primary education

Cognitive load: a case study

oldprimarytimer, , , , 5 Comments

This is a shortened version of the talks I gave at ResearchED Durrington and ResearchED Rugby

When we are taught something, the information our teacher is sharing passes first into our working memory. The working memory is the place where we think.  What many teachers do not realise is that the capacity of the working memory is fixed and limited; as a result, it can only think about a very small number of things at a time.  Once the working memory is full, it can only take on more information by ‘dropping’ something, in the same way that you might be able to juggle with two balls easily enough, but add a third into the mix and everything would go pear shaped. The technical term in cognitive science for ‘going pear shaped’ is cognitive overload. 

Fortunately, there is a work-around. Unlike the teeny-tiny working memory, the long-term memory is vast. I like to think of it a bit like the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter.  The long term memory is the place where things go when we have thought hard about them. The great thing about this is, once something makes it to the long-term memory, we can bring that memory back into the working memory when we want to think about something. We can remember things. With things we have thought about over and over again,  retrieval of memories  can become completely effortless and automatic.  For example, you can read these words with minimal effort because reading for you has become automatic. This means you have cognitive capacity to spare in your working memory to think about what these words are actually saying. You don’t have to use any of you capacity trying to work out what the words say.

This cognitive architecture has implications for teachers. We will need to consider the cognitive load involved in what we are teaching  and be keenly aware of the limited nature of working memory. This means we will need to present information in really small steps. Another implication is that we will need to make sure that students have to think hard about what we want them to remember (rather than thinking hard about something else, like the format of the lesson).  A third implication is that because we want students to remember what we taught them, we will need to give them lots and lots of opportunities to retrieve what we have taught them from their long-term memories, as this will make the memories stronger.

Some things we learn form the building blocks of much of our later thinking so secure recall of these is vital. They must be practised over and over until they are so automatic, it is impossible to forget them. We need these tools to be available to us in our working memory whenever we want them, without any conscious effort. We don’t want to have to remember how to read before we can read anything  or have to resort to counting on our fingers in the middle of our maths GCSE. (For more about how we remember things, see here.)

However, we don’t always bear these implications in mind. For example, we don’t break things down into small enough steps because we are experts in the things were are teaching. Things seem easy to use, precisely because various steps in the learning process have become so automated and unconscious, we don’t even recognise all the different things we are doing at once.  Wiemann called this ‘the curse of knowledge’[1].

I’m going to explore this using a case study approach. I’m going to explore how we learn to tell the time. However, since I am assuming that you probably can already tell the time using a conventional, analogue clock, I am going to teach you using a kind of clock I’m pretty sure most people who read this won’t be familiar with.   Please let me introduce the Fibonacci clock.

fib clock

The Fibonacci clock uses the Fibonacci sequence, rather than the more conventional numbers 1-12.  To work out the Fibonacci sequence, start with 0 and 1, and add them together. Obviously this is equal to 1, which now forms the third number in our sequence of 0,1,1. To get the next number, add the last number in the sequence to number to the one before it. So the next number will be 2. The number after that will be 3, then 5 and so on. If you really want to get into the spirit of things, you might wish to pause and work out the next few numbers in the sequence for yourself.  For ease of reference, I’ve put them here.[2]

However, for the purposes of our clock, we only need to first 5 of these (the first 5 after zero that is, so 1,1,2,3,5). Another property of Fibonacci numbers is that if you draw squares whose sides equal the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, you can arrange these squares into an ever expanding spiral, known as the golden spiral or the Fibonacci spiral.

fib sprial numbers

For our purposes, we only want to look at the rectangle formed when 1,1,2,3,5 are placed together in this spiral formation. This rectangle will form our clock face.

fib 1 to 5

fib clock numbers

The panels on the face light up different colours and the pattern of colours is what tells us the time. (They are only accurate to 5 minutes.) These are the rules for telling the time on a Fibonacci clock

  • The hours are displayed using red and the minutes using green.
  • To work out the minutes just add up the green squares and multiply by 5

That seems simple enough, so let’s have a go (answers at the end as footnotes)

a)[3]

7 oclcok

 

b)[4]

6 30 1

That’s not so bad. The hours are quite straightforward. The minutes are a little but more clunk to work out – worth remembering when we expect children to grasp that with the minute hand you also have to count in 5’s.

