The pressure to accelerate reading progress

As schools settle back into routine, the pressure to accelerate learning can feel relentless. Targets, timetables and accountability measures all push for faster progress. Yet beneath the surface, fragile early gains in reading fluency are emerging. Before we chase speed, we might ask ourselves what we are disrupting and what needs protecting. Are we going to push hard or to protect those small steps forward, which are more likely to be the real key to long-term success?

Presence in the primary classroom

Now that we are midway through the school year, I am reminded of my visits to inner city primary schools that took place almost 20 years ago. In Victorian school buildings, with roomy classrooms and huge windows that floodlit high ceilings, I felt I’d travelled to another era, especially when I saw children lining up, looking straight ahead, standing absolutely still and in silence, as the class teacher inspected their shoes and clothing.

This seemed to take a disproportionate amount of time and every child complied without a single smirk of resistance. Intrigued, I watched the children file into the classroom, stand behind their desks, then at a signal, sit quietly. They listened with close attention and settled to the task. Only then, did the teacher speak to me, “One moment please,” and moved like water between a handful of them, inaudibly instructing each of them on how to get started.

He then sat in a child’s chair as if anchoring the whole class with him and gestured for me to join him there, sitting low down in the centre of the room. He worked through a pile of marking with large weighty gestures, dragging a glue stick over the page, adding colorful personalized comments and corrections into each child’s A4 workbook. There were no shortcuts. This was dedicated work. I then understood how safe these children felt in his presence and that the line outside the classroom had been more a welfare check, than a slow transition from the noisy playground to the calm of the lesson. This experience has stayed with me. I saw the power of presence and also the importance of bringing our presence into everything we do as teachers.

The misread signals of early fluency

With presence, it becomes easier to notice small early gains in reading fluency. For example, when a child asks a question about a picture, or a word or misunderstands the gist of a story, we might be under pressure to hear ten more children read. This question will take us over the time allocation for this child. The way we respond might encourage engagement or snuff out that tiny flame of curiosity for ever. When a child feels their question was inconvenient, they become more compliant. Reading becomes another way to maintain a mask, so they look good on the outside, but feel fragile on the inside. The early gains of these children can become quite deceptive. Reading for speed alone sounds good, but when engagement is superficial they know that they dare not reveal how they really feel about reading for learning.

What stability really looks like in learning

Here is a more recent story. At the end of the school day, I moved down the main stairway with a sea of keystage two children and out into the spring sunshine. Ahead of me a boy turned and stared hard, then his face broke into a broad smile. I smiled in return. I knew how much the change in his reading had meant to him. In baseline assessment, his voice had not faltered once but he’d pushed the book across the table at the end of reading the second passage. The gesture was heavy and showed me his disdain for reading. There was rebellion in the air in the early Rhythm for Reading sessions from this child and his friend. After a couple of weeks, they were reading music fluently in the sessions and along with the others they began to smile. In the follow-up assessment he said he was amazed by his own experience of reading, ‘It’s like a movie playing in my mind’ and went on to describe how he was urging everyone he knew to read with more expression. He now loves reading and is hooked on books.

This is why timing, anticipation and continuity matter. Without stability, anticipation cannot consolidate. Stability in reading is multilayered. Engagement and fluency require this stability. It cannot be secured through speed or accuracy, but relies on a deeper level of engagement from the child, just as it would in a conversation.

Why reading is a social process, not a performance

This is why we can think of the process of learning to read as social at its core. The marks on the page were made by someone and reading their words aloud or silently is a genuine social encounter. This is why reading is not a wordsearch, a puzzle or a guessing game. Accuracy and speed of decoding might sound good on the surface, but the social encounter at the heart of engaged reading is what matters more.

Protecting the sequence of change in the classroom

The example I gave earlier of the highly structured approach taken by one teacher shows how strong framing can provide a calm and child-centered learning environment in which all pupils can flourish. This is very different to the kind of strong framing that escalates anxiety and tension in classrooms. So, by building a culture around the social dimension of learning, in which every child knows that they are seen, heard, understood and appreciated, strong framing can protect the sequence of change that I offered in the second example.

Change in the social dimension of learning can be supported by protecting these three things:

1. continuity: making sure that the rhythm of learning is sustained in the same room, on the same day, at the same time, with the same people etc.

2. minimising noisy transitions: when children need to recover following excessive noise in crowded disorganized conditions, both time and access to calm, focused attention may be lost.

3. avoid children feeling over-extended by having to perform by rushing pupils past opportunities for discussion and engagement. If children need a little more time to ask a question, can we not honour that moment?

Before we chase speed, we might ask ourselves what we are disrupting and what needs protecting. The early signs of stability are often the real foundations of fluency. If you want a practical way to notice early stability before it becomes measurable, the fluency tracker is here.