Lessons from the History of Teaching Reading

It is now unorthodox or even heretical – except among those for whom it is not – to claim that the simple view of reading is fallible. I noticed recently a University lecturer being taken to task for “pedalling tripe” by suggesting he was going to read Davis’ critique of systematic synthetic phonics. We live in a time where vitriol is easily poured out – whether on those heartless fascists who espouse a top-down model of teaching or those careless, loveless airheads who think that children should find it all out for themselves. Such, at any rate, would be the Martian judgement (for “Martian” see the work of Eric Berne as shorthand for a commentator completely outside the system). No matter how important they seem to the protagonists, Single Issue Politics -whether at national or staff-room level – can get very nasty very quickly.

So let’s just have a look at a few sources:

The ‘simple view’ shows that, to become proficient readers and writers, children must develop both word recognition and language comprehension. Letters and Sounds is fully compatible with the wider, language-rich early years curriculum. It will help practitioners and teachers adapt their teaching to the range of children’s developing abilities that is common in most settings and primary classes. The aim is to make sure that all children make progress at a pace that befits their enlarging capacities.

Yes, Letters and Sounds.

It is teachers themselves who will ensure our target is met. This Framework for Teaching [sc the National Literacy Strategy] is a practical tool to help teachers do precisely that. All teachers know that pupils become successful readers by learning to use a range of strategies to get at the meaning of a text…As with reading, it is important that pupils learn to write independently from an early age.

The first NLS Framework.

That to this day our Crop answers not our Seed; that our Childrens Attainments come not to our just, and Rational Expectations, is so stabbing an Experience, that it ought not to be mentioned without a Flood of Tears. The grand reason why you hear Children so much, and yet teach them so little, is because you hear them so confusedly. Put therefore as many of them into one form, as you judg [sic] to be of an equal capacity, or at least no great difference between them…Let an hour every day be solemnly spent in sounding and spelling those words, which you find in the Two last Chapters which contain most, if not all the difficulties are usually met with in the whole English Tongue.

Nathaniel Strong, England’s Perfect Schoolmaster, 1699

However, my concern in this post is not about the veracity of any of these claims, but the “truthiness” behind them, the forcibly put assertion that “this is the way.” We are used, now, to Secretaries of State being, claiming to be (or even overtly supplanting) experts, so this language is very familiar. It could be argued – for the first two, at least, that this is the Government showing leadership.

I am not so sure: the displeasure and downright unpleasantness shown in these arguments by this side or that seem much more to be connected with a who-shouts-loudest demagoguery than with a willingness to listen to various aspects of the argument, and this, if nothing else, is the critical job of higher education research: to read, mark, inwardly digest, rather than simply support the shrill.

Our Education Studies students (and others of the undergraduate programme taking the year 1 module on Introduction to the Study of Education) please note: education systems that demand compliance, over-loud claims for odd pieces of research, (even) jocular and plausible lecturers are there for you to sift much more than to be believed.

More Nonsense in a Minute

Dave Aldridge has released an interesting blog post I want to respond to or at least use as a springboard for a personal rant. Where Dave asks “What, then, will become of the proposed LEA chains?” I guess he is dealing with that uncomfortable truth that the big businesses behind academies will – or may – not want to take on smaller schools, rural areas, some of the seemingly insoluble issues that lead to “poor quality pupils.” [NB: the website of the original report seems to have been taken down] That the state provides the “safety net” (I’m not sure of this shorthand metaphor) seems eminently reasonable; if the government has decided not to be the major player in what was a national initiative, well, we, the electorate, voted them in, sort of. Today it seems “we, the people” voted for a string of idiocies.

