Creating a Reading Culture in Primary and Secondary Schools

This book will help teachers and librarians to develop a whole-school reading culture and advocate for the importance of student reading.

Did 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.

Introduction

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

• We need more research