Teach-Reading-and-Writing-Issue-22

H ave you or your class been involved in judging or shadowing a book award? If not, have you considered the positive impact that it could have on the culture of reading in your school? Before you launch in, it’s worth reflecting on the outcomes you would like to achieve. In this article, we focus specifically on teacher involvement and its benefits to both personal and professional development. Teacher-led awards The UK Literacy Association (UKLA) Book Awards, judged by teachers, aim to highlight exemplary or outstanding books that have engaging narratives and strong literary qualities. The awards are not unique in having a clear purpose like this, but the structure of the judging process – involving teachers at each step of the process – is a model for the education profession, valuing teacher knowledge and expertise. For teacher judges, reading the longlists and shortlists is both volitional and – unusually for adult reading – non-volitional, as they are required to read all the books without having chosen them themselves. This can lead to surprising discoveries: teachers often comment that their favourite books are ones they wouldn’t have chosen to read, whether because of genre or subject matter. For instance, the cover and title of Jenny Ireland’s The Boy Next Door led this year’s judges to expect a conventional romance story rather than the sensitive exploration of illness and bereavement that the novel offers. Longlisted books are carefully chosen to reflect issues and experiences of importance to young people today, and reading these books can also offer us an insight into our pupils’ lives. This might be through the depiction of LGBTQ+ identities, as in Theo Parish’s Homebody , of care leavers, as in Margaret McDonald’s Glasgow Boys , or of child poverty, as in Tom Percival’s The Wrong Shoes . These stories are based on writers’ own authentic experiences and allow us to be more empathetic to the young people we work with. The impact of sharing such stories with children cannot be overstated. One of this year’s teacher judges movingly described how Craig Barr-Green and Francis Martin’s Gina Kaminski Saves the Wolf changed the relationship a particular pupil had with her classmates. A unique, brilliant, passionate, creative girl, she sometimes struggled to accept the rigid structure of a mainstream class. Reading Gina Kaminski... prompted Liam to ‘allow her to tell the story she wanted’, meaning that she could feel validated and listened to. Another teacher judge spoke about the joy of one girl in her class after reading Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow and Hatem Aly’s Salat in Secret , about a young Muslim boy who is afraid to pray in public. This book gave her the confidence to be more open about her religion, and allowed her friends to “There is a real joy to be found in discussing books with such attentive readers” Judge and JURY Book awards can inform teaching practice and energise your classroom, say Nikki Gamble and Stephen Dilley 18 | www.teachwire.net