I join Dave Aldridge in his disquiet. However, I would be more sanguine about this if it weren’t for the dreadful other things we are seeing from this government at the moment: high-handed bullying around dodgy dealings on the NHS; rich people making decisions about their taxes that takes money from public services – and then covering it up; the opposition of the current government to taking in refugee children under the “Dubs Amendment.” This Kindertransport moment (the PM says it isn’t) is where I give up. If, as the Secretary of State for Education has said, this is a “broadly Christian country” (a phrase I believe she used to justify her position at the time in opposing equality in marriage, presumably based in part on a reading of Leviticus 20:13 or Romans 1:27), then where is our broadly Christian Government going to stand on Deuteronomy 10:18, 19, where God “takes no bribe…and executes justice for the fatherless and loves the stranger,” or the vilifications of the prophet Amos (e.g. Ch 8) against those who trample on the needy, eager to resume their unfair trading? And if the mention of Amos makes anyone think this is all a bit Amos Starkadder, then 2 Corinthians 8 is a more human take. Be kind: it seems that kindness – the recognition that we are all the same kind, all human, all with needs and talents and joys and disasters – is exactly what is being written out of our lives systematically.

So this is my Catiline question (I know I am not alone in using it) : Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? How long will you abuse our patience? If “accuracy is for snake-oil pussies,” if High Street tycoons can make a packet and then walk away, it is as if the last election entitles only to attend feeding time at a pool of crocodiles.

Yes, it goes without saying that these views do not necessarily represent an official position by my employers.

And yes, I know Cicero would not necessarily approve of my use of his phrase in this argument.

Dirty

This is a really neat overview on YouTube of my favourite module, “my” Outdoor Learning module. It can serve as a version of the fictionalised examples I have picked up over the years that I present below. As I burble on in the video, I raise the question about where does the passion and interest lie in being outdoors. We whet the appetite in Year 1 in the module Introduction to the Study of Education, pick it up in Year 2 with this module, and some will go on to a final year placement in Forest Schools or maybe do a dissertation around the outdoors. I’m never sure quite what to make of the student evaluation questions about “challenge,” however: U70124 is a popular module, whatever that means, and the eager student will doubtless go beyond the procedural, the basic literature (however valuable) – but we sit, perhaps ambiguously, between the placement modules and the theoretical. What do we mean by challenge, then? Is there a difference between academic challenge and physical challenge? Between physical challenge and overcoming resistance?

Here’s one student: she joins the module with a (largely unacknowledged) antipathy towards sustained reading. She is not alone in finding essay writing an awkward mixture of thinking out her opinions based on class input and “finding the right quotes” for the essay.

And here’s another: she is a solid practitioner who finds the academic stuff hard, but equally finds the alternative perspectives she meets uncomfortable. There are real points in the outdoor learning module where she finds herself thinking “I would never do that with my children.” At heart she is here to make her setting better.

And in the rule of three, here is the last: a good student, an experienced EY worker, she is nonetheless convinced by voices from her past that a stick on the floor is dirty, that sitting in the floor is unpleasant. Even being in the little wood here is several steps into an unknown.

Are their challenges the same? Are engaging with effective reading, linking theory to practice, overcoming tactile defensive systems all fundamentally about overcoming some resistance? And what does their tutor do – what do I do – to help them face their challenges, to see the threshold idea as something to be welcomed ?

I confess I find myself hampered by my big question from the YouTube video, around where the “passion and interest lie.” So often we talk about passion, about well-being, or (worse) “allowing children to be children.” These ideas – sometimes surrounded by metaphor or given authority simply the power of the slogan – may well have power in the advocacy that student 2 may need, but are well-nigh fatal to the thinking and engagement required by student 1. And while this is familiar territory to me as an academic, where does this leave student 3? How do I look at student well-being and challenge on all three levels? It’s as if I need a set of resources or an approach that will

encourage engaged reading
improve practice
support challenge without acting as Mother-Hen.

Oh, wait: that’s probably my job: to develop a package (a class, a module) that enables as well as challenges; where reading is expected, opinions are welcomed, and even den-building in a muddy wood has its place. Maybe that “place” (metaphorically) also has to make the discomfort of changing minds acceptable to students. A tall order: the students aren’t the only people who have a challenge in the module on Outdoor Learning.

What did you to in the curriculum wars, Daddy?

When I asked back in March what we do about evaluation that goes against the grain I was asking (part of ) a question that I come back to again and again: What is a curriculum? and the purpose of the rather glib title is to begin to wonder about whether the contested nature of the curriculum is something I should return to.

We are surrounded by real violence at the moment, and the notion of curriculum wars is a bit silly: there are other things we might take arms, or a moral stance on, and I won’t digress on them here. What I do want to do is look at some possible readings of the OfSTED report “Teaching and play in the early years: a balancing act?” which is linked here.