However, it isn’t quite as straightforward as that. Here is the full set of rules.

  • The hours are displayed using red and the minutes using green.
  • When a square is used to display both the hours and minutes it turns blue.
  • So to work out the hours just add up the red and blue squares.
  • To work out the minutes just add up the green and blue squares and multiply by 5

Ok, let’s try telling the time now

c)[5]

545

d)[6]

6 30 2

e)[7]

6 30 3

 

There’s more than one way to display the same time on a Fibonacci clock.

 

f)[8]

925.PNGI’m hoping that you are finding this a bit taxing. There’s a lot to think about and you are a good way off being able to ‘read’ the time in the same way you can read your watch without thinking.

Now let’s contrast the rules for telling the time on a Fibonacci clock with those for telling the time on an analogue clock.

fib rules

There are actually more complicated rules for the analogue clock. Yet we expect children to pick this up with a couple of three week block in year 2 and year 4, and then wonder why so many of them can’t tell the time! Because there are 4 different rules that all need orchestrating simultaneously, the cognitive load is too high for many children, so learning fails. The ones that get it probably had already had a fair bit of practice at home, so some of the rules were already automated and didn’t need to be consciously worked through. This meant these pupils had more space left in their working memories to think about those rules that were new to them. So, extrapolating from telling the time, we should consider that whenever children struggle with something, it is worth asking ourselves if we have overwhelmed their working memory by underestimating how complex something is? More often than not, the answer will be yes.

If we really did teach the time using a Fibonacci clock, what would be an effective way to do it? We’d break it down into small steps, one rule at a time, practising that lots and lots, before introducing the next rule. So we would start off just telling the time in hours, using red only. if we did this lots and lots, the children would start to benefit from what is known as the ‘chunking effect.’ If we gave children plenty of time to practise each component aspect separately, this step would become stored in the long term memory as a ‘chunk’.

Have you ever tried to carry a large bundle of washing upstairs.  First of all, you drop a sock. When you pick this up you then drop some pants. Precariously balancing your pants on top of the pile causes yet more socks to cascade to the floor. Then consider the same load, packed into 5 carrier bags. You easily manage to climb the stairs without depositing underwear on the landing or hosiery in the corridor. A similar thing happens in our brains with chunking. The classic illustration of this effect is to ask someone to try and remember a sequence of letters or numbers. For example, look at this sequence for a few seconds (or even better, have somebody else read you this sequence) then look away and try to recall it.

TCV  QBM  TBI  NTS

Now try this sequence which has exactly the same letters

BBC ITV NQT SMT

British readers should find this much, much easier as the groups now form instantly recognisable chunks (for non-Brits, BBC is obviously the more usual name of the British Broadcasting Company TV channel, ITV is another TV channel, NQT stands for ‘newly qualified teacher’ and SMT stands for ‘senior management team’ – the leadership team in a school.)

Each of these ‘chunks’ of meaning only take up one slot in the working memory, so in the second example we only have to remember 4 things, not 12. We use chunking when we read a clock face. When we read a watch, we don’t count round in 5’s, we automatically ‘read’ the time from the position of the hands. We can even do it when the numbers are missing!

watchface.PNG

 

In the same way we no longer consciously sound out every letter when we read but can just ‘see’ what a word says, given sufficient practice, children will be able to just’ read’ a clock or watch. So now let’s practise reading our Fibonacci clock sticking just to red for the moment.  You may find you begin to just recognise certain patterns if you do this a few times.

a)[9]

1oc

b)[10]

2oc 1

c)[11]

2oc 2

d)[12]

3oc

e)[13]

4 oc

f)[14]

5oc

g)[15]

5 oc 2

h)[16]

6oc

i)[17]6oc 2

j)[18]

7oc 2

k)[19]

7

l)[20]

8oc

m)[21]

9oc 2

n)[22]

9oc

o)[23]

10oc

 

p)[24]

10 oc

 

q)[25]

11 oc

 

r)[26]

12oc

s)[27]

12 oc 2

When we were able to just read all these red clock faces automatically, we could move on to reading hours using a mixture of red and blue. When that was completely fluent we would concentrate on minutes, first of all just using green and when that was very secure, green and blue minutes. Eventually we would be in a position to put it all together.  This would take a lot of time and a lot of short but frequent practice.

