Author: oldprimarytimer

How to deepen understanding of reading by teaching children how to enjoy it better.

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Or possibly…

How to enjoy reading more by understanding what you read more deeply

Like many primary schools this year, reading is the focus of our development plan. Despite my frustrations with this year’s ks2 reading sats, which I’ve written about here, our children did ok. Slightly above average.  And we are an inner city, deprived, multi-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi-story carpark kind of school. But that’s 20% below how they did in maths.  Now that gap may have more to do with test design than inadequacies in our teaching, but it still infuriates me.  If we can do it in maths we should be able to do it in reading…

So I spent the summer reading about reading. Like many others, I reconsidered what I knew about reading by reading Doug Lemov’s  ‘Reading Reconsidered’. See for example, Nick Hart’s recent interesting blog on reading, and thatboycanteach’s recent post and Rhoda Wilson’s work – who did away with guided reading long before it became a thing.  It is clear that skilled shared close reading of texts is back in the ascendency whereas the carousel-style guided reading lesson is on the wane, particularly in ks2, or where readers can decode fluently. See for example, the Destination Reader approach developed in Hackney primary schools.

However, thatboycanteach’s post – which was incredibly useful – set twitter mulling over ‘reading comprehension’ as a thing, particularly with regards to fiction.  Why can’t children just read and enjoy a story – why analyse to death, why answer turgid sats style ‘inference’ questions?  While I fly no flag for the ks2 reading sats paper, I would respond that inference in general is a vital life skill. Children who cannot infer, who cannot see beyond literal surface features, are children with social and communication problems. Socially skilled children, in contrast, are excellent at spotting the subtle signs that indicate to the initiated that all is not what it seems. Whether in the playground or in the pages of a book, the ability to ‘read’ people is an incredibly useful skill.

Nor are enjoyment of reading and analytical close reading necessarily in opposition.  The whole point of shared reading is that we share with children texts that would be too hard for them to read on their own. We do the heavy lifting, thereby giving them access to richer and more substantial texts than pupils would be able to cope with on their own. It seems to me that primary teachers have three main jobs with regards to reading. First ensure that they can get the words off the page easily and with sufficient fluency to enable at least a superficial understanding of what they have read.  Secondly, to try and inculcate a love of reading. Without this we will produce a generation who can read, but don’t. Indeed, during my initial teaching training way back in 1988, the main rationale for the ‘real books’ approach that I was trained in was to avoid creating literate children who only ever read under duress.  (I saw the light re phonics some 8 years later, but that’s for another blog another time).  Hooking children on books will sometimes mean seeking out the ‘gateway drug’ book that will set our dear pupil on the path to a happily text-filled future. The Recruit, perhaps, a book so racy (by the very low bar of primary education), at our school you are not allowed to borrow it until we have cleared it with your mum first. (Seriously though, if you are considering using it, just stick to the first book in the series.  As with the Harry Potter books, the main characters’ age by one year in each book- though with a good deal more precocity than described in Hogwarts – by book 3 we are deep in year 9 territory – don’t be fooled by the relative tameness of the first book). Thirdly, and just as importantly, we are here to teach children how to ramp up the readable. In our hands lie the tools that will enable children to unlock hitherto seemingly impenetrable texts. By our efforts texts once dismissed as ‘boring’ and ‘irrelevant’ can come alive for pupils. Doug Lemov is explicit in his reason for insisting that students work with hard texts; this is what they will be faced with at college. If they are not exposed to hard texts until they go to college, we shouldn’t be surprised if many young adults drop out when faced with a long and academically demanding reading list. I’m not quite as sold on the ‘university or bust’ credo, but certainly that is one reason why we should present children with rigorous, aspirational texts.  And certainly the reading demands of the new GCSE are much higher, so in primary we need to make sure the groundwork for that is rock solid.

The trouble with this is the 3 different jobs is that each one requires a different kind of book, with the pupil exposed to each in different ways. The ‘getting the text off the page’ stage requires books with restricted vocabulary – with words that the pupils already have the knowledge how to decode phonetically. It goes without saying that at the beginning when the child has only a little knowledge of phonics, these aren’t going to be the most stimulating works of literature ever encountered – though hats off to them behind Project X Alien Adventures – the fully decodable scheme our children go nuts for. Even without these heirs to Biff and Chip, in my experience children enjoy the success that quickly comes using phonetically decodable readers, even when the early books have to try and weave words like ‘pin, ‘mat’ and ‘sad’ into a compelling story line (although sitting on a pin would make one sad, it is true). The ‘getting hooked on books’ stage requires thrilling storylines, some daring-do and/or humour, possibly suspense, characters you care about. Or possibly hate, but in an invested way. But not necessarily nuance, higher level vocabulary, ambitious sentence structure. We are in ‘BeastQuest  and Wimpy Kid territory here. Books children will eagerly read but you would never, ever in a million years read out loud to your class.  They are the literary equivalent of a Pot Noodle. The third stage requires the sort of book CLPE advocates in its literature collections within its Core Book Lists.  For example, the utterly brilliant Varjak Paw or the Lady of Shallot – poems generally in fact. Usually children do not read these independently, at least not at first. They may be the end-of-the-day class story, or used in shared or guided reading. They comprise the literary equivalent of smuggling extra vegetables into pasta sauce.

I fear there is a triple constraint going on here.  In the same way that holidays can be cheap and exotic but not relaxing, or relaxing and cheap at the expense of being exotic, or relaxing and exotic but ever so expensive, it appears we can only have 2 out of any 3 here. So a text can be decodable and exciting (Alien Adventures) but not literature. Or it can be exciting and literary (Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Unforgotten Coat) but you need to be a fluent reader to access. Or I suppose it could possibly be both literary and decodable but not immediately gripping – again many poems are perfectly readable in terms of the individual words, and no one doubts their literary pedigree, but while we may perhaps entice our children, or some of our children, to love them, they are unlikely to become avid readers on a diet of these alone. They are, perhaps, the literary equivalent of stilton.

What this all means is, organising the teaching reading to a class of children with different dietary needs is difficult. The guided reading carousel has the advantage that the guided group’s focus group book can be catered for the group’s particular needs while the other children do something else, some of which includes reading self-chosen books in the hope that this will help them develop a love of reading. But it is a model that devotes a relatively short time – if any – to the teacher making the expert reader’s thoughts visible and explicit; to explaining vocabulary, inference and meta-cognitive comprehension strategies.  If your model does do this, fantastic. But does it also give children time to read the kind of books that they want to read too? And what about the ones who still aren’t fluent? Are you going to tell one that everybody is fluent in your school? Like you don’t ever have new arrivals or children with statements?

In an ideal world, we’d spend the first 20 minutes either learning to spell or learning to decode, followed by 45 minutes of high quality shared reading for all where the teacher modelled their thinking out loud as they read an aspirational text – gradually transferring more and more work to the class as the lesson progressed and the children thought hard about the texts they were studying’ including written answers. Then we would do some longer writing linked in some way to the shared text for an hour, with more teacher modelling, explicit grammar teaching, peer feedback, 10 minutes handwriting practice and finally 30 minutes to read our own self chosen – though guided by an expert librarian or knowledgeable teacher – text, as well as going to assembly, having a break and doing an hour’s maths. And having 30 minutes of story time at the end of the day. That leaves 5 hours a week left for the rest of the curriculum – and that’s without swimming – that time sink that swallows 2 hours time per every 30 minutes actually, er, swimming. Or nativity plays. Or trips. Or having half the class out at a hockey tournament.

So that’s not going to happen.

Having sought out and studied various models this term, it seems the triple constraint comes into play and forces us to make choices about what we are not going to do.  Which one of teacher modelling of reading, giving children time to read for pleasure and teaching children to actually read (the words) are we not going to do?  We are not very good as a profession at owning our choices though and tend to downplay the thing we are not doing – like it wasn’t that important anyway. So old style guided reading carousel is strong on children reading for pleasure and the mechanics of reading, but had less capacity for quality teacher exposition.  Models that have a lot of teacher exposition either dispense with devoting any curriculum time to reading for pleasure, or can’t cope easily with the children in the class who are not yet properly fluent. With this latter group, schools either seem to say – it’s so important these struggling readers are exposed to teacher talk around challenging texts so they must be included; they can miss other lessons for decoding practice. Or they say, decoding practice has to come first, and if they miss foundation subjects then they will miss the very knowledge of the world they need to be able to make inferences, so the decoding children decode elsewhere while the rest of the class do shared reading.

I’ve come across two approaches – one via Destination Reader and one in the approach advocated by Great Bowden Academy (of which more shortly) where the reading lesson is divided into a teacher led introduction modelling a particular learning objective with the whole class looking at the same text, followed by a time where the children seek to apply the same objective (finding places where the reader needs to infer the meaning from textual clues, for example) in the text of their own choice.  This has the obvious advantage of children engaging more deeply with self-chosen texts but the drawback that the teacher – who cannot possibly have detailed knowledge of every book currently being read – has to be very skilled at questioning the children on texts s/he does not know well. If I am reading them correctly, both Nick Hart and thatboycanteach keep with the same text throughout the lesson, with children analysing the text themselves and after an initial input phase. Personally, this approach seems more fruitful because they teacher will know the text under study really well and will have chosen the text deliberately as being rich in whatever technique(s) they are teaching, and so will have more to offer the children.  It also allows for children to do more writing about texts.  The downside being – when do the children get time during the school day to read their own choice of text? Maybe they all read at home…I’d love to work in a school where they all read at home without a huge song and dance and bribes and threats and even then…

We haven’t started doing either approach yet so I’m not going to the stake for what is, at this stage, a hunch, and we are going to do a mixed approach (I think, things are still tentative at this stage) where in years 4-6, 3 days a week are teacher led using one text, and the remaining two have no teacher input and are old fashioned independent reading of self-chosen books, but with the teacher working with a group on whatever aspect of reading they deem necessary. Those who need decoding practice come to the first teacher led lesson, but then have their TA led reading intervention the rest of the week. The children will sit in mixed ability pairs.  The text the teacher will use might be a revisiting of the current class end of day story – so the text can be analysed in the kind of way that would ruin a good storytelling, or a book the class are using in literacy for their writing –  a version of Beowulf say, (with this easier version used in some lessons), or The Wedding Ghost perhaps.  Or they might use an extract from a non-fiction text based on their humanities or science topic, or a poem.  In case you haven’t come across it, Opening Doors to  Famous Poetry and Prose by Bob Cox is an amazing resource, and he has recently published two versions for younger children (the one I’ve linked to is aimed at ks3, but usable with year 6). It is more about using famous – and demanding texts as a springboard for writing, but obviously includes unpacking the texts themselves.

Which brings me, (finally, the reader gasps) to my title.

How to deepen understanding of reading by teaching children how to enjoy it better.

Or possibly

How to enjoy reading more by understanding what you read more deeply.

Is it possible to teach children how to enjoy reading? Surely they either enjoy it or they don’t. maybe we can facilitate that enjoyment but setting up the necessary pre conditions, decoding, fluency, vocabulary development etc., but whether or not a child enjoys a text is surely an intimate matter shared between the author and the reader?

Actually yes you can teach children how to enjoy reading. We ourselves were taught how to enjoy it. I know this is not true for every teacher, but I think I’m pretty safe in assuming most of us grew up in a family where young children were read to. If so, we probably don’t remember our mum or dad or whoever saying things along the way such as…’oh no, Little Red Riding Hood’s gone of the path. Her mum told her not to. I think that means something bad is about to happen!’ (hamming it all up). Or maybe that happened for you at primary school. Either way, without expert reader input, you would not have realised to feel scared for LRRH because we realised she was now in danger – a danger, what is more, that our protagonist is oblivious to.

An aside. When my husband was training to be a teacher his tutor relayed the true tale of the delights of teaching in an inner city classroom. We are in year one, and the teacher is, with great theatre, reading the story of the three little pigs to the class. There is at least one little boy who has never heard the story before, but whom is greatly taken up with the drama of the plot. The teacher reads ‘and he huffed and he puffed and he blew the house down.’  To which our apprentice reader exclaimed ‘fucking bastard!’  (Tick whatever box you now have to tick to record that you now have evidence that the child can understand character motivation). I’ve dined out on that story, and I wasn’t even there.

Anyway, we teach children to enjoy stories by fantastic hammy story telling and by the asides we make that point out the secret clues that alert us to something hidden within the text, a kind of literary Easter egg.   Well, dear reader, there exists a book that describes exactly what these clues are and tells you how to teach them to children. And that book is, Notice and Notes: Strategies for Close Reading by Kylene Beers .

I came across this book courtesy of Great Bowden Academy at the Institute of Education’s annual Research and Development conference.  At this conference members of the research and development network come together from their various schools and share with each other the small scale research they have been doing that year. We are not talking randomised controlled trials here. But thought provoking and useful nonetheless. Our school team were there to share what we had found out  about growth mindset and how it  could be used with teaching assistants – which you can read about here if you wish. I was lucky enough to be on a table with the Great Bowden team, and their project had been about improving pupils’ reading fluency, engagement, comprehension and enjoyment.  A major part of their approach had been to teach the children about the strategies for close reading outlined in Notice and Note. This involved whole class explicit teaching of close reading techniques, a lot of the teacher thinking out loud and pointing out the clues, or signposts as Beers calls them.  Later in the lesson the children read their own texts and looked out for with whatever was specifically the specific aim of the learning objective for the day or ‘spotted and jotted’ signposts.  This sounded intriguing, so I bought the book, and read it over the summer holidays.

It really is very clever.  What Beers has done is identify 6 tropes frequently found within stories that give the reader a heads-up ‘stop, take notice here, this is important’ information. It is full-fat, text level inference we are talking here.  The first, and most useful one is, ‘contrasts and contradictions’.  We teach the children that when you’re reading and a character says or does something that’s opposite (contradicts) what s/he has been saying or doing all along, you should stop and ask yourself, ‘Why is the character doing that?’  The answer could help you make a prediction or make an inference about the plot or the conflict in the text.

