Reading fluency and the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’

Is reading fluency important for academic success?

I’d imagine everyone reading this would agree it was very important – crucial in fact.

This description from Quirky Teacher of many children’s reading in year 6 must sound quite familiar to secondary teachers:

I am worried that children in KS2, despite being officially ‘able to read’, are still not really fluent, even when they get to year 6. When you ask them to read to you, they stumble slowly through a text, sometimes randomly substituting trickier and new words, never able to add intonation and not really getting the bigger picture.

As I outlined in my post yesterday that does not mean that at secondary level we ensure children get enough daily reading practice to ensure our students DO read fluently. One reason for this is that the need for bulk practice is not appreciated. There is another reason why, even when the importance of sustained reading is acknowledged, children still don’t end up with enough practice to become fluent readers. This reason can be explained using the economic principle of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’.

What is this principle?

I like using this cartoon to explain the principle when teaching my A level politics students (about ecologism).

The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource through their collective action.

At secondary level the ultimate goal of subject teachers is to ensure their students learn their subject, biology, geography, RE etc, probably measured through their success in public examinations. Aside from the ultimate benefit to the pupil, if children are fluent readers it helps all teachers achieve the academic goals they have for their students and therefore no teacher would quibble that reading fluency is important.  The reading fluency is a ‘common good’- a shared resource that benefits all teachers as they teach their subject to the student. However, that does NOT mean it benefits the individual teacher to focus on reading fluency. If you look at the wiki definition above, rather than gaining an individual advantage from ‘depleting’ a resource, subject teachers gain an advantage by not adding to a shared resource. It takes valuable lesson time away from subject learning to focus on building the commonly shared resource – fluent reading. I’ll explain using an example from my own teaching:

I want my year 9 students to learn about the 1916 Battle of the Somme. After a series of lessons the class will write an essay on whether the Somme was entirely a disaster. As a subject teacher I will get the most reward from getting the best possible essays as quickly and painlessly as possible. SO should I cover the key detail on the Somme by:

1. Using a great article I found on the internet. I can abridge it to ensure that while it challenges the students it is accessible. I know this article covers the ground well but it will take a long time to read and the students won’t exactly be enthralled that they are doing lots of reading.
2. Use a documentary from Youtube that covers all the issues in full technicolour and takes half the time the article would. Hey – we can practice note taking!
3. Play some sort of fact finding games. Not as effective to get the content across as the article but it will look great if you are observed as the class will love it. They’ll walk out of the lesson saying they prefer history to geography. This means they’ll probably work harder on their history essay and opt for the subject at GCSE.

Let’s be honest. How often do we opt for A because we know it serves the greater good? The common goal of reading fluency is inevitably sacrificed. I don’t think individual teachers should be blamed for this. The incentives are all wrong. How many teachers can get by on a warm glow of self-righteousness when other teachers and other subjects get better results, no one opts for your subject at GCSE and the kids complain that (comparatively) your lessons are boring. We are far more likely to kid ourselves that what amounts to a tokenistic amount of reading is ‘doing our bit’ because we’re not into career suicide.

So what should be done? As my A level politics students know – this is an argument for centralised control. The incentives need to be changed by those with the power to do so – SLT. If sustained reading is the norm in ALL lessons then students just get used to it and will start to read the amount necessary each day to become fluent.

Perhaps this shift towards more sustained reading can be achieved as at Michaela School by having a quite centralised control over the materials used in class. Perhaps SLT can agree with subject departments a notional number of words a week that need to be read in each subject, as appropriate (i.e. not appropriate for maths!). Maybe lesson observation can be used or book scrutinies can look for evidence that there has been very regular sustained reading at the right level of challenge. Ultimately, a sensible, intelligently implemented,  way needs to be found to end what amounts to a ‘tragedy of the commons’.