Words and Graphics by Ant Gray

Recently, I was looking for something about reading to kids, and I happened across an educational theorist from New Zealand with some really great ideas about teaching and learning, which made a few things fall into place for me about being a parent too.

Reading is usually a solitary experience—something we do alone, silently, away from the distraction of others.

But reading with kids, it’s the opposite. It’s a shared experience. As you read aloud, you might have a little one nuzzled into your side, or excitedly bouncing up and down on your knee when they see something they recognise or love. And unlike adult books, children’s books have pictures with details to pick over, count and name.

Reading together like this is not reading for relaxation; it’s ramshackle, rollicking fun. An overloaded wheelbarrow of words and images and story, always on the brink of tipping over.

And that’s what makes it fun. Keeping your child engaged and making them part of the experience.

Sadly, for me as a kid, I didn’t really get that experience. I’ve thought a lot about it since our son was born. Actually, even before he was born, when I started reading aloud to our little peanut most nights while Fi lay heavily pregnant in bed.

I’ve wracked my memory again and again, but I can’t remember there being very many picture books in our house when I was a kid. I have no memories of sitting with my parents reading like I do now with my little one. Dad did read me The Hobbit when I was older. I remember that. He stood towering over me and sometimes pacing round the room as I lay in bed. I loved that, but not any kid’s books as far as I can remember, and little to no reading together.

I struggled learning to read. I came to it comparatively late in life in my first year of primary school.

When I was in primary school, my parents worked a lot, so they made an arrangement the parents of a girl in my class who lived nearby that I would stay with them at their house until my parents could come pick me up in the early evening.

I remember the day I learnt to read clearly. I was staying at the place of the girl in my class. I had some book that I was supposed to read for homework, and my friend’s mum was trying to get me to do it. I wouldn’t even try. I didn’t know how. She tried to make me sit at the kitchen table and do it but with no success. Eventually she got annoyed and sent me outside with the book in hand. She said I couldn’t come back in until I’d at least tried to read it.

I remember being red-faced and annoyed. I sat down angrily at the end of some outdoor paving under a kumquat tree in the otherwise sandy and barren backyard. I sat there awhile and calculated in my head what I could do to get out of reading and what the likely punishment was if I didn’t do as I was told.

After doing a few calculations in my head, I decided it wasn’t worth getting into trouble, so I opened the book at the first page and looked at the alien hieroglyphs. It just didn’t make sense to me, and sounding out letters felt humiliating. I wanted to give up before I started. I also felt the heavy weight of the accumulated admonishments of my teachers and my parents if I didn’t figure this out.

I decided to be brave and really try. The first word I recognised. The next two I had to sound out slowly. The process felt like pulling a loose tooth.

But after a sentence or two it hit me. It was a revelation. ‘Oh, I get it,’ I thought. ‘This is where stories come from!’

It was like the day had gotten lighter all of a sudden. I finally understood that reading is the way you can hear stories on paper. I literally felt giddy with excitement, but it was a mix of joy and terror.

I’d crossed a threshold and could never go back. Now there was no excuse not to read.

The Shared Book Experience

Starting in the late 70s, Don Holdaway, an educator working in New Zealand and Australia in the field of early childhood learning and literacy, had great success in teaching traditionally disadvantaged children to read.

Part of his success came through his advocacy of what he called the ‘shared book experience’ which he thought should be promoted in the classroom and at home.

Holdaway argued that the problem with traditional literacy teaching was that teachers and parents where too quick to correct kid’s mistakes too early in their development, making the whole experience unpleasant for them, and leaving little room for them to experiment and develop their natural instincts for spotting and learning from their own mistakes.

In the past, “We expect to do the formal teaching and then have the performance straight away,” he said in a 1992 interview, “and then we criticise the performance and correct it, which replaces the reflexive self-correction by an intrusive external correction and turns the whole learning act upside down into something perverse and destructive.”

The net effect of this traditional approach, Holdaway explains, is that young readers become more focused on avoiding mistakes and criticism, rather than becoming absorbed in the enjoyment that naturally flows from experiencing great books.

The traditional approach has detrimental flow-on effects. As a result, kids can become inhibited when encountering things they find challenging or unfamiliar, easily losing confidence in their own instincts and their ability to learn independently.

In the school setting, this traditional approach of focusing on minimising errors means that poor performers become even more stigmatised, leading to worse and worse outcomes and performance. “The more problems you had with learning to read and spell, the more you were corrected,” Holdaway explains. “There wasn’t any possibility of learning to correct yourself, to process your own errors,” he says, leading to a counterproductive situation in the classroom where, “the differential treatment of kids having difficulties was in fact detrimental to them.”

In contrast, the shared book experience that Holdaway advocates takes a more careful and empathetic approach when encouraging kids to read, which has some interesting implications in all areas of teaching and learning, at all levels.

The shared reading method runs through four basic phases—demonstration, participation, practice and performance—which can be applied to any learning situation.

Holdaway’s four phases of Shared Learning

The Four Phases of Shared Learning

1. Demonstration—The teacher authentically performs an action which inspires the learner to want to emulate them

In the demonstration phase, the parent or teacher takes the lead and doesn’t worry too much about the child responding. At this stage, they concentrate on reading a book of genuine interest to children.

Instead of forcing interaction, Holdaway says, the parent or teacher’s job is to “share this pleasure and to open up [themselves] as a literate person—to embody the complex things going on in [themselves] being as a reader and make them palpable.”