The Summary begins like this:

“Research has never been clearer – a child’s early education lasts a lifetime.
“For too many children, the foundations for a successful start to their education are weak. In 2014, around two fifths of children did not have the essential skills needed to reach a good level of development by the age of five. Worryingly, in our most deprived communities, the outcomes were much worse.
“The 19 percentage point gap between disadvantaged children and their better-off counterparts has remained unacceptably wide for too long.”

My heart sinks at this; this looks all too like the “beat-up-the-teachers” line of too many politicians. But read on (and I hope I’m not being too selective here):

“The early years providers we visited showed that a strong start can be the norm for all children, regardless of their background. The schools and settings in this survey focused relentlessly on developing children’s communication, language and vocabulary.
The schools and settings we visited did not see teaching as separate from play or infer teaching to mean one fixed view of how things should be done.”

Where is this going? Well, this is the key section for me:

“There is no one way to achieve the very best for young children. Many different approaches to teaching exist. Most of the providers we visited did not think of their time with children as being either teacher-led or child-initiated. They found this terminology unhelpful and sought a better way to articulate the subtleties of their work. They saw their approaches to teaching and play as sitting on a continuum, their staff weighing up the extent of their involvement and fine-tuning how formal or informal, structured or unstructured, dependent or independent each learning experience should be to meet the needs of each child most effectively.”

So is this a contrast with opposition to child initiated learning? Or a compromise? Or a plain fudge?

When we ask what a curriculum is we have to be careful. Is it a programme of study? A set of adult-composed activities through which a child is taken systematically (Swarbrick 2013: 81)? or is it “what it intended to be taught and learned overall (the planned curriculum),; what is taught (the curriculum as enacted); what is learned (the curriculum as experienced)”? [This is from the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review, Children, Their World, Their Education (Alexander 2010:250).]

I suggest that the ambiguities in Teaching and play in the early years are reflected in the subtitle (and its question mark). Is it “a balancing act?” Who requires it to be a balancing act? Still no nearer to a lasting stability, perhaps, but at least the struggle to keep upright, the wobble of a balancing act sounds better than the violent image of a curriculum war.

Bike riding

Just to record the way in which parental (and grandparental) roles shift when teaching someone to ride a bike. “Liberty Hall at Granny’s House” is sometimes (not always) the order of the day, but the relationship shifts when a definite and complex set of tasks are to be undertaken, as in helping Maisy to get to grips with her bike. The need to keep her on task and not downhearted (and preferably relatively uninjured) is compounded by the need to help her succeed – in itself part of keeping her buoyant. Given how learning to ride a bike has a number of components that need to be mastered (balance, steering, pedalling – and to that I might add holding on, using the brakes), it is hard to make some small, achievable steps that are real and build to a sub-set of the skills of successful bike-riding.

Her progress is steady, she is doing well – but it is not easy. Falls are hard, and the effort from all of us is tiring. Lunch and Shaun the Sheep were an important punctuation.

And then this link reminds me of how many children have already had the Time Out of Time Outs in being excluded, as indicated by this DfE report. I just wonder how many of these exclusions had, somewhere along the line, a failure from a practitioner to recognise the complexity of a task, or how tired the day was making child or grown-up? This isn’t to join some line of people blaming the adults, or to suggest that everything must always go at the pace a child thinks is appropriate, but just perhaps

when we think about a piece of learning, should we ask

does it need breaking down any further?
what implications are there for adults’ time and energy?
how can a break in the learning look like a success, not a retreat?

Fattening a Pig

My father-in-law, Donald, was a Master Joiner who spent a lot of his working life on farms in the vale of York. He was (although this is by-the-way) witty, well read, but not a “success” at school; whatever that means, we are not talking about a father-in-law who was an educationalist. He was, however, a man much given to pithy comments, and when SATs first came in, he once said “You don’t fatten a pig by weighing it.” According to Don, testing, whatever other soundbites might suggest, does not automatically improve standards.