If we translate this into how we teach children to tell the time using an analogue clock, it is little wonder children find it so hard and teachers so frustrating to teach. We don’t break it down enough and don’t do nearly enough practice once we’ve finished teaching the unit on time. In fact, it’s a miracle anyone learns to tell the time at all! If you want to find out about a better way of teaching time, I suggest you look at my blog here, where I advocate teaching using the hour hand only at first, and then subsequently teaching the minute hand separately. When both of these can be read fluently, read two clocks side by side, one showing hours, the other minutes. Finally, after all this practice, you can introduce a standard two hand clock.

As I said earlier, there are some things we learn as in the early years and key stage one that form the building blocks of much of our later thinking. If we want children to have the mental capacity to be independent, critical thinkers, we need to move heaven and earth to make sure as many  as possible of these crucial building blocks become completely automatic so that precious working memory space can be used for more creative thinking. These key skills must be practised over and over until they are so automatic we cannot forget them and don’t need to think about them. Drivers may well remember how difficult it was when first learning to drive to change gear, steer, signal and read the traffic all at the same time.  A year or so later, the process is so automatic, you can arrive at home without even remembering much of your journey. Instead, you’ve been able to think about other, more important things on the way home.

In the same way, our children have an entitlement to be given time and encouragement to commit the basic building blocks of thinking into their long term memories. Primary schools owe it to the children they teach to make sure that as a  bare minimum, all of these are learnt to automaticity.

  • Number bonds
  • Times tables
  • Phonics
  • Handwriting
  • Telling the time
  • Full stops and capital letters.
  • Weeks and months
  • Recognising map of UK and beyond

Yet there is a reluctance to spend time practising basic skills. It is derided as ‘meaningless rote learning.’  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  What is really meaningless is condemning children to a lifetime of having to count on their fingers when we could have set them free from the bondage to counting by making such they knew their number bonds to automaticity. What could hinder problem solving more than not being able to manipulate numbers effortlessly because you were never given the opportunity to learn your tables by heart, because your teacher described that sort of thing as ‘regurgitation’?  What could be less creative than not being able to read fluently because your teaching thought phonics was boring? It is our duty as educators to ensure that we help children move as much information as possible to long-term memory, so that their cognitive load can be utilised on the fun stuff, the clever stuff, the important stuff.

 

[1] Wiemann, C. (2007) ‘the curse of knowledge’. Or why intuition about teaching often fails’. APS News 16 p.9

[2] 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89…

 

[3] 7 o’clock

[4] 6:30

[5] 5:45

[6] 6:30

[7] 6:30

[8] 9:25

[9] 1 o’clock

[10] 2 o’clock

[11] 2 o’clock (those annoying duplicates!)

[12] 3 o’clock

[13] 4 o’clock

[14] 5 o’clock

[15] 5 o’clock

[16] 6 o’clock

[17] 6 o’clock

[18] 7 o’clock

[19] 7 o’clock

[20] 8 o’clock

[21] 9 o’clock

[22] 9 o’clock

[23] 10 o’clock

[24] 10 o’clock

[25] 11 o’clock

[26] 12 o’clock

[27] This is also 12 o’clock. I forgot to tell you that rule, in the same way we forget to tell children that 12 is also zero on an analogue clock

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Cognitive load: a case study

Education and Stockholm Syndrome: the road to recovery

oldprimarytimer, , , , 9 Comments

In 1973, 4 bank employees in Stockholm were taken hostage and held by their captors for 6 days. Yet when they were released, not one of them would testify against their captors; on the contrary, they raised money for their defense.