For example, in the book Holes, (where the setting is a kind of character), the book opens with the sentence, ‘There is no lake at Camp Greenlake’.  An obvious (to the expert reader), and intriguing contradiction that should raise an eyebrow. However, in our experience, many children have had to have this pointed out to them. Indeed the year 6 teacher tells me she often spends most of a lesson on this very sentence, making explicit how the author is contrasting the name of the place Camp Greenlake, with the reality (no lake, and no green either, we will soon discover). The name is a contradiction.  And that contradictory name – that’s presents as one thing whilst really being something else entirely, is central to the plot.  Camp Green lake purports to be a suitable environment for the rehabilitation of delinquent teens, but in reality, (spoiler alert!) serves only as a vehicle serve the avarice of the Governor. But by labelling this specific technique ‘contrast and contradiction’ we are giving children a generalisable strategy that they can use with other texts. And that is what is key here about this approach. Consider, for example, within the Harry Potter oeuvre, the contradictory character of Snape. He seems to be a baddie but every now and then he does things that make you wonder; and Dumbledore trusts him, so maybe he is a goodie after all?  But then he does something really bad – like killing Dumbledore – which is in complete contradiction with being one of the good guys, but then again… it’s in the tension of the not knowing that the enjoyment, the thrill of reading lies.  Or the character of Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. We know he really did meet the faun Mr Tumnus yet he lies and said it never happened. Why? And what might happen as a result!  More subtly, in Wonder, in the excerpt mentioned by thatboycanteach, where Summer comes up with a list of (inclusive) rules  about who is, and is not allowed to sit on the same lunch table as August and herself, this contrasts (somewhat painfully) with the exclusive and rejecting actions of everybody else; this alerts us early on that Summer is going to be a key figure in the protection and  maybe eventual acceptance of Auggie.  I’m trying to get our year 6 teacher to teach children the word ‘juxtaposition’ before they leave; – if only to impress their secondary school teachers!

The next signpost is the Aha moment. When a character suddenly realises, understands or finally figures something out, you should stop and ask yourself, ’How might this change things?’  For if a character just figured out a problem, then you have discovered the central conflict in the story. Or if the character understood a life lesson, you probably now understand the central theme of the book. For example, when Felix in Once finally loses his naivety and makes the horrified realisation that the Nazi’s actually hate Jews, that’s an Aha moment. It serves to amplify his resilience; the life lesson of this amazing book. Or this blog describes several great picture books that have great Aha moments in them. It’s American, so I didn’t know quite a few of the books, although some were familiar. But it made me think of all those great books we use to teach acceptance, whether of different others or of oneself; Giraffes can’t dance, for example. Gerald the giraffe has an Aha moment when he realised he can dance. Or Elmer learning to accept his multi coloured true self in a world where everybody else is grey. Which again reminded me of the CHIPS project (Combatting Homophobia in Primary School)  series of book based lesson plans.

The ‘Again and Again’ signpost is when you notice a word, phrase or situation mentioned over and over again. It is a signpost telling you to stop and ask yourself, ‘Why does this keep happening again and again?’ Your answer might tell you about the theme and conflict in the text or might foreshadow later events.  Pernille Ripp, our American blogger again has some picturebook examples. In Holes, the whole recurring family curse motif is central to the denouement.  Two phrases from ‘the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ spring to mind; ‘always winter, never Christmas,’ and ‘he’s not a tame lion’.

In some ways similar, we have Memory Moment, when the author interrupts the action to tell you about a memory. When you come across a Memory Moment then stop and ask yourself, ‘Why is the author telling me this now? Why might it be important?’ The answer might foreshadow later events, or might tell us about the theme and conflict in our text. The family curse in Holes in a Memory Moment used Again and Again, and indeed does foreshadow the climax.

Then we have ‘the Words of the Wiser; when a wiser, and usually older character takes our protagonist aside and offers serious advice. When we read this we should stop and ask ourselves ’What’s the life lesson and how might it affect the character?’    They tell us about the central theme of the text; about how character and plot interact. Sometimes I get Words of the Wiser muddled up with Aha moments. The key difference being Aha moments are discovered by the character themselves and often have the text saying something like ‘I suddenly realised that…’, whereas in Words of the Wiser, someone else gives advice. Someone like Yoda or Dumbledore.

Finally, we have Tough Questions, when the protagonist asks themselves something very difficult. This should cause us to stop and ask ourselves ‘What does this question make me wonder about?’ and will help us understand the central conflict of the story and help us think about what might happen later in the story. In some ways these are the mirror images of Aha moments.  The protagonist asks themselves ‘how will I ever fit in?’ whereas in the Aha moment the character might discover they don’t need to change to fit in; it’s the tight limits on what constitutes ‘fitting in’ that needs to change, not the protagonist. Or the tough question ‘how will I ever survive?’ might have a later aha moment ‘I will survive because I now realise that…’

The book is gives a model, almost scripted lesson for each signpost.  As the book is American and pitched towards middle school, while these lessons are great for teacher inset, they are not immediately usable with British primary aged children. But the general principles definitely are. The internet is also awash with useful bookmarks and posters to help you implement this approach; this one for example has further links to a whole raft of resources. It’s a much bigger thing in the US as the demands for close reading in the Common Core change how reading is taught in the US. Here in England the new curriculum is also causing us to rethink old ways.

I think the ‘Notice and Note’ approach is really useful in explicitly showing students the breadcrumb trails authors want readers to find in their work.  It is difficult for us expert readers to remember what it was like before we just knew that certain types of event or phrases were vital clues to the whole book, let alone give them names or number them in a list. But as we all know, many students find inference really hard -possibly because they didn’t have parents making a metacognitive commentary – ‘oh no, how will the pigs survive now they can’t live with their mummy?’ – as they share a book at bedtime. But better than that, it really does help some children finally ‘get’ why reading can be pleasurable.  Once you know the author is playing with you, you can play along too.

It’s not the whole answer. It doesn’t solve the triple constraint or tell us how to plan our lessons. There won’t be any questions about it on the ks2 sats paper. But it might help them to learn to love books. And children who love reading are much, much more likely to do well academically aged 16. One study from the Institute of Education found that

‘The combined effect on children’s progress of reading books often, going to the library regularly and reading newspapers at 16 was four times greater than the advantage children gained from having a parent with a degree.’

So worth a punt, I reckon.

How to deepen understanding of reading by teaching children how to enjoy it better.

Why wait until 11? The case for Primary Grammar schools

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A modest proposal.

The Government’s plan to reintroduce grammar schools as a way of giving children from low or modest income families an escape route from poverty is missing a trick.  If grammar schools help bright children from ordinary working families become more socially mobile, then why wait until 11? Why not front load the advantage by creating primary school grammars?   We already know that many children of the most disadvantaged families are set up to fail by poor language skills; see for example Save the Children’s  Ready to Read report.  One third of all children growing up in poverty leave primary school unable to read well, correlating with the one in three five-year-olds that do not have the language skills expected of children of their age. A child with weak language skills at the age of five is much less likely to be a strong reader at the age of 11 than a five-year-old with strong language skills.

This relationship between early language acquisition and poverty is not confined to the UK. In 2003 Betty Hart and Todd R Risley published ‘The Early Catastrophe: the 30 million Word Gap by Age 3’. So if we are serious about enabling social mobility and extending opportunity, surely 11 is too late?

Imagine the time and energy in ordinary primary schools that must go into trying to reduce this gap. And then imagine that you are one of the two thirds of children growing up in poverty that does have age appropriate language skills. Indeed, imagine that you’re actually – somehow – ahead of the game. And yet you have to spend the next 7 years of your schooling surrounded by your language deprived peers, who are much more likely to exhibit behaviour problems. (Cohen et al, 1998). Your teacher’s attention will be disproportionally focused on your more troubled classmates.  Apart from the teacher, you will have little exposure to the rich models of language you are unlikely to hear at home.  And as the teacher is constantly having to dumb down her language so that the others can have even half a change of understanding, even that avenue is closed to you. In a classroom where many children have delayed language skills, the teacher’s sense of what is typical or average can shift – pupils appear to be developing in line with their peers when in fact compared to what is typical nationally, their progress may be well below average. This norm shifting leads to the teacher having lower expectations of everybody – you as well as those with genuine difficulties.

Imagine then, that instead, you pass the selection from a grammar primary.  For the next 7 years you are surrounded by language rich, articulate peers. Your teachers are not constantly weighed down by the effort of trying to teach both the bright sparks and those still learning to express themselves in full sentences.  Soon the whole class can read fluently, so you are exposed to a rich diet of stimulating literature that further enriches your vocabulary. This engenders your own love of reading, so you soon begin to read for pleasure.  Before long, you are an avid reader.  Your vocabulary sky rockets.  Because everybody learns easily, the school does not have to prioritise English and maths and can widen your general knowledge though a knowledge-rich humanities curriculum. Here, you and your peers debate, justify and rationalise their opinions, becoming increasingly eloquent.   There is plenty of time for the arts, for PE and sports. Everyone wants to come to your school so the roll is full.  Lots of parents are better off, so the PTA raises tens of thousands of pounds a year to supplement the budget. And if you are eligible for free school meals, they even get pupil premium too. By the age of 11, you are up there with the best of them and more than ready to pass the test for your selective secondary school with flying colours.

Meanwhile, those left behind at the ordinary non selective primary can concentrate on early language development without having to worry about stretching the more able children.  Their curriculum can be tailored more effectively to the needs of their children, without hindering the flourishing of those with academic potential.

The Government’s consultation document ‘Schools that work for Everyone’ suggests that new or expanding grammar schools could establish a primary feeder school in an area with higher density of lower incomes. It does not explicitly state that these feeder schools should themselves be selective –  grammar primaries –  but surely this makes sense. What’s the point of establishing a feeder school if half of the pupils can’t feed into your secondary grammar because they have failed the test?  Given the relatively small size of primary schools in comparison to secondary schools, what we need is for secondary grammars to either open several selective grammar primaries or open as all-through schools selecting from 5.

Indeed, is 5 young enough?  Blanden in 2006 found that vocabulary at 5 was the best predictor of whether children who experienced deprivation in childhood were able to ‘buck the trend’ and escape poverty in later adult life. Children who had normal non-verbal skills but a poor vocabulary at age 5 were, age 34, one-and-a-half times more likely to be poor readers or have mental health problems and more than twice as likely to be unemployed as children who had normally developing language skills. (Law et al, 2010).   If we are really serious nurturing talent, promoting social mobility and overcoming privilege, we have to reach these children, who, let us remind ourselves, had normal or better non verbal skills aged 5; already their intellectual capital is being squandered for wont of an enriching language environment.  At 5 years old, their educational and economic destiny is dangerously close to being set in stone – regardless of the opportunities potentially available 7 years later.   11 years old far, far too late to offer any sort of escape route.  Indeed, that is why the plans for expansion of socially inclusive grammars are bound to fail.  As Tom Sherrington, former headteacher of King Edward’s Grammar School writes, if his former school wanted to offer say even 10% of places to FSM children, it would need to offer placed to students many hundreds of places down the 11+ rank order for the school and doing that would render selection – and its benefits – meaningless.

So maybe the answer is grammar nurseries?

The obvious objection to this would be the difficulty in assessing potential this early.  However, cognitive development continues throughout childhood, and well past 11. As the table below clearly shows, success in the 11+ has no correlation with success in GCSE, so we should not worry overmuch about whether or not we get our assessments exactly right, whether at 3 or 11.

Indeed, inaccuracies in the selection process could be mitigated against by having a series of ‘crossovers’ where children would swap from one kind or provision to another, thus rectifying any mistakes.  So if specially trained health visitors made the first assessment, at a reinstated 2-year-old check-up, toddlers with strong non-verbal intelligence could be directed to grammar-crèche, even if their language development was poor.  This two-year-old check would have the added benefit that it would be insusceptible to middle class coaching; no gaming!  Surrounded by language-rich peers and with an academically orientated though age-appropriate curriculum, these two-year-olds would soon come on linguistically in leaps and bounds.  This would then be followed by competitive entrance tests into grammar nursery with the 3+, open to all comers. Some children would move from grammar-crèche to mainstream nursery while some would enter the grammar stream for the first time in a grammar nursery. A second crossover point would follow on entry to reception, and then a year later, those who achieved ‘exceeding’ in the early learning goals would be eligible to sit the 5+. A year later the phonics check could provide a fourth crossover point and the end of ks1 sats a fifth. So some children might cross back and forth between standard and grammar provision several times in their early years!  Then, as the green paper wisely suggests, further crossover points should be available at 14 and 16, as well as 11, with pupils swapping between grammar and non grammar provision depending upon their success, or otherwise in selective exams.  This would have the added bonus of keeping the key stage 3 grammar school population on their toes, knowing that in 3 years time, they would be competing against pupils in other schools to keep their grammar place.  Non selective ordinary schools would compete for the honour of having the highest proportion of children leave them at the end of year 9 for grammar school, whilst welcoming those for whom the rich grammar diet had all been a bit too much.  Perhaps having a high proportion of ‘grammar graduates’ leaving you could be made into some sort of accountability measure? Non selective schools would develop an expertise in rehabilitating children who, as their failure in the 14+ clearly indicates, learn in a more pedestrian fashion than grammar schools are able to offer, by offering a nourishing yet simplified curriculum, rich in the basics.

This would go some way to mitigate against the criticisms of the 11+ and ensure that the grammar school experience was not weakened by the presence of those wrongly identified at 11 as having solid academic potential. Those who found the experience too challenging could move to a setting more suited to their needs.

We could of course argue that even 22 months is too late. Jean Gross, at the Communication Trust points out that by the age of 22 months, a more able child from a low-income home will begin to be overtaken in their developmental levels by an initially less able child from a high-income home.  More than half the children starting nursery in socially disadvantaged areas have delayed language – while their general cognitive abilities are at least in the average range. By 22 months, the gap in language skills already gapes. Nascent academic potential is already evaporating. Why should children have to suffer a poor communication environment at all?  If poor language at 2 is highly predictive of poor language at 5, and poor language at 5 is highly predictive of poor reading at 11, and poor reading at 11 is highly predictive of poor qualifications at 16, early pregnancy, involvement in crimes and poor mental health, leading to intergenerational cycles of poverty, then maybe trying to tinker around the edges by establishing grammar schools at any age should be called out for what it is: pissing in the wind.

