Starting September Strong, but with old data?

In some schools the timetables and the data have been finalized and processed and shared well before the end of term. There are other schools where the data and timetables find their way onto desks in week two or even week three of September. The contrast is stark, but does it matter? If everyone spends a bit more time settling in and getting to know one another, perhaps that’s a people-first advantage. Indeed, one newcomer arrived last September from a different country and was elected by her Key Stage Two classmates onto the school council in the second week of term.

Data are always valuable, but are they relevant three months after the assessments and when so much has happened over the summer break? Some children visited bookshops, libraries and enjoyed hearing audio books. Some read in cars, trains and planes, on beaches and under the covers in bed. Some ignored books or tried and then gave up. Outdoor play, imaginative play, structured play with adults, unstructured play with friends - it all amounts to a constant state of flow, social development and a massive expansion of expressive language. None of these experiences are tracked or monitored, as many children are set free to manage their time in their own way.

So returning to the classroom on Day 1 there will be children excited to meet their new teacher, be reunited with friends and to face a new level of challenge with immense positivity. Some return feeling brave. Some will sit in their seats braced for difficulties with learning, wondering whether they will understand anything at all that is happening in the room.

What the Proposed Year 8 Assessment could mean

The new Year 7 intake may be among the first cohorts to take the proposed reading assessment whilst in Year 8. If this new measure of reading fluency and comprehension has strong face validity (measures what it says it measures) it will shine a light on whether pupils are reading well enough to access the Key Stage 3 curriculum. If the face validity is weak - for example, reading fluency is scored as correct words read per minute, and the comprehension test is a multiple choice format, with a high likelihood that correct responses are a product of chance, then this assessment will make little difference to pupils’ reading outcomes. Many pupils decode quickly and accurately without understanding what they are reading. A multiple choice format will enable them to apply a keyword search as the skill required to score reasonably well in the test. Under these circumstances, they may pass the Year 8 test, but still not read well enough to access the secondary curriculum.

At the moment, we do not know what the format of this assessment will be. In my opinion, the format will determine whether the attainment gap in reading narrows as a result of introducing this assessment, or whether we maintain the status quo. Based on twenty-five years of experience I can predict that a great many of these young people reading below expectation would read with fluency and understanding if the conditions to support their progress were in place. I realise that they are surrounded by excellent teachers who are working diligently day in, day out. But it’s only when we do things differently that a different outcome becomes a logical possibility.

Rhythm in Play, Then Rhythm in Reading

As I walk through my local park and there are children running, playing football or catch and learning new ball games like tennis and cricket. Others are whirling about on skates and bicycles.

Timing, balance, reciprocity and coordination are key for all of these activities.

It’s challenging to build ball skills. There’s a lot of repetition and refinement of coordination going on, as well as running and huge amounts of commitment. During the summer, children are busy honing these skills in the sunshine day after day, week after week.

For most children this comes naturally and they run together across the bleached grass as a group, feet drumming on the ground, keeping time and arriving together. There’s a natural bond between them that appeared from nowhere. For others, these skills are not built with ease, but through challenge. They are breathless from running and stop too soon. Maybe the ball games had worn them out. I watched as they flinched and tried to anticipate the approaching ball, and to kick it, but it went straight past. Someone had laughed.

Is the solution to double down on practicing ball skills? Probably not, as mistiming the approach of the ball is only one manifestation of something deeper, a rhythm block. Rhythm is important to everything we do - from coordinating walking, running, jumping to speaking. Conversations between people involve reciprocation and a social form of rhythm that helps us to manage the flow of what researchers call, ‘conversational turns’ (taking turns in conversation) and how to anticipate what is coming up next in the speaker’s phrases.

When this part of the language instinct is underperforming, children feel ‘out of the loop’ in social development and this affects the way they make friends. They may compensate by giving way to others, to win approval and cement friendships, or by becoming more dominant and controlling a conversation so that the timing of conversational turns becomes irrelevant. Some children, however, feel daunted by all social contact and withdraw from conversations altogether.

The same rhythm block affects reading as well.

When the majority of children learn to read, they are not only decoding, but also anticipating and monitoring what is coming up next in their reading. This is an extension of the social and emotional development that underpins reciprocity in language skills. The rhythmic aspect of reciprocity is not only the rhythmic ‘to and fro’ between the children, but also the delicate timing that positions each syllable within the grammatical structure of the sentence, allowing understanding to arrive without effort, whilst sustaining attention with ease.

For almost 20 years, a body of work has accumulated showing the link between rhythm and reading development. For example, a child’s sensitivity to rhythm in Year 1 predicts their reading attainment years later, in Year 5 (David et al. 2007).