As he explains:

“Literacy is a rather covert type of practice; it’s got puzzling things for young children to understand as they watch adults read or write. It’s not so easy for them to see the thing as a concrete, accomplished act, so one of the problems in teaching language is to make the invisible visible, to make the abstract concrete, to make the whole thing tangible for the kids—to embody what’s going on.”

To this end, in this first phase, the parent or teacher works to put on a show of the process and expereince of reading in an engaged and lively way. “In a holistic sense, what you are doing with your whole being, including your body, is very important,” Holdaway says. “You’ve got to be more lively and outgoing, even dramatic, than you would normally be, because you’re trying to convey in a concrete way what the story means to you.”

Whilst reading aloud, it’s also important that the parent or teacher be authentic to themselves as well, Holaway argues, even when hamming it up a little. The goal is to make explicit to children the internal processes going on for you as a reader experiencing the story through the act of reading. As Holaway explains:

“Just about everything that’s going on in your head as a reader ought to come out at those times as you’re reading—you are sharing the affective and cognitive processes that are going on in your own head. You’re bringing them out in the open and verbalising them and talking to the kids about what's happening to you.”

As a result of the teacher or parent’s reflexive demonstration, the child will gradually become absorbed in the story as it is unfolding, and in the way the teacher or parent’s is open about their internal processes, leading the child to want to share their experiences too.

2. Participation—The teacher and learner share in the experience of performing the action together

From this point, a certain level of bonding between participants takes place, and the experience becomes more interactive.

Children from here stop being merely passive observers and become active participants, asking questions and enjoying the satisfaction of joining in the act of reading. “Participation is like a dance between the two who are engaged in it—one skilled and the other inept,” Holdaway says. “It is these two parts of the process not represented clearly in traditional teaching—demonstration and participation—which form the framework of shared reading and shared writing.”

This is the part where there are a lot of exchanges between the child and parent or teacher, including discussing what the book is about, what things mean and what might happen.

3. Practice—The learner experiments alone without interference

Once the story is finished, there are still plenty of opportunities for children to further develop their reading skills, including leaving them to their own devices to explore their most beloved books on their own.

For some kids, especially younger readers, this might involve pretending to read. They may take up the book spontaneously, and look through its pages, exploring the pictures, and attempting to recover some of the remembered joy, sights and sounds of your shared time together.

During this experimental phase, Holdaway advises, its best that the parent or teacher be felt to be there, but not necessarily seen or heard. They are there to lend a hand if called upon, but not to intrude.

“Skilled figures do provide the security within the environment,” he explains, “the sense that the safe world is going on because they are near or within cooee.”

As Holdaway explains in a 1982 article, a “noteworthy feature of this reading-like behavior is that it lacks an audience and is therefore self-regulated, self-corrected, and self-sustained.” In this phase, without being told to do so, kids try to recreate both the enjoyment they felt when reading with the loved adult and the skills the adult was demonstrating. For Holdaway most crucially, during this period, “The child is not self-conscious or over-awed by the need to please an adult, nor is the child dependent on the adult for help or correction.”

4. Performance—The learner wants to show off their new skill and is open to suggestions for improvements

Once the child has spent time exploring the book at their own pace and in their own way, there will naturally come a point when they will be excited to share some aspect of the story with their caregivers or teachers.

“After this period of reflexive activity where the teacher is most passive, the learner storms out to display her new-found competence, especially to that important bonded adult,” Holdaway says.

And from here kids should be validated in their attempts. “Approximation is a ruling principle,” Holdaway explains, meaning ‘near enough is good enough’ rather than adults jumping into the role of critic. Their job is to offer support and expertise only when prompted by the child, or if it feels as though they are being invited to give advice or help.

Thus, in this final phase, the shared experience of reading and learning comes full circle, starting with the skilled adult doing all the work and then passing that torch on to the child. In this way, over the course of their interactions, the adult moves from activity to passivity, and the child vice versa.

The shared experience of learning and the movement from activity to passivity and vice versa

The object of the shared reading experience is to help kids make the transition into being literate in a more natural and organic way without instilling in the them a fear of failure, especially in their early attempts.

The goal is to create an experience that is “meaning-centered and process-centered rather than word-centered,” Holdaway explains.

“It would be based on books from a wide literature which had become favorites for the children through enjoyable aural-oral experience. It would promote readiness in powerful ways associated with books and print, and would allow for a gradual transition from reading-like behavior to reading behavior. Approximation would be rewarded, thus supporting the early development of predictive and self-corrective strategies governed by meaning, which are crucial to healthy language use.”

This strategy of providing space for rewarding, shared experiences and time to experiment, learn and grow in private is sadly what most of us missed out on in our schooling, which is what makes Holdaway’s theory of learning so persuasive.

“For the work of learning to read we attempt to motivate the children artificially and reward them extrinsically, neglecting the deep satisfactions which spring naturally from a proper engagement with books of high quality,” Holdaway writes.

The Last Page

Before finishing this piece—which I wrote more for me than anyone else to heal my own expereinces—I was having trouble getting my two-year-old to sleep.

We had read him a story already, me and Fi taking turns reading the book together, after which he was nowhere near ready for bed. So he and I lay in bed—me reading my own book quietly and him screwing around, slithering all over the bed and occasionally roaring at me like a dragon. (We’d watched How to Train Your Dragon the night before.)

I tried my best to tune him out a little to get him to settle down. After a while he seemed quietly absorbed in something, so I looked over to see what he was doing.

He had on my spare pair of reading glasses upside-down on his face, pretending to pour over one of my non-fiction books from a stack on my bedside table.

As far as his experiences of learning to read, I think he’ll be fine.

Ant Gray