If you’ve just read the last few paragraphs with a rising sense of incredulity and anger; it was meant to be a parody of the Government’s position, a reductio ad absurdum.  I intended it to be hilariously funny, but didn’t find much to laugh at when I actually sat down to write it. It all sounded far too plausible.  Mad, but plausible.

Because poverty does not have to be destiny. It is not poverty per se which matters most; it is the young child’s early communication environment that makes all the difference. It is exposure to activities that enrich language such as children’s early ownership of books, trips to the library or to museums, and attendance at quality pre-school provision, that make a difference (Roulstone et al, 2011).  These things are much harder to do for families who are just about managing, let alone not managing at all. How parents use language around their child is also very significant. While living in poverty does not automatically mean that the home learning environment is also impoverished, the stresses associated with struggling financially can make it harder to offer the same level of engagement as better-off parents. Parents in poor households are more likely to have low levels of formal education and may struggle with language or literacy themselves.   But the cycle can be broken through early intervention for all children who need it.   Rather than patting ourselves on the back for saving a few clever deserving poor through grammar school provision whilst throwing everybody else to the wolves, how about doing whatever it takes to help all children thrive?

There is good evidence that initiatives that bring together a range of agencies across a community in a disadvantaged community to help families enrich the early language environment can be very successful. For example, the Stokes Speaks Out initiative reduced the percentage of three to four year olds with significant language delay in the area from 64% in 2004 to 39% in 2010.  There is substantial evidence that good quality early education can have a very positive impact on language development that can last through to secondary school –  for example the EPPE study (Sylva et al 2014).  However, today we hear that the Government are raiding the childcare fund for poor families in order to pay for extra childcare hours for the better-off.  Grammar nurseries by stealth. My parody turned into policy.

Well funded, quality primary school provision also makes a huge difference. Reading England’s Future clearly shows that schools in some areas are much more effective at enabling children from disadvantaged backgrounds to read well, in some cases all but eliminating the gap between  FSM and non FSM children. Poor children in London for example do very well – both in early language development and in reading by 11. London schools receive disproportionally higher funding than other regions facing similar challenges – although the National Funding Formula would end this; no doubt putting an end to this success too.  Rather than fund all schools adequately so that they are all able to do the sorts of early intervention work that promotes language acquisition, the same pot of money will be divided up differently.  Whist not disputing that the present situation is unfair and needs changing, robbing Peter to pay Paul isn’t going to work. Some schools will be better off and able to do more, others worse off and having to cut excellent provision: a zero sum game.

Schools that work for everyone, not just the privileged few; every child able to go as far as their talents will take them. Nice rhetoric, shame about the policies.

Blanden, J. (2006) Bucking the Trend – What enables those who are disadvantaged in childhood to succeed later in life? London: Department for Work and Pensions.

Hirsch (1996) The Effects of Weaknesses in Oral Language on Reading Comprehension Growth cited in Torgesen, J. (2004). Current issues in assessment and intervention for younger and older students. Paper presented at the NASP Workshop.

Law, J. et al (2010) Modelling developmental language difficulties from school entry into adulthood. Journal of speech, language and hearing research, 52, 1401-1416

Roulstone, S.  et al (2011) Investigating the role of language in children’s early educational outcomes DfE Research Report 134

Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I., & Taggart, B. (2014) Students’ educational and developmental outcomes at age 16. London: DfES / Institute of Education, University of London

Why wait until 11? The case for Primary Grammar schools

Feeling positive about negative numbers

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Now sats have finished yet term stretches out before us – what shall we teach year 6 in maths?  The test and the demands of the curriculum behind it dominated the landscape for so long, now that’s all done and dusted, it can all feel a bit anchor-less – what now? What shall I teach them now I am free to teach them anything I want, without anyone checking up on me? It’s all a bit disconcerting.

We usually opt – as I am sure many do – for doing lots of problem solving. I bet the website analytics at nrich show a peak in June and July. And there is nothing wrong with that.  It was difficult to yield precious curriculum time to their more open ended problems when there was so much  stuff  to be got through. But now – now we have 7 whole weeks to fill and spending time on actually applying all that maths we’ve been learning seems like a great idea. Consolidation and application; isn’t that what mastery is all about?

And, to a degree, it is. But 7 weeks of nothing but…I’d go crazy – never mind the kids.  I know maths isn’t all about getting the right answer but its nice sometimes to be able to get the right answer fairly quickly – and be pretty sure that you’ve got it!  And while some activities are great – this is my all time favourite -others are just boring number crunching.  Also – you actually have to be pretty good at maths reasoning yourself to teach these well. To use these effectively, you have to know yourself what would be an effective solution so you can prompt the children appropriately in the right direction.  nrich and other maths problem solving sites are written by mathematicians who find such matters trivial. They don’t supply the correct answers – what would be the fun in that? In the example I dismissed above as boring number crunching – Im sure if I actually sat down and spend a few minutes I would see that  – of course – if I did such and such that would be better than something else. It’s not something I immediately know and frankly would prefer some pointers to save me time.  The same goes for the wonderful Don Steward. His website is aimed at secondary teachers who presumably solve the problems he poses in almost instantly. He doesn’t write for primary practitioners who mostly stopped learning maths aged 16. If only he would put the answers!

Also – all that maths we’ve taught year 6 – it’s amazing how quickly it begins to dribble out of their ears once you stop the highly focused daily practice that marked lessons before sats.  There’s a sort of ‘match-fitness’ to a lot of maths that rapidly declines once you stop.  Consider times-tables facts. Remember how rusty yours were when you first started teaching and how much better they are now? Once term ends, they will probably have 6 maths-free weeks. If we tack on another 7 weeks when they don’t really learn anything new or practice much old, then no wonder secondary school maths teachers sometimes think sats ‘levels’ (50p in the swear box) are inflated. They may have been a 4B/at the expected level/secondary ready in early May; by September they have probably slumped way below that. Spaced repetition doesn’t like spaces quite that big.

So, what to do?  Giving them a flying start to secondary school obviously. So if they don’t yet know their tables or understand place value or can’t do the four operations in their sleep – then you should do those. But I’m taking it as read that nearly all the children can. There is no point in accelerating them through ks3 content because  *mastery* and also because if you have ever looked at a ks3 maths textbook, part from the algebra it’s just just the yr6 curriculum again. Seriously – we bought some k3 textbooks for the level 6 children last year – when level 6 still existed and we had to jump to halfway through year 8 to find anything sufficiently challenging.  I am sure secondary school teachers are well aware of this and use such text books selectively.   They probably even have new ones for the new curriculum.  Although I am slightly haunted by the experience of my first son who spend the first half term (yes the whole half term) revising what happens when you multiply or divide by 10 and multiples thereof. But that was some time ago, I really must move on.

So the obvious contenders are those things we whizzed through prior to sats in the mad dash to cover the new curriculum and suspect the children do not really understand deep down. They just know a few tricks.  As I worried about here.  So possibly we could revisit fractions, especially multiplying and dividing which are so easy to teach as procedures and so difficult to understand conceptually. Hey, we could even do some nrich investigations on them. This is the only one I could find that focus on multiplication. Most focus on equivalence but I am assuming the class is pretty solid on that.  This one from Don Stewart is good – but see what I mean about answers being useful – took me a minute or so before I realised that drawing a bar model made these ridiculously easy.

The other candidate is negative numbers which we whizzed through at the start of the year and then realised some children were confused about when we did algebra. There wasn’t time at that point to go back and address those and actually, the algebra questions in the sats paper were far easier than those we had been practising. However, what  gift to the child and their future teachers to have a rock solid understanding of negative numbers on starting secondary school. Including, of course, a firm grasp of why when you subtract a negative number, you end up adding. Algebra gets really tricky if you are not secure in your understanding of positive and negative numbers – so let’s give our leavers something that will really set them up well for the coming year.

Now when I started writing this post, I fully intended to explain at length about using integer counters to teach negative numbers.   If you don’t know what integer counters are, watch this. (There’s the added bonus the teacher sound a bit like Officer Dibble from Top Cat – the original series obviously).  But then I did a bit of pre-post googling, to se what else was out there and stumbled across this from Tess India which is simply brilliant and uses integer counters as well as various other good ideas.  I particularly liked the bench number line  where you use PE benches to make a number line with children describing how they are going to move from say -4 to +3, and the ‘feeling positive’ idea where you ask students to think about things that make them feel positive and things that make them feel negative.  If you add yet another negative thing you become even more negative whereas if someone takes away a negative thought you become more positive. Simple – but brilliant! So there is no point in me explaining much more about negative numbers – read the lesson plans in the link.

Indeed the whole Tess India resource is a treasure trove of wonderful ideas – well the bits I’ve managed to look at so far are anyway. And it is humbling to read the plans and realise they are aimed at a context where a class size of 60 is not uncommon and interactive whiteboards don’t exist.  Alongside the maths there are handy tips about how to make flashcards from old cardboard…rather puts things into perspective. There are English and science resources alongside the maths and it covers primary and secondary. It’s really well worth a look.

But back to integer counters. These don’t seem to be well known about in the UK. Indeed, we use the wonderful Primary Advantage maths scheme in key stage 2 and while they bang on about CPA everywhere else – for negative numbers they state that no concrete materials are possible and go straight to number lines.  Now number lines are all fine and dandy but some students get so confused using them and it all seems a bit arbitrary why you are moving forwards or backwards.  I  love  integer counters because I love being able to see why the maths works.  When I found out you could even model  why -4 x-2=+8, I beamed for days. I kept on showing people my newest party trick. (I didn’t get invited to many more parties after that.)  And here’s a great link showing how to divide negative numbers.  And no I am not suggesting you teach year 6 how to multiply and divide negative numbers. I’m just banking that if you’ve got this far, this sort of thing brings you great joy.

Using integral counters is the final idea in the Tess India resources.  To be able to understand them, children need to understand the concept of a zero pair, made from one positive counter and one negative counter.   These can then be added to any equation without changing its value. I could try and do some badly drawn graphics to explain it properly – but others have done so with so much greater flair I suggest you look at these instead. Unfortunately Officer Dibble’s video on this seems to be missing. However, this from Learn Zillion  is perfectly serviceable although this is a bit more fun, if a bit more complicated. Can’t quite place the accent.

With a bit of practice, children soon learn to just draw themselves + and – signs if they want to check a calculation, rather than need to counters.

One of the problems children face with this topic is that we never make it clear that all numbers have polarity –  that they are either positive or negative – and that strictly speaking we should write 3 as +3 etc. It’s a shame that the polarity signs are the same as the operator signs – I’m sure it would be a lot easier if they weren’t.  When we write 5-3 do we mean

+5 + -3 or +5 – +3?   I’m sure if we did a lot more work with counters showing that they give the same answer but actually represent something different, that might help. No wonder children get muddled and think -3-5 equals 2  or possibly 8 (because you have got 2 minuses and they half know something about two minuses making a plus. How much better to act it out with counters and see the maths before you very eyes. Works for me.

Then we can return to where this post started and have children investigating negative numbers.  Back to nrich.  And here’s a great reasoning activity from maths pad. If they can articulate why certain statements are or are not true then that’s job done. Secondary schools- here we come!

 

 

 

Feeling positive about negative numbers

Milling around in bewilderment: that reading comprehension.

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You can see the reading test for yourself from this link

The day started well; dawn casting spun-gold threads across a rosy sky.  The long wait was over; sats week was finally here.  And it looked like summer had arrived. Year 6 tripped in to classrooms  while head teachers fumbled skittishly with secret keys in hidden cupboards.  Eventually teachers across the nation ripped open plastic packets.Perhaps at first their fears were calmed, for the text – or what you can glean about it from reading snippets here and there as you patrol the rows – didn’t seem too bad. In previous weeks children had struggled with excerpts from the Lady of Shalott, Moonfleet, Shakespeare.  The language here looked far more contemporary.

But no. Upon completion children declared the test was hard – really hard. Many hadn’t finished – including  children who usually tore through tests like a…white giraffe? What is more, the texts didn’t seem to be in any kind of order. We had drilled into them, as per the test specification guide, that the texts would increase in difficulty throughout the paper (section 6.2) Yet the middle text was almost universally found to be the hardest.  Some declared the final text the easiest. What was going on?

Tests safely dispatched, I decided to take a proper look. It didn’t take long for it to be apparent that the  texts contained demanding vocabulary, and some tortuous sentence structure. The difference with the sample test material was stark. Twitter was alive with tales on sobbing kids, and angry teachers. Someone said they had analysed the first paragraph of the first text and it came out with a reading age of 15. Debate followed; was this really true or just a rumour? Were readability tests reliable? I tweeted that it was a test of how middle class and literary one’s parents were, having identified 45 words I reckoned might challenge our inner city children.  After all, as a colleague remarked, ‘my three-year-old knows more words than some children here’. Other people drew groans by mentioning how irrelevant the texts were to the kind of lives their children lived. I seemed to be implicated in this criticism…although it’s difficult to tell who’s criticising who sometimes on Twitter. Still, I was put out. I don’t care if texts are ‘relevant’, I retorted. I cared that the vocabulary needed to answer questions  favoured a ‘posh demographic.  Apparently, this was patronising. I saw red at this point! It’s not that poorer children can’t acquire a rich vocabulary but that since it is well known that a rich vocabulary is linked to parental income and the domain ‘rich vocabulary ‘ is huge (and undefined), it is not fair or useful to use tests that rely on good vocabulary for accountability.  And then I put a link to this previous post of mine, where I’ve explained this in more depth. If accountability tests over-rely on assessing vocabulary as a proxy for assessing reading, this hands a free pass to school choc full of children like my colleague’s three-year-old, since such children arrive already stuffed to the gills with eloquence and articulacy. Whereas the poorer the intake the greater the uphill struggle to enable the acquisition of the kind of  cultural capital richer children imbibe with their mother’s milk.

