Reading Power

Our Story

Like many schools, guided reading is popular with pupils and they enjoy engaging with a range of high quality texts. We know how important it is to develop fluency using high quality fiction, but once we have taught the mechanics of reading, do we spend enough time really thinking about how we teach children to understand text? I started to do some research and stumbled across "Reading Power" by Adrienne Gear. It is used by a significant number of schools in Canada, which has a high performing education system, and it seemed like something worth of investigation. Reading Power and Writing Power are meta-cognitive approaches to reading and writing instruction, grounded in research and developed to support educators in their quest to provide the very best literacy instruction to their students. Therefore, I ordered myself the book and then we were off! 

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So what is reading power? 

Gear was a teacher for a number of years and she begins explaining that she recognised weaknesses in her own reading instruction. All too often, teachers don't do enough to teach thinking about reading explicitly. Instead, they hope that pupils' reading skills will simply develop as they read more. Gear contends that in order to improve reading comprehension, we need to make it very clear what we are doing. In order to do this, she offers the teaching of five reading powers as a solution. These are: the power to connect; the power to infer; the power to question; the power to visualise; the power to transform. In each chapter of the book, Gear explains how these powers can be taught and developed with pupils, offering example lessons and ideas. 

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So how have we used reading power at J.C.P.S? 

Our journey started by using our staff meetings for staff to discuss what we do well with our reading instruction and what we need to improve. Then, each member of staff was provided with a chapter from the book each week so that we were able to discuss the content in the following meeting. Staff were wholeheartedly enthusiastic about the approaches pioneered by Gear and we decided to introduce her reading powers as a whole school approach. 

We started to introduce each 'power' to pupils across the school and we spend several weeks familiarising pupils with the language and ideas connected to each power. The application of the powers looks different in each class. For example, when pupils are reading a picture book in Reception Year, they make simple connections to other stories or films. In Year Five, when pupils are reading a more advanced story they make connections to geographical information in the text, themes and much more. In Progression Step Three, the reading powers are used to guide discussions and reflection. We have also designed our own bookmark and poster for each reading power. The posters are displayed in each class and the bookmarks are used during group guided reading sessions to prompt pupils. 

Reading Power has allowed us to introduce a consistent approach for the development of reading skills. Hopefully, this will prevent pupils needing to learn a new approach each year as they move through the school. 

We track pupils reading progress using a series of standardised scores. In the Autumn, we are going to be reflecting upon this work and attempting to measure any improvement in pupil progress. 

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