Bringing Every Reader Into the Conversation – My 2025 Inquiry Focus

Last week we had our first CoL PLG for the year and our focus before our next session is the summarise the challenge of student learning. One of the cluster goals this year is 1.5 years progress inside a year, focusing on the big three of reading, writing and maths. As a school we have found the key areas that we want to focus on with those being reading and maths. From looking at my data and my reflections from being part of RPI last year I would like to continue my focus on reading. Being part of the Reading Practice Intensive (RPI), gave me lots of practical strategies and helped shape the way I thought about reading in my classroom. This year, I’m keen to build on that learning and continue to focus my inquiry on reading, digging deeper into what my learners need, and how I can better support them.

At the end of last year when I was looking at the data for 2025 and presenting my ideas for CoL 2025 my thought process of what I wanted to look at for this year was to extend my students who at or just below where they should be for reading and focus on critical thinking and extended discussion. From looking at 2024 data for these students in my class I would like to focus my inquiry on my students who are reading between the ages of 9 and 12.5 years.

I have spend the first few weeks of this term observing my learners in reading and have found that there are two extremes in this group of students. There is a number of students who are confident and really like sharing their thoughts and ideas in guided reading lessons, however there are a large number of students in these groups who rely on these confident ones to share and will just sit back and not take part in these discussions. I have completed a reader profile survey in week 1 and I will share the results of this in another blog post but it was really interesting to see the students thoughts and feelings around reading.

The main challenge that I can see my learners are facing is being able to have conversations and discussions as a group with everyone being able to share their thoughts and ideas. I want to be able to build a space where students love to read and share what they have read with each other. This is the transition from learning to read to reading to learn and this is what I want to empower my learners with this year.