Flawed as the previous reading tests were, they did not stack the cards against  schools serving language-poor populations. The trouble with using vocabulary as a measure is that it that each individual word is so specific. Usually what we teach is generalisable from one context to another. Learning words however has to be done on a case by case basis. I recently taught year 6 somnolent, distraught and clandestine, among many others. I love teaching children new words, and they love acquiring them.  But unless there is some sort of finite list against which we are to be judged, I’d rather not have our school judged by a test that is hard to pass without an expansive and sophisticated vocabulary. With the maths and SPAG tests, we know exactly what is going to be tested. The domain is finite. We worry about how to teach it so it is understood and remembered, but we do not worry that some arcane bit of maths will worm its way into the test.  Nautical miles, for example.  Not so with reading. Any word within the English language is fair game – including several that don’t regularly appear in the vocabulary of the average adult. There may be very good reasons for the government to want to ascertain the breadth of vocabulary acquisition across the nation. In which case, they could instigate a vocabulary test – maybe something along the lines of this.  But that shouldn’t be confused with the ability to read. To return to our earlier example, my colleagues three-year-old may have an impressive vocabulary but she can’t actually read much  at all yet. Whereas our 11-year-olds may not know as many words but are happily enjoying reading  the Morris Glietzman ‘Once’ series.

It is becoming accepted that  reading is not just the orchestration of a set of skills, but requires knowledge of the context for the reader to make sense of the bigger picture.  But that’s not what happened here.  It’s not the case that children found the texts difficult because they lacked knowledge of the context. The context of the first text was two children exploring outdoors. True only 50% of our present year 6 knew what a monument was at the outset – a bit tricky since this was pretty central to the test – but by the end of the story they sort of worked it out for themselves. The second text featured a  young girl disobeying her grandmother and taking risks. And a giraffe. Well I reckon this is pretty familiar territory (grandmothers and risks, I mean) and while we do not meet giraffes everyday in Bethnal Green, we know what they are.  The third and final text told us all about dodos and how they may have been unfairly maligned by Victorian scientists. So that was a bit more remote from every day experience but no so terribly outlandish as to render the text impenetrable. The third text is meant to be harder. The children are meant to have studied evolution and extinction by then in science anyway.   So it wasn’t that the Sitz im Leben was so abstruse as to render comprehension impossible. The problem was the words used within the texts and the high number of questions which were dependent upon knowing what those words meant. The  rather convoluted sentence structure in the  second text didn’t help either – but if the words had been more familiar, children might have stood more of a fighting chance.

According to the test specification, questions can be difficult in one of five different ways. These five ways are based on research commissioned by the PISA guys. It’s an interesting  and informative read – so I’m not arguing with the methodology per se.  I don’t know nearly enough to even attempt that. Amateur though I am, I do argue with the relative proportions allocated to each of the five strategies in this test.

With three of these, I have no quarrel. Firstly,  ( and my ordering is different from that in the document)  questions can be made easier or harder in terms of accessibility; how easy is it to find the information? Is the student signposted to it (e.g. see the first paragraph on page 2).   Or is the question difficulty raised by not signposting and possibly by having distractor items to lure students down dead ends?  I think we have little to complain about here. e.g. question 30 has clear signposting…’Look at the paragraph beginning:  Then, in 2005…’ whereas  in question 33  the relevant information is much harder to find – it’s a ‘match the summary of the paragraph to the order in which they occur’ question.

Secondly, questions may vary in terms of task-specific complexity. How much work does the student have to do to answer the question?  Is it a simple information retrieval task or does the pupil have to use inference?

For example, question 7 is easy in this regards.’ Write down three things you are told about the oak tree.’   The text clearly says the oak tree was ‘ancient’.  I haven’t checked the mark scheme as it’s not yet published as I write, but I am assuming that’s enough to earn you 1 mark. Whereas question 3 is a bit harder. ‘How can you tell that Maria was very keen to get to the island?  Students need to infer  this from the fact that she she said  something ‘impatiently’.   There are far fewer of this kind of question under this new regime – but we were expecting that and the sample paper demonstrated that. Again – no complaints.  Indeed the test specification does  share the relative weightings of different skills (in section 6.2.2, table 9), but the bands are so wide its all a bit meaningless. Inference questions can make up between 16% and 50% of all questions, for example.

Thirdly, the response strategy can be more or less demanding, a one word answer versus a three-marker explain your opinion question.

The two final ways to make questions more or less difficult are by either varying the extent of knowledge of vocabulary required by the question (strategy 5 in the specification document) or by varying  the complexity of the target information that is needed to answer the question.  (Strategy 2) The document goes on to explain that this means by varying

• the lexico-grammatical density of the stimulus

• the level of concreteness / abstractness of the target information

• the level of familiarity of the information needed to answer the question

and that …’There is a low level of semantic match between task wording and relevant information in the text.’

I’m not quite sure what the difference is between ‘lexico-grammatical density’  (strategy 2) and knowledge of vocabulary required by the question (strategy 5), but  the whole thrust of this piece is that texts were pretty dense lexico-grammatically and in terms of vocabulary needed to answer the questions. When compared with the sample test for example, the contrast is stark. Now I’m no expert in linguistics or test question methodology. I’m just a headteacher with an axe to grind, a weekend to waste and access to google.  But this has infuriated me enough to do a fair bit of reading around the subject.

On the Monday evening post test, twitter was alive with people quoting someone who apparently had said that the first paragraph of the first text had  a Flesch Kincaid reading ease equivalent to that of a 15 year old. I’d never heard of Flesch Kincaid – or any other of the readability tests – so I did some research and found out that indeed, the first paragraph of The Lost Queen was described as suitable for 8th-9th graders – or 13-15 year olds in the British system. But there was also criticism online that the readability tests  rated the same texts quite differently so weren’t a reliable indicator of much. (Someone put a link up to an article about this, which I foolishly forgot to bookmark and now can’t find – do share the link again if it was you or you know a good source.)*

Anyway, be that as it may, I decided to do some readability tests of various bits and pieces of the sats paper.  And this is what I discovered. (texts listed in order of alleged difficulty)

The Lost Queen first paragraph:  13-15 year olds

Wild Ride first paragraph:              13-15 year olds

Wild Ride ‘bewildered’ paragraph     18-22 year olds

Way of the Dodo first paragraph          13-15 year olds  (and lower score than The Lost Queen)

Way of the Dodo 2nd paragraph         13-15 year olds.

So there you have it, insofar as Flesch Kincaid has any reliability, the supposedly hardest text was in fact the easiest, the middle text was the hardest.

I did the same with the the sample paper. The first had a readability level of a 11-12 year-old and the second 13 – 15. I had lost the will to live by then so didn’t do the third text – but it is clearly much more demanding than the previous two  – as it should be.

I also used the automated reading index and while this gave slightly different age ranges, the relative difficulty was the same and all the texts were for children older than 11, the easiest being… the first part of the way of the dodo.

However,  it was also clear from my reading that readability tests are designed to help people writing, say pamphlets for the NHS, make the writing as transparent and easy as possible. In other words, they are intended to make reading simple so people who aren’t very good at it can understand stuff that may be very important. It struck me that maybe this wasn’t exactly what we should be aiming for in a reading assessment. After all, we do want some really challenging questions at some point. We just want them  at the end, where they are meant to be. We need readability tests because previous generations have not been taught well enough to be presented with demanding information. We want better for the children we now teach.

Which brought me to discover this site, which ranks words by their relative frequency in the English language.  If we are going to be held accountable for the sophistication of the vocabulary are children can comprehend, then surely there should be some bounds on that.  While the authority of this is contested, it seems to be generally held that the average adult knows about 20,000 words. You can test yours here.   How many words the average 11 year old does or should know I did not discover – so here are my ball park suggestions.

For the first text – the one that is meant to be easier – there should be a cap on words ranked occurring below 10,000. (I’m assuming here we understand that as words are used less frequently their ranking falls but the actual number rises: a ranking of 20,000 is lower than a ranking of 10,000. If this is not the correct convention for such matters, I apologise). Definitions should be given for low frequency words, especially if understanding them is critical to answering specific questions. In the same way in which Savannah was explained at the introduction to Wild Ride

Then in the second text words could be limited to 15,000, and in the third 20,000 – representing the average adult’s vocabulary. I have plucked these figures from the air. I would not go to the stake for them. But you get my meaning. We need to pin down the domain of ‘vocabulary’ if we are to be held accountable when it is tested.

For what it is worth, I asked our year 6 after the test to tell me which words they did not know. There are 30 children in the class. Words where half the class or more did not know the meaning included  from the first text: monument, haze, weathered (as a verb); from the second text: jockey, dam, promptly, sedately (zero children), counselled, arthritic, nasal, pranced, skittishly (zero children), milled, bewildered, spindly, momentum; from the third list haven, oasis ( they knew this was a brand of drink though), parched, receding, rehabilitate and anatomy. My Geordie partner tells me they would have known parched if they were northern because that’s Geordie for ‘I’m really thirsty.’  Here we can see again that the middle passage had the highest number of unknown words in my obviously unrepresentative sample. In fact, it was the first paragraph on page 8, which henceforth shall be known as the bewildering paragraph that seemed to have the highest lexico-grammatical density.  As the mud flats entrapped the Mauritian dodos, so did this paragraph ensnare our readers, slowing them down to the extent that they failed to finish the questions pertaining to the relatively easy  final text.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe when the statistics are finally in, there won’t be a starker-than-usual demarcation along class lines. I’d love to be wrong. Let’s hope I am.

And finally, what you’ve all been waiting for – what was the lowest ranking word?  Well yes of course, it was ‘skittishly‘;  so rare it doesn’t even appear in the data base of 60,000 words I was using. But suitable for 11 year olds, apparently.

In case you are interested, here’s the full rankings. Where the word might be more familiar as a different part of speech I have included a ranking for that word too, in italics. The words I chose to rank were just those my deputy and I thought children might find tricky.

Word

(organized by rank lowest to highest)

 Part  of speech Ranking Text Necessary (N)/useful  (U) for question number
skittishly adverb <60,000 WR
parch adjective 46,169 WD E29
sedately adverb 38,421 WR
clack noun 32,467 TLQ 4 distractor
sedate verb 23,110
prance verb 22,360 WR
skittish adjective 21,298
sedate adjective 20,481
arthritic adjective 20,107 WR
mossy adjective 19,480 TLQ U8 distractor

E9
misjudge verb 19140 WD
spindly adjective 19025 WR
bewilderment adverb 17,410 WR E16
squeal noun 17,103 WR
sternly adverb 16,117 WR
plod verb 16,053 WR
prey verb 15,771 WD
dismount verb 15,601 WR
hush noun 15,394 TLQ N4
burrow noun 14,900 WR
hush verb 14,295
nocturnal adjective 13,755 WR E14
enraged adjective 13,378 WR
mill verb 13,378 WR E16
sprint noun 12,187 WR
squeal verb 12036
folklore noun 11,722 WD
rehabilitate verb 11,496 WD E31
oasis noun 10,567 WD U29
stern adjective 10,377
moss noun 10142
evade verb 9759 WR
sight verb 9730 WD
jockey noun 9723 WR
weather verb 9568 TLQ U8
blur noun 9319 WR
murky adjective 9265 TLQ U6
inscription noun 9164 TLQ U8
rein noun 8793 WR
sprint verb 8742
slaughter noun 8494 WD
anatomy noun 8310 WD E32
haze noun 8,307 TLQ 4 distractor
counsel verb 7905 WR
nasal adjective 7857 WR
recede verb 7809 WD
intent adjective 7747 WR
stubborn adjective 7680 WR question E15
slab noun 7585 TLQ U8
arthritis noun 7,498 WR
promptly adverb 6762 WR
blur verb 6451
haven noun 5770 WD
vine noun 5746 TLQ U6
defy verb 5648 WR E15
startle verb 5517 WR
drought noun 5413 WD
remains noun 5375 WD
devastating adjective 4885 WD
rehabilitation noun 4842
prey noun 4533
dam noun 4438 WR
momentum noun 4400 WR E18
ancestor noun 4178 TLQ N1.
monument noun 4106 TLQ U8
dawn noun 4044 WR N12a
intent noun 3992
click noun 3822
counsel noun 3441
indication noun 3401 WD
prompt adjective 3142
mount verb 3012
urge verb 2281 WR
cast verb 2052 WR
judge verb 1764
unique adjective 1735 WD E25
weather noun 1623
sight noun 1623
Word (organized by where they appear in the texts) Part  of speech Ranking Text Necessary (N)/useful (U) for question number
monument noun 4106 TLQ U8
ancestor noun 4178 TLQ N1
clack noun 32,467 TLQ 4 distractor
hush noun 15,394 TLQ N4
hush verb 14,295
haze noun 8,307 TLQ 4 distractor
vine noun 5746 TLQ U6
murky adjective 9265 TLQ U6
weather verb 9568 TLQ U8 distractor

E9
weather noun 1623
mossy adjective 19,480 TLQ U8 distractor

E9
moss noun 10142
inscription noun 9164 TLQ U8
slab noun 7585 TLQ U8
dawn noun 4044 WR N12a
cast verb 2052 WR
jockey noun 9723 WR
dam noun 4438 WR
startle verb 5517 WR
nocturnal adjective 13,755 WR E14
promptly adverb 6762 WR
prompt adjective 3142
stubborn adjective 7680 WR question E15
defy verb 5648 WR
sedately adverb 38,421 WR
sedate verb 23,110
sedate adjective 20,481
plod verb 16,053 WR
arthritic adjective 20,107 WR
arthritis noun 7,498 WR
nasal adjective 7857 WR
squeal noun 17,103 WR
squeal verb 12036
burrow noun 14,900 WR
prance verb 22,360 WR
skittishly adverb <60,000 WR
intent adjective 7747 WR
intent noun 3992
enraged adjective 13,378 WR
squeal noun 17,103 WR
squeal verb 12036
mill verb 13,378 WR E16
bewilderment adverb 17,410 WR E16
spindly adjective 19025 WR
evade verb 9759 WR
momentum noun 4400 WR E18
urge verb 2281 WR
sprint verb 8742
sprint noun 12,187 WR
blur noun 9319 WR
blur verb 6451
dismount verb 15,601 WR
mount verb 3012
sight verb 9730 WD
sight noun 1623
haven noun 5770 WD
slaughter noun 8494 WD
unique adjective 1735 WD E25
prey verb 15,771 WD
prey noun 4533
folklore noun 11,722 WD
remains noun 5375 WD
drought noun 5413 WD
oasis noun 10,567 WD U29
parch adjective 46,169 WD E29
recede verb 7809 WD
rehabilitate verb 11,496 WD E31
indication noun 3401 WD
anatomy noun 8310 WD E32
misjudge verb 19140 WD
judge verb 1764
devastating adjective 4885 WD

By way of contrast I did the same with the sample text. In the first text there were no words I thought were hard enough to check. In the second there were 4: cover (15,363), pitiful (13,211), brittle (10,462) and emerald (12,749).  In the third and final passage there were 8:triumphantly (16,3,43), glade (20,257), unwieldy (16,922), sapling (16,313, foliage 7,465, lurch (9339), ecstasy (9629) and finally, ranking off the scale below 60,000 gambols.