So here I am, on an unreasonably sunny morning, procrastinating about my Easter email backlog and pondering what might be said about tests. I see the opposition to baseline testing is back, from Early Education and others, and from the Unions – and I gather that Tristram Hunt has said he is always ready to “listen to professionals but…”

And today the proposal to re-test children who fail SATs at KS2 is interesting: the language alone is worth a re-read. Look first at the Telegraph‘s report:

Children who fail their primary school leaving exams in English and maths will be made to retake the tests in their first year of secondary school under Conservative plans to ensure there is “zero-tolerance of failure and mediocrity”

Is “failure” at the heart of SATs, then? And are KS2 SATs to be seen as “leaving exams”?

I think I am in favour of giving children a chance to have another go at an assessment task. It may even be (although I am less convinced about this) that a child might do better in a different environment. What is really quite disturbing in the language used by the Telegraph is the shorthand which makes SATs the ultimate arbiter of a child’s success – so much so that they will take them again if necessary.

Of course, this isn’t really what the proposal would be like: children would be allowed to have further teaching that would improve their skills in basic maths and English, and their NuSATs (my neologism) would test how well they were managing to catch up. The BBC have a different take on this:

The test resit plan from the Conservatives, which would be implemented next year, is aimed at making sure that pupils have not already fallen too far behind at the beginning of secondary school.
…
Pupils who did not get good grades in the Sats tests taken by 11-year-olds in primary school would have to retake a test during their first year after moving up to secondary school.

So let’s hear from the SoS herself:

“If they don’t achieve the required level when they leave Primary School, then in year 7, their first year at Secondary School, they would take slimmed-down tests in English and Maths. They could take these either in the spring term or the summer term.”

and I hope this link to her BBC interview remains stable, since her ipsissima verba are mostly reasonable, not strident, well worth listening to and pondering. It seems to me a wholesome ambition that young people should move from Primary schooling with a strategy in place for all the support they need to make a success of Secondary (I have been marking undergraduate year 1 assignments recently and might comment on English at entry to University at some point – but not today). I am not sure she has really explained here what will happen to make sure the children reach what she calls the “required levels,” and I worry that this may mean that Secondary schools are asked to use what she calls “catch-up money” to brumm children who are “behind” up to a standard that may not really be sustainable but which has got them through their NuSATs. There is a slight unease as I hear her move into what view OfSTED and the DfE might take as they look at “whether the school is letting those children down by not getting them to the required standard…there could be an intervention (NB the word is first used by the Beeb’s interviewer), it could be that other head teachers could come in or offer advice…”

And we are back at what has always seemed to me the main reason for SATs: to assess, not children, but the effectiveness of the school.

So if the pig being weighed is not the child, can we apply my father-in-law’s dictum to systems? Can we over evaluate schools? Is the over-testing of system likely to cause irreparable damage to the system? While I acknowledge they say little about school systems, to finish, here are some YouTube clips in which stretching and stress are used to test materials from a webbing manufacturer, and from a Lab Test on Stainless Steel.

They are testing products to destruction. Absit omen.

Visual Methodologies

Hmmmm.

I’m re-reading Gillian Rose on Visual Methodology, and she has given me a lot to think about. I’d like to see if I can apply her ideas to some children’s work such as this:

So let’s look at this in more detail.

There are two figures, arms down by their sides, under or at least near a complex climbing frame. Writing explains that the child feels s/he is “very good at playing on the climbing frame.”

Now, I know who did this (I have obscured a name, although I do have the young artist’s permission to share this drawing) and the context, but if we apply Rose’s criteria to it, we need to ask:

What is being shown? What are the components of the image?
How are they arranged?
Is this a contradictory image?
What knowledges are being deployed?

At the basic level, what is shown is as I’ve said above, a climbing frame and two figures in proximity to it. There are two components as I read it: humans and climbing frame. If part of the questioning we need to undertake is around what has been missed out, what is not there is interesting too, however. It might be that we can distinguish here a sort of intransitivity: the climbing frame is not being climbed, and the figures are not climbing it. In the picture there is no sky or grass, no distraction from other equipment. Does this argue for there being a lack of need from the adult for a ‘holding activity’? “Just [go away for five minutes and] colour in the sky”? Or does it argue for purpose or maybe even haste in the interaction between adult and child?

