The Teachers' Collection: a story

Well hello there, and welcome to update #096!

Here’s the story about how the collection started…

I’d been talking about the findings of the ‘Just read’ research from the University of Sussex which found that just reading complex novels aloud, and at a fast pace over 12 weeks with Year 8 pupils, resulted in ‘poorer readers’ making a whopping 16 months’ progress in the time.

Well, I thought, this is something everyone in education should know about! Who wouldn’t want their young people making the same gains in their learning?

So I started talking about it everywhere I went. While the original trial was for secondary pupils, primary schools decided to see what they could do with this information.

Low and behold, it worked there as well! In one school, 93% of pupils in Year 2 made at least 6 months progress in 12 weeks. You can see what Gayle Fletcher and Lauren Haines found in their primary school here.

It got me thinking…

If it works in English, for pupils in primary as well as secondary, why wouldn’t it work in other subjects? Here’s a short film summarising the research.

So I started talking about examples of using books to support pupils’ learning in Year 6 science for example, where the national curriculum programme of study says that they need to learn about the theory of evolution.

Colleagues I spoke to loved this idea and asked for more examples of books that could be used to underpin teaching across the curriculum.

It ended up with so many requests that I decided the project needed its own website, and so The Teachers’ Collection was born!

However, not every text is suitable, and I have some criteria which I’ll talk about in the next post!

I’ll also be doing a webinar on Thurs 7 November 4pm about how to use books to power up the primary curriculum, and you can sign up here.

Until then

Mary

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PS I’ve done a new film on Myattt & Co about just how far we’ve come with the curriculum. While there’s always more to do, we need to clock just how much has been achieved!

You can watch ‘Look how far we’ve come’ here (£/free trial)