Milling around in bewilderment: that reading comprehension.

KS2 reading comprehension analysis teaser

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I have just completed an in depth analysis of the difficulty of various words that appeared in the ks2 sats reading comprehension.  Because of the embargo for children who have still to take the test, I can’t publish the post yet – as it identifies the actual words – until next Friday 20th.

But, as kind of teaser advert I can reveal that

  • text 2 was by far the hardest
  • followed by text one
  • text three had the easiest vocabulary
  • the hardest word (i.e. least frequently used) was in text two…can you guess what it was?
  • this word had a frequency so low it didn’t appear in the ranking of 60,000 I used
  • 6 words ranked lower than 20,000 – 4 of which were in text 2 and 1 was in text 1…again – have a guess.

That’s not what the test specification says should happen.

Presuming I can get the wifi working in the hotel  (I’m away at a residential on Friday), I will post by blog on Friday morning.

KS2 reading comprehension analysis teaser

Fast, good or cheap? The ‘Triple Constraint’ in Education.

oldprimarytimer, 2 Comments

‘Fast, good or cheap? Pick two.’ Originating in software design, this aphorism nicely challenges our ‘have it all’ delusions. Make something quickly and cheaply and quality suffers. High quality products made quickly are expensive. You can have both quality and affordability, but you will have to wait for it. Known in business circles as the ‘triple constraint’, it also lends itself to a great pub game – finding examples in everyday life. Home cooked food can be tasty and easy to make (bacon sandwich) but not terribly nutritious, or easy to make and nutritious (a salad) but not terribly tasty, or tasty and nutritious, but not easy to make (anything in a ‘Anna Jones’ recipe book). I first came across ‘triple constraint’ in this article by Oliver Burkeman and he cites a blog by the entrepreneur Ben Casnocha who has some amusing, if provocative examples. For example, holidays can be exotic and/or cheap and/or relaxing, and our partners can be hot/smart or emotionally stable.

Perhaps teachers can be popular and/or effective and/or emotionally stable whereas with leaders the trade off is between being visionary and/or consultative and/or effective. Pupils’ writing can have good ‘SPaG’ and/or be neat and/or be interesting…although this year’s end of key stage interim assessments are only bothered with the first two. While I hate and detest that dull and boring writing which is neat and has good spelling trumps imaginative, thoughtful work – particularly the perverse incentive to use easy-to-spell vocabulary rather than take a creative risk – I would be willing to trade a little bit of creativity for better spelling and handwriting. Or we could go all out for all three by increasing the curriculum time for English by cutting time for something elsewhere. You might be able to cling onto a broad and balanced curriculum by your fingertips – but depth of coverage in English will have to be paid for by superficiality of study somewhere else. You just might not admit it. At least, not publically.

Project managers describe the triple constraint as defined by choices between time, cost and scope. By scope, performance specification, and/or quality is implied. Project managers use this as a tool to stop kidding themselves that there are no limits upon what can be achieved within a given set of finite resources. It’s a refreshing blast of realism in the face of aspirational, ‘whatever it takes’ woo.   No one gets to have to all. We’ve all made choices along the way – using the model just makes us honestly own the downside of our decisions. If you want something quickly (or frequently) and high quality, it is going to cost. That cost may not be in cash terms, it may be in terms of opportunity cost – you can only spend the time of your teachers once, so make sure you spend that time wisely. So with marking, a set of books can be marked and returned to the class very soon after the initial lesson and the marking can be very effective in that it enable great progress – but this will be at a huge opportunity cost to the teacher. All other calls of their time will have to be rejected – including the calls of their family commitments and personal wellbeing. Here the high quality of the marking and quick turn around is achieved at the expense, or cost, of the teacher’s time. Whereas in days of yore when ‘tick and flick’ was the norm, marking cost relatively little in terms of teachers’ time and could be turned around quickly – but didn’t have much impact of pupils’ learning. Its scope was limited. The Holy Grail of course being finding a system that effectively accelerates pupil progress (scope) whilst still occurring frequently (time) without incurring too large an opportunity cost on the teacher’s time. (Although I suppose theoretically one could reduce opportunity cost by increasing financial costs by employing more teachers to do the marking – not a route likely to catch on in the present funding climate).

The Marking Policy Review Group certainly makes some interesting suggestions and claims that its triplet of ’meaningful, motivating and manageable’ marking is relatively easily achievable – no triple constraint here. Maybe, because meaningful and motivating cover the same ground? Marking’s hardly meaningful if it is not motivating, is it? Clearly, we all want to reduce the opportunity cost to teachers that marking in its present form is extorting. So either we accept that we will have to reduce how frequently work gets marked, or reduce the scope of marking.   So, for example this primary school uses codes and symbols which direct action the next day. A different solution is to only explicitly marking a couple of pieces per class – and sharing these, via a visualiser, with the rest of the class – leaving them to then ‘mark’ their own work by extrapolation. The trail blazer schools are reporting that this approach is working really well; better in fact than the old distance ‘deep’ marking of all pupils’ work ever did.  This of course has its own opportunity cost in terms of curriculum time – curriculum content not covered because lesson time was spent improving and deepening what has already been taught – teaching less but in more depth – in other words, a mastery curriculum. Maybe this is a price well worth paying – for what it is worth I think it probably is – but we should not flinch from owning our choices. There is a shadow side to every decision.

One of the things I really admire about Michaela School is the way it is so up front about its choices. Accepting that it is impossible to do everything – it doesn’t try to. But rather than sweep under the carpet the corners it has cut, it advertises its omissions as a badge of pride. No distance marking here, no siree and no display neither. No computing, or DT or PHSE. Joe Kirby explains here how ideas can be either hornets or butterflies. Hornet ideas are high-effort, low-impact, whereas butterflies are vice versa. Reports and homework are hornets. I don’t think computing and DT are seen as such – just collateral damage in the struggle to teach an exacting and demanding curriculum in the other subjects. You pays your money and you makes your choices. Costs and time being relative fixed within schools – the only give in the system is to reduce scope somewhere along the line. Even when you’ve honed your systems to be as effective as possible – no school can do everything – so choose what you don’t do or what you do less well consciously and not by default.

It would be really useful if schools had to be really honest about the downside of their choices. Particularly in these days of school to school improvement, where we look to schools with amazing results and then try and copy what they do, its really important we are aware of the hidden cost in the choices they’ve made, so we can decide whether the strategies being employed are really replicable, sustainable and ethical. For example, some schools burn through young staff by working them to exhaustion at great cost to the individual teachers concerned. It gets results…but is this sustainable long term? Obviously it’s unethical. (Maybe that should be marked up as an increase cost…to one’s mortal soul!)   But less dramatically, how useful it would be to hear about the things people have decided not to do. School A decides it won’t have a library, thus reducing both financial and curriculum time costs – no more time consuming book-choosing time. The downside is some children who don’t have parents who either buy them books or take them to the library don’t get to read much for pleasure. Maybe their intake means they don’t have many parents like that, or few enough for some different, cheaper strategy to expose those children to a rich selection of books. Or maybe that’s just how it is. Instead, all the children get quality musical instrument teaching. At School B, the priorities are reversed. School C teaches maths in a way that means almost all children make rapid progress. The cost? Children on p levels become more and more isolated, hardly ever working in class with their peers, never taught maths by the class teacher. School D withdraws poorer readers from humanities lessons for extra phonics. The downside is while their phonics improve, their general knowledge suffers, so later on they find it harder to understand what they read.

One problem is often the effect of the downside is displaced a few years, so the school in question does not pay the accountability-price of their choice. The school without a reading-for pleasure strategy doesn’t pick up the tab when that child effectively stops reading fiction. As I’ve written about before, teaching maths with an over-emphasis on the procedural at the expense of the conceptual might engender short term results but at a cost to longer term comprehension of the basics which comes back to bite (some other teacher’s) bum. And the outcome of some choices will make itself felt many years down the line, well into adulthood. An adult drowns; her primary school cut swimming provision to the bone. Another goes to prison; he never received help with his anger management when he was little. Yet another has poor health due to obesity; PE was a Cinderella subject. Obviously the lines of cause and effect aren’t anywhere near as clear-cut as this. But let’s be honest with ourselves. We say we come into teaching to transform children’s lives. Yet the reality of it is, we have to choose which bit of their life it is we are trying to transform. In other words, we have to be clear about the scope of education; what it is we can do well, given the other constraints of limited time and money. What really matters, what will we go to the stake for?

With the coming National Funding Formula, us London schools are bracing ourselves for cuts on an unprecedented scale. The triple constraint reminds us that if there is less money, then either scope will have to be reduced or timescales will increase. In an education context, timescales are fixed. Whether SATs or GCSE’s, those annual results wait for no man – there’s no potential to ask if year 11 can take their Maths GCSE at the end of year 12 as we’ve had to reduce the frequency of Maths lessons due to staff cuts. (Although I love the idea of ‘when –ready’ exams along the piano grades model, I can’t see the government adopting this any time soon). Age-related expectations set tight delivery timescales. Failure to meet them is, well, failure.

So the scope of what we offer will have to take the hit, or several hits, meaning we’re reflecting as rigorously as possible on what is absolutely essential and what is potential cut-able. Not being an academy, I can’t ‘do a Michaela’ and decide we are just not going to teach certain subjects. Obviously English and Maths take centre stage. The time devoted to the rest is already less than ideal, except for music and French – which being taught by subject specialists and taught whilst class teachers have PPA – get an hour per week come what may. Who knows if we will still be able to have subject specialists. Are they the cheapest way of covering PPA? Are they the best use of ‘spending’ precious curriculum time.

We are very proud of our pastoral provision. As well as a (part time) learning mentor and a (part time) home school liaison officer, we also have our own social worker half a day a week. She’s invaluable. They all are. I could reduce this team, or salami-slice their hours. But the inevitable effect would be to reduce the scope of support for the most vulnerable. Maybe, longer term, the scope of the kind of pupil that comes to our school will have to be reduced as we have to cut the resources that enable them to stay in mainstream. They won’t cope. We won’t cope. But hey, there’s always permanent exclusion.

Cutting back on the arts is pretty much inevitable. Swimming provision: how little is too little? We have already cut back on our intervention programmes. Children who are way behind in Maths would have, in previous years, had half an hour a day catch up with a specialist teacher, following a programme proven to be highly effective over the long term. Well, those children won’t get that opportunity anymore. But at least our deputy head teacher is able to run intervention groups – for now.

No wonder oldprimaryhead wrote this heart felt blog recently. That’ll be me next year. I don’t deny that funding needs to be fairer and that in Tower Hamlets we’ve been generously funded compared with everyone else. But it’s not like we’ve been burning fivers; the money’s been used very effectively.

Of course, we are not allowed to admit that scope – quality and breadth of provision – have taken a knock. Since we are held accountable for standards in English and maths, we will move heaven and earth to maintain quality there, while wondering what we can pay lip service to, while maintaining a veneer of quality? What can we get away with? What can we live with and still sleep at night?

I didn’t start this blog to moan about education.   There’s plenty of people doing that already. I’m not decrying moaning. It’s necessary. Done well, it galvanizes us to change things. But I wanted to mull things over, suggest solutions, share what I’ve read. This post seems to be a bit scarce on the sharing suggestions front. Sorry about that.

 

 

 

 

Fast, good or cheap? The ‘Triple Constraint’ in Education.

‘If they sit with us, they become lazy.’ TA’s, growth mindset and the MITA Project

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Back in the day when the DfE had a rainbow in its logo, Peter Blatchford and his colleagues were commissioned to start their longitudinal study into the impact of teaching assistants on pupil outcomes.[1] The Deployment and Impact of Support Staff Project (DISS Project) lasted 5 years, from 2003-2008 and researched in primary, secondary and special schools. It remains the most comprehensive piece of research into teaching assistants[2] in the world to date.

The key finding took everybody by surprise. While TA’s had a positive effect on teachers’ work load, job satisfaction and levels of stress, their deployment made pupil outcomes worse. Researchers were stunned to find out that even after adjusting for SEN, fsm etc. there was a very strong negative correlation between the amount of TA support a pupil received and the progress they made. The more support, the less progress. Clearly, things had to change.

The researchers were clear that the reasons for the poor outcomes originated in managerial decisions about their deployment and preparedness – rather than in some deficiency innate in teaching assistants.   TA’s were overwhelmingly deployed to work either with children who had some kind of special educational need or with children with lower prior attainment. Very often, they acted as a kind of replacement teacher rather than an additional, enhanced provision on top of excellent teaching from the class teacher. What is more, very few TA’s had any meaningful liaison time with the class teacher and generally learnt what was being covered that day along with the children by listening to the teacher. It is not surprising then, that under these circumstances and lacking sustained professional development, TA’s tended to focus upon task completion rather than the actual learning.

