Becoming an expert in teaching reading

Online course

This course is designed to create a 'deep knowledge base' in order to enable you to become an 'expert reading teacher'. This online toolkit combines theory and practical resources, enabling you to implement evidence based research. The programme is extensive and can be returned to many times, ensuring that you can grow your expertise gradually and in a way that suits your needs and your role.

Welcome and thank you for investing your CPD

This course is aimed at teachers and adults who are working with children aged 5-12 years. Although the course is designed to reflect the demands of the British education system, the key principles can be applied internationally.

The course is based around a framework of reading comprehension strategies, referred to as the Big 10 reading comprehension strategies. The framework will give you a structure that will be of enormous help to you in designing whole class teaching sessions, delivering focused group work, assessing pupils, pinpointing pupil needs and providing effective 1:1 and group interventions. In addition, children can use the framework when reading independently. The Big 10 reading comprehension framework can be applied to any book, including wordless books and audio books.

The course comprises of:

• Lectures designed to deepen and broaden your knowledge of reading comprehension strategies.
• Theory on how children acquire reading skills and advice on how best to support them in overcoming difficulties.
• Think pieces that enable you to dig into specific issues.
• Examples of good practice to aid lesson design.
• Over 30 videos / over 10 hours of footage allowing you to tune in to sessions that would have traditionally been delivered during face-to-face training days.
• Resources and activities that might be used (or adapted for use) with children.
• Materials that may be useful to teachers who lead reading development across a school.

(Video introduction with Vicky Crane, course tutor - approximately 3 mins) and a later video 4 mins covering navigation and downloading documents.

Please note: some of the course files are quite large - if you have any problems with the screen display of PDF files, try refreshing the page. Some video clips are up to 25 minutes long, so you may need to wait for files to load / encode.

We wish you every success in developing reading with your class.

Welcome video

Aims of the course

This file can be downloaded as a PDF document (below).