What is VIPERS?
We adopted VIPERS from The Literacy Shed Blog a few years ago as a result of my visit to one of our feeder primary schools.
Our key aim is to consider how we can build on and address any gaps in our students' active reading skills from KS2 to KS3 and beyond.
VIPERS seemed a good place to start to introduce students to some of the reading reflection questions an active reader goes through whilst reading actively.
So I collated various question stems from Rob Smith's fantastic website and free resources (thank you, Rob!) into the following slide for our students to formulate their own active reading questions.
We know there are millions of possible reading reflection (active reading) questions out there.
But why not start with a consistent and comfortable number of reading questions/skills?
Once VIPERS is consistently applied (through teacher modelling and peer modelling) the habit of actively reading will become automatic. In turn, we will have reflective readers who interrogate a text and develop their own critical opinions. Imagine: our passive readers transforming into independent active readers because of the VIPERS foundation in active reading.
Our active readers (students who stop and question what they are reading and have read) seemed to be far more engaged with whatever it was they were reading.
On the other hand, our passive readers would simply read passively not knowing how to (or simply not try to) question whatever it was that they were reading. With this passive reading habit in mind, VIPERS is a logical way of demonstrating to our passive readers the sorts of questions they should be asking themselves as they read a variety of texts in English and beyond.
As a result, I piloted VIPERS with my KS3 classes as a differentiation tool for our struggling passive readers.
It started to increase the engagement of our passive readers with our set texts.
Students started to be pleasantly surprised with their recall of what they read (knowledge) and more importantly they were confidently voicing their opinions, providing predictions and summaries of the various texts read! They were volunteering their opinions without being asked to do so.
Having received positive verbal feedback from my KS3 classes, I decided to roll it out with my KS4 classes. For example, my Year 10 class enjoyed actively reading Macbeth using VIPERS as one of their active reading toolkits. They explored the vocabulary, made inferences, made predictions and not always in that order. They challenged themselves and developed their own active reading reflection questions (Socratic Seminar questions). This naturally fed into their developing oracy skills as we are aspiring to become a Voice 21 School (second year training with Voice 21).
Students were proud of their active reading skills. I was then asked by my class why other classes were not actively reading. Good question!
This is when I made the decision to introduce VIPERS to my department and explore their views.
Our English team appreciated that it was a simple way to make the implicit explicit for our students when reading. We obviously use an array of active reading questions/skills as teachers but are students able to identify those active reading skills and explain their differences?
Are students able to check if they've used those active reading skills effectively whilst exploring an unseen text independently?
Making the implicit explicit: active reading using VIPERS.
We live model to our students how to actively read and encourage students to use VIPERS as their active reading toolkit (and challenge them to go beyond those questions too!).
VIPERS cards for group discussions of a quote, extract or chapter.
VIPERS has been used to support students with their exploration of poetry.
VIPERS has also been introduced as part of our students' library lesson records:
Here's an example of our of our EAL Year 7 students using VIPERS library lesson record:
VIPERS questions stems have also been introduced as part of our students' D.E.A.R Drop Everything and Read Time with their form tutors at form time once a week.
VIPERS and parental engagement
As part of Year 7 Parents' Evening we sent out to parents a copy of the VIPERS handout below to use with their child at home for active reading. Parents responded positively to the resource and we happy to use it.
VIPERS and disciplinary literacy
This year I was provided with the opportunity to run a reading group and yes, you guessed it!
This staff group was presented with VIPERS as a source of inspiration for departments across our school to start considering how they develop subject specific reading skills (an example of the multifaceted nature of disciplinary literacy).
We also questioned how we ensure that our students are reading a wide range of texts beyond their set texts and school library lesson books.
Our Active and Wider reading group resulted in us sharing some fantastic research on reading from the brilliant @AlexJQuigley and EEF's Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools. I also drew inspiration for these sessions from @MrMPritchard's Slough Curriculum Continuity Literacy project (@DLContinuity) which sees a number of Slough cross-phase schools work together to promote disciplinary literacy.
VIPERS is not a whole school reading strategy.
However, it is a good place to start conversations with departments to ask teams: how are students expected to read in your subject? How do they actively read like a Scientist? How do they actively read (and widely read) like a musician?
The main question was... what it your subject's reading strategy? How are we modelling to our students how to actively read in each subject?
This is what our Music Curriculum leader has developed as a result of considering how to model the act/skills involved when reading music.
Computer Science VIPERS
I will be sharing more details about our reading journey and thank you for having taken the time to read this information!
VIPERS has started our adventure into the world of active and wider reading for our school.
Active reading seems to be in line with what Ofsted are calling Comprehension Monitoring. That's what we continue to explore.
#VIPERS #activereading #widerreading #comprehensionmonitoring
