Thinking Reading: What every secondary teacher needs to know about reading

by Dianne Murphy, James Murphy

Despite the efforts of teachers and educators, every year secondary schools across the English-speaking world turn out millions of functionally illiterate leavers. The costs in human misery and in wasted productivity are catastrophic. What can schools do to prevent this situation? In this highly accessible book James and Dianne Murphy combine more than 50 years of experience to provide teachers with a thorough, easy to use introduction to the extensive research on reading and its effects on student achievement. Drawing on the work of experts from around the world, the authors explore how we learn to read, how the many myths and misconceptions around reading developed, and why they continue to persist.Building on these foundations chapters go on to examine how the general secondary school classroom can support all levels of reading more effectively, regardless of subject; how school leaders can ensure that their systems, practices and school culture deliver the very best literacy provision for all students; and what it takes to ensure that a racing intervention aimed at adolescent struggling readers is truly effective. The overall message of this books is one of great the authors demonstrate that the right of every child to learn to read is entirely achievable if schools employ the best research-driven practice.

151 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 23, 2018

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

One-ish line baby feeding review:

There was exactly one page of useful information in here for me personally where the five things struggling secondary readers need were stated- though that page occurred 3-4 times so I guess technically 3-4 pages of useful info?- and not much else- though the chapter for school leaders about what NOT to do when implementing an intervention could have been cut out for a seminar on that for those people. But no real info on how they recommended implementing the five things or best practices - tons of weird time wasted proving to the choir why reading is important (chapters! Literally!) - like who is reading this that does not agree with that? Meeting that could have been an email?: Book that could have been a buzzy Ed Week article.

[Paige Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25/5

I liked the podcast version of this with Melissa & Lori Love Literacy better than the print version and didn’t love their takes on learning disabilities but thought there were lots of little gems sprinkled throughout the book and will take lots of it into my own practice

[Robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has been recommended in various literacy education circles. I listened to the authors talk about it on a podcast and was impressed by their passion and the results they’ve achieved with some of their students. I thought the book would have more details about how they run their program. How did they manage to get students to make years of reading progress in months? But maybe they don’t want to tell us that because it’s a commercial program.

It’s a short book that has a good overview and advice but nothing very specific. As a learning support teacher, I didn’t really learn anything new. I know what I need to do to help struggling readers in high school, but it’s hard to know where to start. I guess the target audience for this book is supposed to be general secondary teachers, but would they read it? I could share Chapter 4 with them, but they would still need a lot of specific advice and guidance to apply it in their subject areas.

I felt that it walked a fine line without saying it directly, but the repeated implication was that many students are incorrectly diagnosed with dyslexia when it’s actually caused by inadequate teaching. (See page 43 for example) There’s probably an element of truth to that, and I agree that students shouldn’t be labelled as unable to be taught to read. But on the one hand the authors are saying we need to assess students properly and use that data to plan intervention, but on the other hand they imply that diagnoses of dyslexia are often wrong. Surely this diagnosis helps teachers to work out how to help those students and is also used as evidence to get more funding for targeted intervention for these students. But the question remains - where to start?