello there and welcome to update #060!
Welcome to the last post of the year! I’m going to share the three of most impactful pieces of curriculum conversations on Myatt & Co.
The first is the impact of reading across the curriculum. It originates from the ‘Just reading’ research from Sussex University. It found that:
Simply reading challenging, complex novels aloud and at a fast pace in each lesson repositioned ‘poorer readers’ as ’good’ readers, giving them a more engaged uninterrupted reading experience over a sustained period.
Students made 8.5 months’ mean progress on standardised tests of reading comprehension, but the poorer readers made a surprising 16 months progress.
A number of primary and secondary schools have replicated similar findings when they ran the trial in their own schools. Rachel Higginson spoke to Gayle Fletcher and Lauren Haines about the impact in the Gloucester Road Infant and Primary school: more than 93% of pupils in Year 2 made more than six months progress after 12 weeks of faster reading and more than 83% made similar gains in Year 4. You can see how they went about it here, free to watch.
There’s a similar story from Jude Arkwright, Ben Jarvis and Jane Godfrey from St Michael’s C of E primary, again free to watch here.
And then for secondary, there’s Rob Grover and Ritchie Slack from the Nene Park Academy in conversation with Steve Willshaw who couldn’t believe the results so ran the programme again to make sure!
All three fit the bill of high impact from relatively low input and there are implications from this for high quality texts across the curriculum. On the back of these results we have developed The Teachers’ Collection to show how to link beautiful books to the national curriculum programmes of study in primary.
Have a good break!
Until next time
Mary
Also to let you know that we’ve got some great new courses about to start on The Huh Academy.
NEW: Leading the Diverse Curriculum: you can watch the introductory webinar with Hannah Wilson, Bennie Kara and me. The course starts in Jan 2024.
New: Building Teams with Lekha Sharma and Sam Crome: And we’ve got an introductory webinar on Tues 9 Jan 24 19.30-20.00 where I’ll be talking with Sam and Lekha about how they believe their work will be helpful for leaders.