Donna Thomson
Donna is a reading and co-operative learning specialist, researcher, educational writer and Every Child a Reader campaigner. She began working life as an educational TV writer and presenter for children’s programmes in the 1970’s, followed by 15 years as an executive in music publishing and recording.
Since 1996 she has worked in SEN, at first began supporting children with special education needs, then on developing SEN training and practice. Whilst focusing on the reading behaviours of fluent and struggling readers, she became aware of the disparity between decoding levels and the children’s understanding of text in comparison and began researching into effective ways of developing early comprehension skills and child-led enquiry across the ability range in 2001.
The Think2Read reading comprehension approach grew out of this action-research over the following years and has been trialled and evaluated in other schools with the same positive outcome. In 2005 Donna set upThink2Read as a not-for-profit company and has continued to develop the programme further as a sustainable whole-school model that not only improvse early comprehension skills and reading for meaning, but also enables transferable thinking across the curriculum to support easier transition between the key stages.
Language and Literacy expert Professor Ros Fisher, Exeter University, evaluated the impact of Think2Read’s scheme of work on classes of 6 –7 year olds in two large Devon primary schools in 2008. Her report highlighted how the teaching of interpersonal skills and team roles helped mixed ability groups of children to respond to challenging tasks together with confidence, a sense of common purpose, mutual consideration and respect for one another.
Since then the Think2read TEAM-Building and Comprehension Programmes have been designed for generic use across the curriculum for all primary ages and abilities. The cross-curricular Transferable Thinking programme that emerged from this work was also successfully evaluated during the RIO Project in Bea’s Year 3 and 4 class, 2010-2011 and will be available as a school programme soon.