But we might also suggest a third component: the writing, both by the child and the adult. Image and text work together, and are part of the same tradition (of which child and adult are aware) as the picture story book. The arrangement is one in which this convention is upheld.

Where it is skewed, where it has an element of contradiction, is in the adult intervention. What is the purpose of this object? The title gives it away: this is a piece of school record keeping, very probably created at the request of an adult “to go in your file.” The child’s writing (and adult transcription) and title and date suggest that this is part of a record-keeping system that tells someone (see below) something (again: more to think of here) about how the child artist-writer sees themselves.

So what knowledges are being deployed? In brief, as a first go at this I propose that we can discern:

an understanding of how text and image can work together;
an understanding of how to represent the various elements of the climbing frame (including climbers);
some understanding of purpose and power in adult-child relationships.

So in looking at this power relationship, we come to the reason the work was created. I suspect, as I said, that this is at the request of the adult – and therefore, to some extent, the adult is the intended reader, the sponsor of the activity. Even in the context of physical play, the child is constrained, as is the adult, to use the event to spawn other events closer to the curricular needs, not of the child, but of the adult: play and the observation (or in this case the self-evaluation) makes it have a purpose the adult world might value.

Attention sp

William Pooley raises some interesting questions here about attention span. Should we be “so willing to assume that every individual has a fixed ‘span’ (which can be stretched, or curtailed, perhaps, but still exists as a kind of objective measure)”? The notion of us needing to maintain or enhance our focus is something Jason Elsom raised earlier this week in his tweet “How to focus in the age of… SQUIRREL!!!” (@JasonElsom). In both cases there are undertones of the now well-disseminated TED talk by Ken Robinson in which he claims too much of education is anaesthetising children.

I’d like, however, just to take an anecdotal sideways look at this.

Boys, we all know (because we are told we all know) have poor fine motor control, poor attention span., &c., &c. While William P is right that a serious study needs to be done on attention (I once found some interesting evidence of English monks in the Middle Ages muttering about long, rambling sermons, and attention during prayer has long been the focus of spiritual writers, but that’s even more of a digression), he is also right that this discourse of attention itself needs sustained enquiry. What follows is merely a snapshot.

Evan was having a good time – on and off – with the cars one week. Evan was four. One day he found that smashing trucks down a plank meant that the car crash was more spectacular than brumming them together. He built a ramp with planks and bricks to stop the trucks from falling off the sides. So far, an hour has passed. Group time, tidy-up time. Home time.

The next day he returns to the play, builds up the ramp, asks for some technical help about stopping the planks from sliding off the bricks (masking tape) and returns to his exploration of car crashes. He spends half and hour on this, goes to the loo, comes back – you can see where this is going. His key worker comes and sits with him from time to time, asking questions, finding masking tape, suggesting better cars – and by now fetching them from down the classroom where Evan is by now getting them to zip to. Two hours pass that day.

By the end of the third day, Evan has, in effect, devised an experiment to see whether how steep the ramp is affects how far the cars go. His key worker’s job on his Foundation Stage Profile is nearly done – if that’s a factor here.

My point is that the ‘discourse of attention span,’ when it hits the early years needs to take account of motivation: “Can concentrate on a self-chosen task” is a different thing (almost) entirely from “Can do as s/he is told for at least five minutes without wandering off.” Confusing the two risks misunderstanding the nature of self-motivated learning.

Pedagogy

This posting from me is just a jumped-up tweet, but what’s behind it is worth sharing, I feel. Steve Wheeler (whose blog is always a good read) has an insightful view of pedagogy here in his latest post.

Good pedagogy is about guiding students to learning. It’s about posing challenges, asking the right questions, and presenting relevant problems for learners to explore, answer and solve. True pedagogy is where educators transport their students to a place where they will be amazed by the wonders of the world they live within.

Yes, well worth a look.

Suffering from Childhood

Again the thoughtful and thought-provoking Ken Robinson talking about the nature of learning. http://embed.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.html
Learning or compliance? Teaching or testing? I won’t comment much more, but it does tie in to some extent with last night’s post about my position as an HE lecturer; what he says about teaching children also applies, mutatis mutandis to many University classes, too.

Maybe that Latin tag is ill-advised?