Blast from the Past: This blog posted on November 19, 2017, and was re-posted May 21, 2022. I would love to say that its original posting ended the practice of round robin reading. Alas, too many teachers continue to cling to the practice – main, I suspect, because they know not what else to do. And, at least some of the teachers who do manage to eschew the practice try to rely solely on silent reading, which is just not sufficient (monitoring students’ oral reading progress is informative, particularly in the primary grades). This blog may be worth a second look as it does more than complain about round-robin, suggesting a practical and powerful alternative.

Teacher question: 

I'm a UK teacher; we use read-along here a lot (the teacher or pupils read a text to the whole class while the other pupils follow in their own text). There is a growing concern that this is ineffective for several reasons. Chief at the moment is that reading and listening simultaneously has a higher cognitive load than either independent reading or listening alone. What do you recommend?

Shanahan response:

The practice of having students read-along as you describe is often referred to with what is now a pejorative term, “round robin.” That term originally comes from the UK, so perhaps its pedagogical misuse starts there too (yeah, blame the Brits).

Back in the day, when sailors had a complaint, they’d sign a circular instrument so that no one could tell who signed first. These days anything that operates in a rotational manner may be referred to as round robin, including the practice of reading aloud in turn.

When I was a boy that meant 50 turns, since there were usually about 50 kids in a class. And that reading was really done in turns… thus, if you were the seventh child in the row you knew you were to read the seventh paragraph.

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