I’ve spent a good deal of my career producing and directing plays at school. I’ve got well over a hundred behind me now. (We stage quite a few each year - I’m not that old).
After almost every production, someone has asked me how the students manage to learn ‘all those lines’. I usually just smile a little awkwardly and mutter, ‘Yes, haven’t they done well!’.
Because the truth is, I don’t really know how they’ve managed it.
Some appear to do it pretty easily.
For others, it’s a traumatic experience. Especially when the lines we ask them to learn were written hundreds of years ago and don’t seem to make much sense.
I’m pretty certain that saying the lines out loud when you’re learning them is vital. I’m also convinced that making the process physical can help; I’ve seen lots of young actors who find the words only ‘stick’ when they start moving in the rehearsal space.
But there’s a lot about the process that I don’t understand. I think I’m not alone.
And yet, most of us are happy to dish out huge amounts of reading material, much of which we need our students to learn. OK, they may not need to learn it word for word, but they need to ‘know it’.
And many of the new exam specifications in the UK place more emphasis on memorisation than they have done for decades.
Recently, at school, we’ve been thinking a lot about how we can help our students to be better readers. All of them; the highly academic and those who struggle to read fluently.
There’s a lot of helpful work going on in the field at the moment. David Didau, for example, has written persuasively and powerfully about the importance of reading aloud, which chimes with my line-learning experience and also about reading along, which has challenged my preconceptions rather more.
And, of course, I’ve been thinking about how we can use technology to help us in this quest.
In one sense, technology is proving very useful because of the neuroscientific insights it is offering all the time. We are in the early stages of working with a new tool which we think will revolutionize our understanding of the way all our students read - I’ll write about it more in a future blog. It’s amazing!
But I don’t think classroom based technology is as helpful as it could be yet.
Many of the apps which claim to promote ‘literacy’ focus more on writing than reading. I tend to think that being a good reader is a necessary precursor to being a good writer.
Incidentally, I also have a bit of a problem with the word ‘literacy’. Mention it in a staff meeting and everyone just looks at the beleaguered Head of English to ‘sort it out’. That doesn’t seem fair.
The apps like Zinc and Newsela that do focus on reading tend to work by giving the students more to read. We’ve got plenty of material we want them to read. That’s not the problem. We want them to be better at doing it.
Other apps hint at the fact that technology can present new problems to readers and they focus on stripping away distractions from the text such as hyperlinks or other navigation controls. Did you follow the links to the Didau articles? Hard to resist isn’t it?
Of course, we’re using more and more video and audio than before because it’s easy to make it and share it. That might help with the transmission of information. I’m not sure it helps directly with reading and learning.
We’re sure that new technology will help us a great deal but we haven’t got it cracked yet. We are working on some very interesting innovations, though and I’ll keep you updated with our findings.
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