Once again, I am at the beginning of another subject. Over the summer I will be completing the unit ETL567, Research in Practice. To tell the truth, at first, I was not thrilled about having the study this unit. My initial reactions were ‘how is this relevant?’ and ‘this is going to be so boring’. I have decided to change my attitude towards this subject and throw myself in because, hey, I might actually learn something.

So, what does research in practice look like? Having looked over the subject outline my thoughts are that it’s applying analytical research to make improvements or changes in the school library. I would even go so far as to say that these research skills could also assist my students in their research practices. Research in this context is more than fact-finding on the internet. It’s about going deeper into a problem to find possible solutions based on my own findings and the findings of others.

Module 1 asked us to think about a possible research project in our own context. It got me thinking about the Wide Reading Programme and the DEAR programme that are both currently run at school. Through readings and presentations at seminars, I am aware that there is a decline in readings for pleasure in the teenage years. The question I am thinking about is ‘What can we do to reverse this decline?’ Having learned about the ‘Just Read’ programme at Queenwood I am most interested to see if a similar model could work in my school context.

The issues that we are currently facing with the programmes are two-fold. The Wide Reading programme is run from Year 7 to 10 through the English department, with one wide reading session a cycle per class being timetabled. This means the teacher librarians only see their classes once every ten days (on average, sometimes even longer). This is not enough for students to focus on their reading on a regular basis. The DEAR programme is run from Years 7-9 each day for 20 minutes at the beginning of period 5. While this sounds great in theory, I really wonder how often this is actually happening. I would imagine that any practical class (PE, VA, Music, Drama, Science) would not participate in DEAR as it would impact too much on their own class time.

The Queenwood model involves having a dedicated daily 20-minute period for reading. This means it doesn’t impact on any other classes and is regular.

This would be a huge change, but I feel an improvement, to the school. It would require structured research about the students’ current reading habits, as well as review of current literature on the reading habits on teenage boys. Thinking about this process is overwhelming, but I’m hoping that ETL567 can provide me with some practical tools in order to tackle this project.