Following the report, the Education Endowment Foundation released guidance for schools to alert them to the pitfalls of poor TA deployment and make seven recommendations to maximize the impact of teaching assistants. Three of these (V, V1 and V11) are to do with interventions – the one area where TA’s could be shown to be making a difference. Only last week, the EEF released further evidence that TA’s can and do make a real positive difference when deployed and trained properly to deliver high quality, well researched interventions.

Back in Bethnal Green we already knew that our interventions had positive outcomes for the very reasons given. For example we used several maths interventions from the Every Child counts stable, such as 1stClass@Number[3].

As a staff we had been looking at growth mindset research and that had already challenged us to move away from grouping by ‘ability’ to letting children choose their own level of challenge from a range of differentiated tasks.   There was no point in us promoting a growth mindset message if we then went on to undermined it by corralling children in tacitly fixed-ability groups. We were amazed on what a difference it made and how a sizable proportion of children made stunning progress once liberated to work at higher levels of challenge.

However, we still had teaching assistants sitting next to the statemented children and their lower achieving acolytes. Did the very presence of a teaching assistant give out the sign ‘abandon hope, all ye who sit on this table’ – whatever other positive messages we were promulgating? And were our TA’s focused on task completion? Did our statemented childrem – like their DISS counterparts – mainly interact with TA’s rather than other children? And what could we do to change?

What was surprising was that our teaching assistants agreed with the research. ‘If they sit with us, they become lazy;’ said one TA. ‘They rely on us to do the thinking for them’. What transformed the situation was discovering the follow up to the DISS report – the Effective Deployment of Teaching Assistants Project (EDTA). This action research project looked at ways of enabling schools to use TA’s effectively. As a direct result, the researchers published Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants,   a book so good and so accessible we bought a copy for every TA and class teacher and which I highly recommend. It is highly readable and set out to be used directly for professional development purposes. There is also a MITA website to accompany the book – that’s definitely worth a look too.

We did, of course, reflect on deployment and preparation of TA’s, but the key thing we have been concentrating on has been how TA’s can ensure that their presence promotes resilience, self reliance and autonomy in the pupils they support – the entire ‘growth mindset’ table d’hôte as it were.

One of the first things we did was conduct a survey among a subset of our pupils. We surveyed all the children in ks2 with statements, a selection of lower prior attainment children, and a selection of higher prior attainment children. When asked, who helps you learn in school – the ‘higher’ children almost all named their teacher whereas the ‘lower’ and SEN children were more likely to name a TA and not mention the class teacher at all. But the most illuminating finding was when asked to answer ‘true’ or false’ to the question ‘I learn better when a TA is there to help me’, a third responded no (including the SEN and ‘lower children), and explained that it often interrupted their thought processes and was an unwanted distraction. Another third said that TA presence was sometimes helpful and the final third were positive.

We shared these findings, along with highlights from both the DISS and the EDTA research, with TA’s and teachers during an INSET day this January. Prior to the training, we also videoed 3 out of 10 TA’s as a benchmark tool to help us evaluate the impact of our initiative. This video was only seen by the TA themselves and the 3 teachers leading the MITA project group in school. The best thing about the MITA project is what we now call ‘the MITA triangle’. This is a simple visual reminder of a hierarchy of when to intervene – or not intervene – when supporting students. I say ‘not intervene’ advisedly, because a key message from the project is to intervene as little as possible when supporting students. Assume they can do it, observe carefully, and only intervene after sustained careful observation shows you that the child needs some support.

Our teaching assistants found this really challenging. The idea that it was ok to just sit next to a pupil and effectively do nothing but watch for a few minutes was difficult to take on board. Fortunately, I had videoed myself ‘being a TA’ and supporting a year 6 child with his maths. The sight of the headteacher sitting alongside a pupil and just watching him work for a good few minutes was liberating for them. I was, of course, watching very carefully, so when I did intervene, it was because I could see a misconception getting in the way of learning. We talked a lot about the difference between this and spoon feeding a pupil. ‘I definitely don’t spoonfeed’ said one TA. Imagine her surprise when she saw her video…

The triangle outlines 5 possible ways of intervening. At the top of the triangle the pupil is autonomous and self scaffolds their own learning. Nothing to see here – move along.

The next rung down is prompting (or I prefer to call it nudging) a pupil. This might be as gentle as a meaningful look or strategically focused cough. It might be as simple as saying ‘so, what have you got to do now’ and that will be enough to get the ball rolling. If that isn’t sufficient we might then suggest a very generic strategy, leaving as much of the leg work as possible to the pupil. ‘So, is there anything on the board that might remind you of what you are meant to do now?’

The next step down the triangle is to give clues to the pupil. These will be more specific to the learning at hand than prompts. So we might say ‘ would it help you remember if you looked at the success criteria/spelling bank/100 square/periodic table/working wall? Remember this is happening after some quality input from the class teacher. This is not the child encountering information for the first time. Or being re-presented with it after it has become obvious that the first time didn’t work. This is not an intervention situation where the TA is acting as a teacher and imparting information. This is when the pupil is working with information or a process they have just had explained to them during whole class teaching.

If that doesn’t still work then the TA has to do some explicit modeling. This means the original teaching has failed in some way – it might mean it was too hard for the pupil in the first place. Modeling is basically re-teaching the concept or information. Modeling is fine – but the idea is that the pupil gets it first time along with the rest of the class and doesn’t get to have their own private mini lesson with a TA. That way, dependency lies. I am sure we have all come across pupils who realise that they don’t have to listen the first time around because they will be rewarded with special 1:1 time if they switch off when the teacher is talking.

At the very bottom of the triangle is just telling the pupil what to do. Not because telling pupils things is bad per se – but because we tell them instead of expecting them to work for the answer. Obviously this means that the answer has to be something they should be able to work out for themselves. It isn’t something they don’t, in theory, already know. This isn’t about championing discovery learning – this is about expecting a child to use strategies to find information we have already shared. If, for example, we have shown pupils how they can find the atomic number of an element by looking at the periodic table – it is not ok for them to shrug and look hopeless when asked to find the atomic number of sodium when there is a copy of the periodic table readily available to them.

If they’ve got counters in front of them, and worked examples, and – if all else fails – someone to re model the concept to them again, they should be able to re-create a 3×2 array. What shouldn’t happen is for them to be told,’ put three counters in the first line and another three counters in the second line – there – that’s three times two, draw that in your book.’   In this case, the TA might as well have done the work in the book herself and cut out the middle man!

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Following the INSET day, we shared the videos with the original 3 ‘benchmark’ TA’s, to see what they thought about how they performed, now that they had received the training. Each TA watched their video alongside one of the 3 teachers leading the project. The reaction was amazing. The very TA who had been adamant she didn’t spoonfeed was running around the staff room afterwards exclaiming ,’oh my God – I do everything – I turn the pages, I give him a pen, I jump straight in before he’s even had a chance to think, I interrupt him when he is talking, I practically tell him the answer – I’m spoon feeding all the time.’ The child she was supporting is in year 5.

Another TA was similarly horrified. ‘I don’t give him any space, I hold the book like his a baby, I turn the pages – my hand are in the way.’ Indeed, the child she supports being a feisty character – there are veritable tussles for who gets to turn the page and hold the book. The child she was supporting was in year 4.

Throughout the video was an endless litany of ‘Good boy! Good boy!’ It was suggested to her that pointing out what successful strategy the child had just used was likely to be much more helpful. In discussion, each TA came up with 3 or 4 things they were going to try to do differently and the teacher summarized the discussion and these targets on one side of A4. After this, we videoed the other 7 TA’s for the first time and went through the same process. Unsurprisingly, because these TA’s had already had the training, they were already using the techniques in their practice. The discussions with the teacher were really useful. Everyone found it really hard to back off and wait at the start of the session. Everyone wanted reassurance they were doing it right. People were a bit confused if they were clueing or modeling at various points. Looking at the footage, it becomes obvious that we all flit up and down the triangle at different points as the child encounters and then overcomes difficulties. It didn’t really matter if we couldn’t quite decide if a particular intervention was a prompt of a clue – what mattered was that we were all thinking hard about how to let the child – or children in the case of a group – do the thinking.

After a couple of weeks, we re-videoed the original three. The results were astonishing. I actually cried watching the footage of one child. Here was a boy who used to do anything to avoid reading, and now here he was, blending those sounds like a pro, going back again and again if it didn’t make sense, showing amazing levels of self motivation and ploughing through the book like an Olympian. You know I never thought we’d ever teach this child to read and he is miles and miles behind – a 1C probably in old money. But he now has the determination and drive to go for it. It’s two and a half years until he hits secondary school and we are going to move heaven and earth to get him as far as we possibly can so he transfers a fluent (ish) reader. I had better make it clear that his failure to read previously was not down to the kind of support he had received previously – there’s a long and complicated story and I’ve named my school so I can’t say more – nor was the new style of support the only factor in his resurrection (no other word will really cover the extent of the transformation).   However, now that his TA was supporting him in a way that took the stabilisers off – he was flying. No more holding the book for him or being the one pointing at the words on the page, no more vacuous praise, lots more praise for using specific strategies of for showing perseverance, lots and lots more waiting and observing. Really insightful intervention just at the right time, building on strategies. It was like was like watching a masterclass in supporting reading. I watched the footage alone on the weekend before I was due to meet with the TA to look at it with her. It was so brilliant I texted her there and then to thank her for making such a difference to this child’s life.

But is wasn’t just her. Both the other TA’s have really changed how they do things. And all three children they work with have taken off. The gap between them and the rest of the class is closing rapidly. By chance, both classes having been doing fractions – notoriously challenging and made even more so by the hike in expectations from the new curriculum. Both children – and they both have statements for learning difficulties – can how add and subtract fractions with ease, and in the case of the older child, including when they have different denominators.   Before they come and take the money away, I had better add that their difficulties, particularly with processing language, remain as severe as ever. But as for maths – extraordinary!

And the main thing the TA’s are doing differently? Waiting. Taking time before jumping in. in fact, not jumping in…gently putting a toe in the water if really necessary.   Reminding pupils of strategies they could use, giving students space to struggle and become a little frustrated without rushing in to soothe and calm.

With the other TA’s we have also seen a sea change –waiting, gentle prompting – expecting independence as the new normal. There’s been a real buzz about this project with TA’s chatting about it a lot on the staff room. When your TA’s are reflecting about ways to improve their teaching and students learning on their tea breaks, you know you are on to a winner.

Particularly when TA’s work with groups, I can see how strong the temptation to go for task completion is and how we need to reinforce that sometimes you just need to model the input again – and then try the other strategies. One group of young children were meant to use objects such as toy dinosaurs to tell a ‘real story’ based on an equation such 3+2 and then draw a pictorial representation of this. The word ‘story’ was a distractor to some in the group who started on elaborate tales – as if it were a literacy lesson – without reference to the maths. Despite the TA reminding the children about how the class teacher had told a real story based on the maths story, the link between the two – obviously the whole point of the exercise, had not been grasped by a couple of children. Instead of modeling this again – or – even better – sharing the work of other children who had been successful – the TA spent most of her energy trying to get the children to draw first 3, then 2. When actually the drawing was an afterthought – a recording of the thinking and not the thinking itself. But the MITA model allowed us to have a great conversation around this and for her to self identify her own desire to please the teacher by getting the task done – whether or not this actually helps the child learn. So a powerful learning experience for her.

The project’s not over yet. The idea is that a second round of videoing is shared in TA triads – sort of lesson study style – but less threatening. That was meant to be this week – but we have fallen behind. The main problem was that videoing in class made it really difficult to capture the sound properly – even when the rest of the class were really trying to work as quietly as possible to facilitate the video, the sounds of chairs scraping and background talking just made the soundtrack too hard to analyse. So we re-videoed with TA’s taking their group or child out just for this lesson. We could invest in a directional mike, I suppose – but for our purposes videoing lessons in a different room worked fine. We had to make sure that the prompts available in class were still present, of course.

The project has also helped class teachers reflect on how they promote independence for all children.  In one notoriously dependent class, the teacher has shared the triangle with all pupils – suggesting that some of them rather like life at the bottom of the triangle. She now gives them feedback about how well they are able to self-scaffold – the expectation being that children who actively listen during whole class time should usually be able to get down to solid independent work without needing further reassurance. Her TA and herself will circulate, reinforcing where things are going well and spotting where children are making mistakes and then prompting, clueing and possibly re-modeling as necessary. But the children need to risk doing something wrong first.

At a recent open day day review – when teachers from 7 different schools came to observe classes and look in books – all present noted the high levels of resilience and autonomy. I am sure we have further to go with this and it will be interesting to see how this impacts on end of year data in the summer. I wholly heartedly recommend the MITA project to you – it’s been instructive, it’s been transformative and it’s been a blast.

[1] The rainbow doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of this post – I just included it because it looks hopeful and I was feeling wistful.

[2] I’m going to use the term TA – teaching assistant for all classed based support staff. I know a variety of other terms are used and some school differentiate between learning support assistants for SEN pupils and TA’s for more general support – but for brevity and clarity I am using the one term – in the same way the researchers themselves do.

[3] Full disclosure: husband works for ECC. Also, to be quite clear, ECC’s teacher led intervention has been subject to published independent study which found to made a very positive impact but its suite of TA led interventions do not yet have published independently verified research –although EFF trails are taking place. Their own databank is substantial and shows positive impact, as this report from Learning Wales shows.

‘If they sit with us, they become lazy.’ TA’s, growth mindset and the MITA Project

Efficacy, efficiency and fancy counting (Or why primary schools will ruin fractions forever.)

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My husband and I once had an epic row one Saturday morning about whether all of maths could be reduced to fancy counting. He is a maths consultant specializing in teaching children who struggle with early maths. I am a primary school headteacher. He’s the one who has read the books. I’m the one who felt like they were doing a vicarious Masters when asked to read essay after essay. His knowledge is deep and focused – mine is more broad brush but shallower. He’s probably a bit more on the progressive side of the continuum. An innocent comment over a supposedly relaxed weekend breakfast sometimes degenerates into maths wars. My sons, if they haven’t already left the table bored rigid by our endless pedagogy discussions, depart exclaiming ‘they are arguing about bloody maths again!’