Common Myths About Rhythm-Based Teaching

Many people are interested in a rhythm-based approach as it is free, just like the air we breathe! This is a good thing. On the other hand, rhythm is very subtle. If we think about rhythm in relation to language, every sentence differs in terms of length and stress patterns. If we think about rhythm in relation to music, the different musical styles are very nuanced in terms of their rhythmic feel. If we look at musical traditions around the world, there are different kinds of rhythmic organization in language and music. Researchers looked at all of these factors more than 20 years ago and discovered that although music and language are similar in obvious ways, they are not united by their rhythmic patterns.

This means that although clapping, chanting and body percussion games can be fun in and of themselves, they are not going to transfer onto better language skills unless something else was influencing the data. It’s a bit like believing that chanting a magic spell will improve reading.

There are two main reasons why musical rhythm influences the rhythmic aspect of language. The first is that we use our ears when we hear music and spoken language. The same auditory system apparatus is involved. This is the main ‘overlap’ between hearing music and hearing language.

The second reason that musical rhythm influences sensitivity to rhythm in language is precision. If either speech or music demanded a higher level of precision the other would benefit, because of the overlap. Music demands a higher level of precision in terms of rhythm than does language, particularly in shorter phrase lengths, typically encountered by children when learning language.

It is logical that so much emphasis is placed on language learning skills as they would seem to relate directly to oracy, reading and writing. Unfortunately, the sensitive time window of language development in the first five or so years of a child’s life is a natural barrier to what can be achieved. The good news is that rhythmic precision in music can be developed throughout life. Emphasis at the very front edge of a musical sound determines whether a musical rhythm is accurate.

Working with musical rhythm is not a matter of shaking a tin of rice, and hoping for the best. Not at all. A rhythm-based intervention is about working together as a group with a strong team ethos, and maintaining a social and emotional perspective.

When done well, the benefits of rhythm-based intervention are positive in terms of affect and belonging, as well as benefiting the children’s attention, comprehension, fluency, decoding, and sensitivity to phonemic awareness. This is very much about supporting the whole child and as such, is delivered by empathic and sensitive teachers, and of course, never by a metronome.

5 Ways Rhythm Supports Reading

It is so easy to reach for a reading assessment in the first week, even with an awareness of the risk of over-testing. This approach generates data that clog up the system and add to workload. A ‘third way’ avoids the binary approach of the deficit model and is more agile. It’s lighter on data and does not generate a ‘label’. Better still, a ‘third way’ comes with a logical solution that doesn’t depend on a firm diagnosis of a learning deficit of any kind.

Sensitivity to rhythm develops very early, shaped by social interaction from infancy. It is hierarchical in its structure and supports the following five areas of reading:

• Attention is robust and directed at learning

• Sensitivity at the front edge of phonemes is strengthened by rhythm.

• Anticipation of the most likely next word is strengthened by rhythm and supports decoding skills

• Ease and fluency in the rhythmic flow of phrases and sentences are strengthened by rhythm

• Anticipation of what is coming up next in the reading sparks the deeper structures of language grammar and comprehension during reading and learning, so children say they know what is happening in the text and in the classroom. This too strengthens attention and sets up a positive spiral.

Children often say to me:, “I know what’s going on now.”

All of this is very logical and very natural and low cost. But it does require us to think a little differently about rhythm and also about reading.

The Reading Fluency Tracker - A Free Way to Get Started

To make this an easy transition I created a Reading Fluency Tracker. It is designed to be used once a week with each child and can be completed while they read aloud to their teacher. The five areas of reading listed above are built into the tracker.

This isn’t an assessment of reading speed. There’s no stopwatch. It’s about listening to the flow of the reading and noting down the extent to which the child is engaging with the text, asking questions about it, understanding what is happening and above all enjoying their reading. There is a section for building a rapport with the child and the text and also a section for recording the tricky words.

Although it is easy to figure out how to use this tracker, I run frequent training sessions using audio and video files so that we can practice using the fluency tracker together.

👉 Get your free Reading Fluency Tracker

Rhythm for Reading Online CPD

If you are keen to see children in your school progress in the five aspects of reading I listed earlier, then you may be happy to learn that my CPD programme is about to open its doors.

Each term, you will see a new group of children go through the Rhythm for Reading programme.

Rhythm for Reading Online CPD runs for 30 weeks and teachers start with skills in empathy and in supporting children, but finish the 30 weeks, able to not only teach children to read more fluently, but also to adapt the programme to support children with SEND.

Teachers who take the CPD become sensitive to the rhythm blocks that hold children back in their social and emotional learning, as well as in language development and reading. For schools interested in expanding their inclusive approaches, this would be a good resource to add flexibility, agility and support children with diverse needs.

I have three starting dates: w/b 24th August, 7th September, and 21st September because some schools are back quite soon, particularly in Scotland.

👉 Find out more about Rhythm for Reading Online CPD

REFERENCES

David, D., Wade-Woolley, L., Kirby, J.R. and Smithrim, K. (2007), Rhythm and reading development in school-age children: a longitudinal study. Journal of Research in Reading, 30: 169-183. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.2006.00323.x