Anyway, my side of the argument was that once you realized that counting in groups was much more efficient than counting in ones, everything else in maths was really just a set of footnotes to that basic principle.

Footnote 1: counting in tens (or multiples thereof) is a fancy way of adding or subtracting something efficiently

Footnote 2: multiplication and division are just fancy ways of counting something lots of times

Footnotes 3: fractions, decimals and percentages are just fancy ways of counting bits of things.

Footnote 4: graphs are just fancy pictures of counting

Footnote 5: everything else in maths is just combining notes 1-4 in some way or other.

Footnote 6: by maths I of course mean mainly number. Geometry is some alien cuckoo-in-the nest, cruelly inserted into the maths curriculum by nasty people who can read maps and parallel-park easily. That it is not fancy counting, just proves my point. It should be a weird option at GCSE and not inflicted upon the rest of us.

For some reason he thought this was some gross over simplification.

I suppose what I was trying to express was that much (maybe ‘all’ was stretching it a bit) of learning maths is learning ever increasingly efficient ways of applying our ability to count in different situations. Maybe that would be better phrased as, ‘learning ever increasingly efficient ways of manipulating the number system.’

Hin-Tai Ting’s blog post about efficacy, efficieny and mastery brought it all back. What was really helpful about Hin-Tai’s post was how it contrasted effective strategies with efficient ones. Effective ones work, but may be laborious. Efficient ones work better, but you really have to ‘get’ the maths to be in any position to be able to decide which strategy is more efficient. Procedural understanding gives you effective strategies; conceptual understanding enables you to choose between procedures to find – or even invent for yourself – the most efficient for the task in hand. And when teaching and wanting to reduce the cognitive load on students we tend to go for the method that they are most likely to get and teach this as a procedure. This is fine up to a point – but with only one ‘tool’ in their mathematical toolkit, the student has no alternatives.

I had a friend once who passed her driving test without being confident at turning right at junctions. Left was easy because you don’t have to cross the traffic – turning right freaked her out. If she gave you a lift you could end up going some really strange routes to avoid right turns. And some places you just couldn’t reach! She hadn’t mastered turning – that’s for sure. What we want is to give students flexibility of thinking. We want them to have a range of tools in the kit, and – crucially – to be able to work out on the hoof, which to use when. This is what mastery understanding is. It’s not some special level clever kids get to, it’s what proper maths teaching is all about. But there is a real tension between only having one effective tool and having so many tools you’ve know idea which one does what – let alone make a judicious choice about which is most efficient for the job in hand.

This was one downside of the otherwise groundbreaking National Numeracy Strategy. Primary old lags like myself will recall how we were expected to plough through pages and pages on different strategies. See for example, the range of mental calculation strategies we were meant to teach year 3 for addition:

Mental calculation strategies (+ and –)

  • Use knowledge that addition can be done in any order to do mental calculations more efficiently. For example:
    put the larger number first and count on in tens or ones;
    add three small numbers by putting the largest number first and/or find a pair totalling 10;

partition into ‘5 and a bit’ when adding 6, 7, 8 or 9, then recombine (e.g. 16 + 8 = 15 + 1 + 5 + 3 = 20 + 4 = 24); partition additions into tens and units, then recombine.

  • Find a small difference by counting up from the smaller to the larger number (e.g. 42 – 39).
  • Identify near doubles, using doubles already known (e.g. 8 + 9, 40 + 41).
  • Add/subtract 9 or 11: add/subtract 10 and adjust by 1.
    Begin to add/subtract 19 or 21: add/subtract 20 and adjust by 1.
  • Use patterns of similar calculations.
    • State the subtraction corresponding to a given addition, and

vice versa.

  • Use known number facts and place value to add/subtract mentally.
  • Bridge through 10 or 20, then adjust.

(From the National Numeracy Strategy 1999, p2).

What the authors wanted was for children to have such mastery over the number system that they would appreciate that you can partition any number in a myriad of different ways; the trick being to partition the numbers you wish to add in a clever, efficient (or as I would say, ‘fancy’) way that made life easier for you. Instead, what actually often happened was that children were taught a range of seemingly unconnected procedures that all got muddled up, leaving them not really knowing which method to use at all.   So schools quickly chose one method that seemed best at getting the right answer – the most effective method – and let considerations of efficacy go hang. I remember one school where it was absolutely forbidden to teach children that you could partition both numbers into tens and ones and then recombine the tens first. You were only allowed to teach partitioning the second number; anything else was wrong.

Accountability pressures are our enemy here. When the reputation of the entire school is at stake, better teach one tool that will always work – possibly inefficiently, – than two that they muddle. Especially when the consequences for inculcating inflexibility won’t be felt until a few years hence, when some other educational institution gets to pick up the tab. In theory we are all mastery teachers now; taking our time teaching less in more depth; spending quality time with topics so that procedural and conceptual understanding develop in tandem. In reality schools are tearing through the curriculum at breakneck speed in order to cover the new curriculum before accountability exams kick in.

Which brings me to fractions. Secondary school teachers; I’m so sorry. On behalf of my primary colleagues I apologise for ****ing up the understanding of fractions for the children you will shortly inherit. Here’s the backstory.

The higher expectations of the new curriculum now have us teach year 6 to multiply and divide fractions. Previously, children could easily obtain a level four without even knowing how to add or subtract fractions with different denominators. That was for level five children. But not now. The sample paper is chock full of fractions being manipulated ever which way. What we used to teach in year 6 is now meant to be done in year 4. But we didn’t do it  when the present year 6 children were in year 4 ‘cos the curriculum was only finalized in July of that year. We didn’t do it in year 5 much either because we were too busy teaching the column methods and formal long division, which also weren’t previously necessary. So finally here we are with three years worth of fractions curriculum to teach (on top of prime factorization, cube numbers, area of a circle, algebra…) by early May. Added to that, to be honest, our own conceptual understanding of multiplying and especially dividing fractions is a bit hazy. Added to that, the actual procedure for these two operations is ridiculously easy. So why waste time explaining why they work, eh?

That was the general consensus at a conference I was at last week. I’ve begged my year 6 teacher, please…humour me, at least show them, albeit briefly, a quick area model of why multiplying a fraction by a fraction works. And then teach them the trick. Which incidentally seems to break all the rules about denominators. Previously, for addition and subtraction,  we’ve stressed that when numbers have different denominators you absolutely can’t muck about with them with them at all. That would be like saying that 3 litres and £4 was 7 metres.   Different denominators were evil and dangerous and had to be rendered safe by finding a common denominator.  But now children are positively encouraged to play fast and loose with denominators and multiply them even when they are different. The illicit is, for reasons best known to the maths police, made licit.

This really bothers me. If we teach children to do things that make no sense and seem arbitrary, we run the risk of children assuming maths is not meant to make sense, that it just a case of complying with whatever apparently random routine has been served up to us today. Don’t touch the denominators: touch the denominators. Whatever. No wonder they are not bothered by answers that are clearly wrong. No one ever said it was meant to make sense.

Confession time: I’m, 53 and until last week, I didn’t realize that the quick, ‘effective’ methods we use for multiplying and dividing fractions, are actually underpinned by first of all finding a common denominator. That just makes so much sense. This video has really helped me understand this. In fact I felt a palpable sense of relief. All these years I’ve been defrauding maths, performing algorithms like they were magic spells. Made me feel dirty – and not in a good way. At last I am an honest woman. No wonder when at secondary school I encountered algebraic fractions I didn’t understand the various rules for manipulating them. In fact, it was only last year helping my child with GCSE maths I realized that algebraic fractions are just…fractions! Same rules and everything! Who knew? Seriously it was a light bulb moment for me.

However, probably year 6 teachers will just be drilling ‘flip and multiply, flip and multiply.’ Anyway squeamishness they may feel overwhelmed by noxious accountability radiation.

♫ “Dividing fractions, as easy as pie,
 Flip the second fraction, then multiply.
And don’t forget to simplify, 
Before it’s time to say goodbye” ♫

 Which is fine as an aide-memoire alongside work to develop conceptual understanding, but not as the main course. Which is what it will be. Sorry about that.

So when they are in year 9 and trying to manipulate algebraic fractions and it’s all going horribly wrong, curse your primary colleagues. (I presume it’s year 9, maybe it’s year 7 these days?)

Actually don’t curse your primary colleagues. Like you, we have to operate in a strange land where the government imposes a shiny new curriculum on all of us all at once. It’s not put into place one year at a time so that we can build children’s understanding of the new maths landscape one step at a time. Which is how they did it in Singapore. Like you, we operate within the accountability force-field, which distorts everything in its path. On top of this the accountability system is getting even more punitive with schools still pressured to get kids looking like they can do the stuff they are as yet not quite ready for. There is a fundamental disconnect here between the desire to promote deep and sustainable learning and the desire to meet fairly arbitrarily specified targets. Rock and a hard place anyone?

Hin-Tai’s post was much more positive and solution focused, so I will endeavor to end on a positive note. He talks about the need to design curricula that build-in mastery approaches by identifying the deep maths and then devoting quality curriculum time to do just that. This is clearly beyond the headspace of individual teachers and madness that we should all try to do this in isolation. Fortunately, our school had adopted mathsmastery , which does precisely that. I was a bit suspicious, initially, of its highly detailed –almost scripted – lesson plans and had all the usual objections (as outlined, but not championed, by David Didau here.)   The name is seriously naff too. Can’t we just call it ‘deep maths’. However, two years down the road I have to say the curriculum is a work of pure genius. I fancy myself as able to plan great maths lessons – but as a day-to-day practitioner I simply don’t have the time to read the books necessary to really get to the heart of the matter. This curriculum does. And it goes s-l-o-w-l-y at first. The first half term of Reception covers numbers 1 to 3. I thought some kids would be so bored they’d be sticking pins in their eyes. But no. With these three numbers, children work on – among other things ­– getting a firm grasp of equivalence, by randomly generating these numbers twice, and describing the two numbers as the ‘same’ or different’. There are, after all, 9 possible outcomes, if we say that 1 followed by 2 is a different outcome from 2 followed by a 1. What concept could be more fundamental than understanding what ‘same’ and different’ means? If you think about it, ‘same’ is quite a tricky concept, since it does not mean ‘identical’. We mean ‘same’ in a specified way. Variation theory for 4-year-olds.

In another great lesson, the children play a variation of Nim’s game. Using bricks, build a wall in a 3-2-3-2 formation. They can choose to remove 1,2 or 3 bricks at a time, the person removing the last brick being the winner. I can’t begin to overstate how clever this is. Some children just do this practically and don’t realize until they remove the last brick(s) that they have won. Others begin to plan ahead – to visualize the maths in their head. Some of them begin to theorize about a way that works every time.

And it turns out, I was dead wrong about fancy counting. In fact, in the UK we are far too wedded to counting as a means of calculating. In Singapore, close on the heels of ‘same and different’ comes ‘part, part, whole’. These two form an essential part of the deepest of deep maths children that need to master. Really, once you have got 1 to 1 correspondence, you shouldn’t really count anything much beyond 5. [1] 7? That’s the same as 5 and 2.  I might concede to counting to 10 at a stretch. Adding is much more about applying really simple number facts than it is about counting. 8+5? Don’t teach the children to count on 5. Instead, partition the 5 into 2 and 3, pop the 2 with the 8 to make 10 and voilà.

Occasionally, I think mathsmastery miss a trick. For example, in year 1 they leap straight from circling pictures into tens and ones to dienes, without the all important physical bundling and unbundling of tens using straws. Lots of children in upper key stage 2 with poor place value haven’t actually grasped that the ten stick is made up of 10 ones as it seems so obvious we brush over it. Printing with dienes would also help in the tricky move in transferring what we’ve done concretely to what we record pictorially. And of course, I think fractions should start with inculcating a secure grasp of the denominator before introducing numerators. As I’ve said before.   And I read something I should have bookmarked about teaching Time by removing the minute hand from clocks and getting children to approximate telling the time by the position of the hour hand. ‘Oh look, its gone past the 6 and is close to the 7 – it must be a few minutes to 7,’ which I also think would really work much more effectively.

But these are mere quibbles. I would really recommend it. Or something similar. Something with a better name, perhaps.

[1] Actually him indoors says counting is vital for development of place value and mentions Carpenter and Moser, or possibly Nunes. But can’t be arsed to pull himself away from the rugby and actually find a proper citation. Ok. But we should rely less on teaching calculation through counting. Looks like we’ve done a volte-face on our previous positions.

Efficacy, efficiency and fancy counting (Or why primary schools will ruin fractions forever.)

Wurdz.

oldprimarytimer, , 6 Comments

‘The old bear roared in frustration and waved at the empty air with his huge paws, then reared up on his hind legs .’

It’s the Easter holidays. Reading booster revision class for year 6.  I have a group of 4 children. They need to get a level 4. It’s not going well. The bear in question has recently changed his behaviour – we are medddant to be describing how. And why.  I’m settling for how in the first instance.

‘So,’  I enquire, with that  strained upbeat  tone adopted by teachers when the odds are against us, ‘can anybody tell me what it means when it said the bear  ‘reared up?’

Blank looks.    Someone says that rear means your bottom – which is sort of encouraging – though not particularly helpful in this context. Mental note to self:-must make sure we teach them the words ‘rear up’.   Time for a spot of drama. I rear up out of my chair and we all practice rearing up and think about what sort of occasions might make us want to rear up. Not taking a bottom group booster class three weeks before sats, that’s for sure. All though I am – like the bear – frustrated.  Quick check that we know ‘frustration’. Nominalisation is a problem – they know frustrated but don’t automatically make the link. Mental note to self:-must make sure we teach them more about nominalisation, root words, looking for links.

‘Ok, are we all clear now about the meaning of all the other words in the sentence?’

A pupil enquires, ‘what does hind mean?’  How come they don’t  know they word ‘hind?’ We do lots of stuff about animals. Surely it came up somewhere.  I check if they know the word ‘fore’.   Nope. Don’t know that either.

I reread our sentence, one more time, confident now that every word is now understood by my four pupils and that we can begin to answer our 2 mark question. So if we were, by some sort of miracle, to get a very similar sort of passage in the real test, where someone reared up in frustration – possibly on his hind legs – we might even be able to glean a mark or two.

‘Miss…? The undulating tone indicates a question is coming. ‘What’s a paw?’ Some of the group are excited now because they know this.  They rear up in excitement. ‘I know, I know, it’s what you call an animal’s foot!’ Mental note to self:-must make sure we teach them the word paw. Surely we teach them the word ‘paw’. Surely in the early years during ‘people who help us’ the vet makes paws better? I’m sure we learn ‘paw’ in phonics.  Despondently I turn and  reread the sentence yet again. My face a mask of fake brightness as I strain to erase any hint of sarcasm from my voice I enquire, ‘we are all sure what a bear is – right?’

By the way, I ought to point out, only some of this group are EAL. Others speak English at home. Allegedly. It’s a different kind of English though. Standard English is definitely a foreign tongue.

Look, I’ve got as  big a ‘growth mindset’ as the next ‘ResearchEd’ nerd, but there is something about trying to increase children’s vocabulary that drains every last scrap of optimism out of me. With just about everything else in education, it is simply a case of finding the right technique and then practicing the living daylights out of it. Actually that’s the grossest of gross generalisations. It is not simple for a start. And there’s infinitely more to education than just mastering basic literacy and numeracy. There is creativity and wonder and stuffing your brain with glorious morsels of knowledge. There’ s critical thinking and problem solving  and reasoning and immersing yourself in the imaginary worlds of brilliant stories.  But to get to all that properly you need to read, write and be numerate at least a little bit. And there are techniques like phonics in reading and using the concrete-pictorial- abstract approach in maths that have a proven track record of being pretty efficient.  I like the way the universe has been even handed here: favouring traditional phonics on the one hand and trendy ‘cpa’ on the other.

When it comes to increasing a child’s vocabulary, the way ahead is so much more mysterious. Something like phonics is, for the most part, generalisable.  Once you know the 44 grapheme: phoneme correspondences and how to blend and segment them – you’ve got that skill for life. You can transfer that skill onto any other phonetic language you encounter. Sure the gpc’s may vary a bit or even a lot, so you may need to upgrade you knowledge of those, or learn to decode from right to left if you learn Arabic, but the basic skill is there: it doesn’t need to go on being taught over and over once securely grasped.

Maths is pretty much the same. Once you understand the base 10 place value system, you don’t need to have it explained afresh each time we increase or decrease a factor of 10. It’s quite a complicated and abstract principle so may take some time to really understand, but once it is done, it is done for ever.  Same with the four operations. Yes we apply them in ever more complicated situations, but addition is always addition, whether it’s 2+3, 233+32.3  or  2a +(-3b).  Obviously there is a lot more to both, but you get the point. In both there’s an element of the really hard work being done in the early years and ks1.  After that, it’s mainly applying what you already know in new, more demanding situations. But words are so damn specific.  If today I teach you ‘paw’ that  doesn’t help you know ‘hoof’ tomorrow. If today’s character ‘rears up in frustration’, tomorrow’s will ‘slump in deep despondency’. Am I meant to have some sort of list- starting perhaps with aardvark and ending with zygote?

It has always struck me as miraculous that any child ever learns to speak at all. It’s creation ex nihilo par excellence. One minute you have a babbling baby who can’t say or understand anything and the next they start issuing orders like ‘more’ and ‘milk’. Before you know it they’ve moved beyond giving orders and labelling objects to generating their own, unique sentences- beyond just copying and into innovation. Watching a young child learn to speak is exciting and enthralling; no wonder parents bore everyone else senseless with news of the latest cute thing their genius  two year old has just said.

I am sure those who have EAL new arrivals turn up in February into year 4 /8/11 ( insert numeral of choice) have often witnessed the same miracle. One minute you are announcing to the class ‘here is a new boy,Yan Ye. He doesn’t speak any English yet’ and arranging a buddy system  to get him through geography and the next he gets a level five in his English reading sats. So- and here is the million dollar question, how come Yan Ye can learn English in little more than two years when he only really gets to speak it at school whereas some of this classmates have been surrounded by English since birth, been to the same school for 8 years and don’t yet know what ‘frustration’ means? Unlike their teachers. Why does this everyday miracle fail to ‘take’ for some children and what can we do about it?

Of course it is linked to disadvantage. For a variety of reasons, there is a much higher risk of growing up within a family with a limited language environment if that family is also poor. It’s absolutely by no means inevitable, but statistically, if you are poor, the odds of you being raised in a language rich environment are just lower.  When comparing  the exposure to language of the richest and poorest children, a seminal American study that makes me want to weep describes the grim reality that a child from a high-income family will experience 30 million more words within the first four years of life than a child from a low-income family. But it is also true that socioeconomic status is not destiny and that there are a variety of providers out there working with parents of babies and toddlers to empower them to break the inter- generational cycle of deprivation.  But what about the children already in the system? How can we help them?

Well it turns out that there is some sort of list. Or at least there should be, although there is a lot of argument about what should be on it. Unfortunately, Mr Gove was rather in favour of having a list. I say unfortunately because I think there is quite a lot in this list business, but Mr Gove tended to taint everything he advocated with the venom of his invective against teachers. A bit like the new maths curriculum. It’s really good- but you have to get past one’s stomach churning aversion to anything Govian to appreciate it. E.D Hirsch, an American academic and chair of the Core Knowledge Foundation, argues persuasively that in order to read, one needs to know not only certain words but something about the cultural context in which those words are set. It’s hard for a British reader to make much sense of an account of baseball or an American an account of cricket even though we understand the individual words perfectly well. It’s just together they don’t make sense.  Socioeconomic disadvantage in education is best overcome, he argues by the explicit teaching of knowledge and its accompanying vocabulary. Instead of wasting time teaching generic reading skills, precious curriculum time should be spent on the humanities and science, building up knowledge.  As his colleague Daniel Willingham argues in this video, teaching content is teaching reading.  The trouble is that Hirsch’s list, as well as being American and rather dated, just seems so arbitrary. Back here in the UK, Civitas tried to translate it into  our kind of English. Apparently, every year 1 child should know about Machu Picchu- something I confess I know precious little about (despite my knowledge based private secondary education). I think it’s a sort of templey thing somewhere in Latin America – Peru maybe- and was built by the Inkas or possibly Aztecs. The same list says every  year 2 child must know about rabies. Why? To give them nightmares, perhaps.

Much more usable is the work of Isabel Beck  . She divides words up into three tiers. Tier one words are everyday words that do not need teaching- table, house, book etc.  Tier three words are specific to certain domains and are fairly low frequency, words like isotope. Words like this are taught fairly easily as they occur in the curriculum. But it’s tier two words where the action is.  These are words that don’t usually come up in spoken language but are high frequency in written texts and give the learner a more mature, nuanced way of expression a concept they already understand. A child who knows ‘sad’ can be taught the word ‘forlorn’, for example.  Rather than providing a definitive list, she teaches teachers how to identify and choose suitable tier two words for explicit word work. she explains this well here.  There are two books by her that are definitely worth reading; Bringing Words to Life and Creating Robust Vocabulary. (Although the phrase ‘robust vocabulary’ brings a smile to my face: no need to put any effort into teaching that!)

Beck (and colleagues) explain that children don’t easily pick up new vocabulary just from the context and from their reading. Rather they need explicit instruction and creative ways to practice what they have been taught. Katie Ashcroft from the fascinating Michaela school explains how they are explicitly teaching vocabulary there.    How does this contrast with current practice in primary schools?

In my experience (almost entirely based in schools in Tower Hamlets), schools work very hard to provide language rich environments. We have to, since our population is predominantly EAL and those who are not EAL tend to number among the word poor.  We all know our BICS from our CALP.  Thinking of my own school, starting with the early years promoting high quality communication is our top priority.  We’ve done ‘Every Child A Talker‘ and refresh our memories its key messages every couple of years. We have a speech therapist on the payroll who regularly observes practitioners to develop their practice. We run interventions such as TalkBoost and Speech Bubble. We value speech as integral to learning. Talk partners are a completely routine part of every lesson from Nursery onwards. We expect children to answer in full sentences. We use sentence frames and dictogloss. We orally rehearse before we write and use drama across the curriculum. We talk for writing and internalise key texts. We spend a lot on our library which has high quality non fictions well as fiction.  Each year a group of children who have read widely get to visit the book wholesalers and spent a budget of thousands electing new books for our library. Authors come and visit.  We insist children read daily for homework.  We read to them daily.  Key vocabulary is highlighted and explained. Yet still, frustratingly, vocabulary problems rear up.

Upon reflection, I reckon we explain too much vocabulary too fast.  If I am reading Beck et al correctly, less is more. Fewer words, carefully identified and revisited over a series of activities.  This is something we can change.  We magpie literature, ‘stealing’ good words. We list ‘wow’ words and ‘star words’ and ‘powerful verbs’.  Beck’s tier framework provides real scope here to revisit our practice.  Those ‘powerful verbs’ are bound to be tier two words. Time for them to come down from our working walls and be rehearsed in the ways Beck recommends.

Beck’s recipe is as follows:

First introduce a new word in context. I think this is pretty standard primary practice. I don’t think primary schools tend to just dole out list of edifying words to learn. I hope not anyway.

Secondly, provide a friendly explanation. Not a dictionary definition unless it is from something like the Collins COBUILD Dictionary that defines words in full sentences. Beck suggests explaining words with sentences that use words such as someone, something, if and you. For example,’ if someone is jaded,me has or has seen so much of something that he begins to dislike it.’ (p24 Creating Robust Vocabulary). I think, given time, this is the sort of explanation most of us would tend to give. The trouble is, because our vocabulary teaching tends to be so ad hoc as we encounter words in the middle of stories, we try to articulate a coherent definition on the hoof and fail miserably, coming up with something garbled.

But even in programmes such as Success For All that go out of their way to highlight and define high value vocabulary, this goes nowhere unless the students have opportunities to encounter this word several more times over a series of days. So step three is that old favourite spaced repetition.  Beck suggests spending  a few minutes over 5 days on a few words. After introducing the word and briefly defining it, on subsequent days, children can be given opportunities to process the new words mentally in a variety of ways. One technique is called example/ nonexample. Here students are asked to decide if various sentences illustrate the target word or not.

‘If any of the things I say might be sleek, say ‘smooth man’. If not, don’t say anything.

a porcupine 

a duck

a leaf

a car

Another technique is word associations. This is basically matching. A card sort really- though maybe without the cards.

The next activity she suggests involves  generating situations, contexts and examples.

How might a …..cook……a musician…..a basketball player……..a teacher show they are:

versatile

industrious

clever

expert

And so on.  Then at the end of the week,mother words go in a word back. Each week, three ‘old words’ are drawn from the bank to jog those memories. That way, they stick and might actually get used.

I’m not sure why it is secondary school teachers who are leading the way here (or maybe they are just the ones blogging about it) but there is some inspiring practice being developed.   As well as Katie Ashcroft, l have also found this by Josie Mingay on using root words as our bread and butter teaching. We already do this is spelling – so why not in vocabulary instruction too? Joey Bagstock  – a colleague of Josie’s – is worth reading too.  Which brings me back to nominalisation.  This term foxed loads of primary teachers when it first appeared in the writing APP grid for level 6. It’s only now after reading this brilliant blog ( nominalisation comes right at the end) I realise it is a great way of turning an ordinary sounding verb into a much posher sounding noun and making your writing seem so much more intelligent. Contrast ‘when the Romans arrived’ with ‘The arrival of the Romans’.

Of course, I can bet my bottom dollar that however many words I successfully teach my charges, when it comes to test time, those words won’t be in the test.  ‘If only I had taught them frugal instead of exuberant’,’  we will exclaim.  And when it’s a test we are talking about, that arbitrariness remains. But we are teaching these words for life and not for the test. Be nice if they coincided though- just this once.

Wurdz.

The light switchers solved- with actual photos!

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In my previous post (silly carpets and the light switchers) I mentioned an interesting problem and promised to post the solution – I’m sure it was easy enough the work out especially since the title also mentioned prime and square numbers. I’ve never actually done it practically before. But for you, dear reader, I’ll go that extra mile. Really glad I did because I’ve just appreciated that that this is a really great problem for upper ks2 ( possible ks3. – what do I know?) and a fun way to rehearse those tables yet again. I wanted to video it but lack of something to fix my phone/ iPad into eluded me. Too many shots of me in my dressing gown (hey it’s the weekend, you don’t expect me to actually get dressed?) So just what is probably one of the most boring sets of photos ever- but what was strangely satisfying to do in practice. I needed an object I could turn over to signify the light being on or off.  Having no plastic cups I resorted to nespresso coffee capsules which makes this the most middle class poncy maths investigation ever….in class maybe use those mini ketchup cups you get at McDonalds or biscuits like Jaffa cakes which have very different sides and which we now all know are zero rated for vat, thanks to MP Stella Creasy.

So first of all all the lights are off so my capsules are all the right way up.

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Then number one switches all her multiples on – i.e turns all of the capsules over.

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As every number is a multiple of one, all the capsules are turned over- all the lights are now on.

Then along comes number two and turns over all,of her multiples, making this obvious pattern.

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Then number three turns over all of his, making this interesting pattern.

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Number four turns over all his multiples…

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And I’m losing the will to live inserting all these photos, so I will cut to the chase. Here is what it looks like after number 25 has done her switching. Drum roll please….

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So the lights left on are 1,4,9,16 and 25 ( and following- I decided modelling it to 25 was quite enough) because, of course, square number have an odd number of factors whereas all the other numbers have an even number so return to their original ‘off’ state.

The light switchers solved- with actual photos!