In June of this year, at the Festival of Education, Amanda Spielman released the English educational establishment from its captivity to a narrowly data-driven paradigm of educational excellence. Yet so strongly has this paradigm held us in its grasp for so many years, it is hard to let it go.  More than that, it is difficult to appreciate quite how perniciously this paradigm has permeated into our psyches, so that we find it difficult to detect just how far its corrupting influence distorts what we do. We suffer from a data-induced myopia. There are a myriad of possibilities we cannot ‘see’ because our focus is firmly fixed elsewhere. Our sense of what ‘good’ looks like has been so warped, we flounder when challenged to concentrate ‘on the curriculum and the substance of education, not preparing your pupils to jump through a series of accountability hoops.’ Surely ‘good’ looks like good results? Take away this guiding light and we are all at sea. You mean, my good results aren’t enough anymore? You mean I can have good results and still be bad? Those wicked jailers have taken away our security blanket; no wonder we want it back!

The penny is slowly beginning to drop. Now we don’t know what ‘bad’ looks like. Before, as long as we cleared those hoops, we were ok. If we cleared them in spectacular style, we might even be double ok with a cherry on the top. But unless we did something really horrific like having out of date plasters or the wrong type of fencing, we could be pretty sure we weren’t actually bad, as long as our results held up. Until now.

Of course we’ve always said there’s too narrow a focus on data and there’s more to education than English and maths and what about the arts and personal development and so on and so forth.  But when our jailers not only agree with us but blow up the jail, without this familiar reference point we find it hard to negotiate the landscape.  We keep looking back to where the jail once was to orientate ourselves.

In May, a month before Amanda’s talk, we held a governor away day to think about our ‘vision’. It was a good day. We spent much more time looking at our values than our results and ended up with our vision statement, which at the time I was really please with. It went like this:

Our Vision 

‘Learning to live life in all its fullness’ 

  1. Maintain and improve pupil progress and achievement within a responsibly balanced budget.
  2. Reduce educational inequality through maximising progress for all.
  3. Encouraging personal development in line with the school’s values.
  4. Working in collaboration and not competition with local schools for the good of all our pupils: ‘all pupils are our pupils’.

But now, when I look through it with Spielman-spectacles, is see how prison bound it is.  3) and 4) are ok, it’s 1) and 2) I have the problem with. Let’s look at 1).   (Forget the bit about the budget, that’s just an acknowledgement of the challenge of maintaining provision in the face of a drastically reduced budget)

Maintain and improve pupil progress and achievement.

We all know what this is code for. What it really means is ‘get good Sats results’ in English and maths. Now I’m not saying that Amanda thinks for one moment that getting good results isn’t important, of course it is. But we’ve forgotten that these results are an imperfect proxy for being suitably literate and numerate rather than an end in themselves. This is compounded by 2)

Reduce educational inequality through maximising progress for all

This is code for ‘make sure pupil premium children get good results too.’

Which is a worthy aim, as far as it goes, but it’s all just a bit reductionist.   Amanda’s speech, on the other hand, shared a vision of education ‘broadening minds, enriching communities and advancing civilization.’ Now getting good Sats results will contribute to that to a certain degree; let’s not understate the case. Minds are not going to be broadened very much unless children can read and write well and are confident in their use of maths.  There are many things that might enrich a community and advance civilization, but most of them are greatly helped by agents who are literate and numerate.

It’s the fixation on measuring things (implicit here) that’s the problem. To an outsider, ‘progress’ and ‘achievement’ sound like perfectly good things to aim for. But we all know that progress ain’t progress as the lay person might understand it. It’s Progress™, something quantifiable, something on a spreadsheet, something with the illusion of tangibility.  Our vision statements may be vague and aspiration, but that’s ok because pretty soon they will be translated into smart targets with numbers and everything. But, as the saying goes, measure what you value because you will value what we measure.  Our jailers measured us relentlessly and soon we valued their measurements above all things. We may have denied this with our words but our actions spoke louder.

Of course we want to broaden minds, enrich communities and advance civilisation. That’s a dream job description!  But mark my words, before long someone will invent a ‘broadened mind’ rubric so we can report how many microGoves of Progress™ we have made in the mind broadening business.

Grade Descriptor
9 A superlatively broad mind. Sublime community enrichment. Establishment of heaven on earth.
8 An extremely broad mind. Excellent community enrichment. Rapid advancement of civilisation.
7 An impressively broad mind. Impressive community enrichment. Notable advancement of civilisation.
6 A broad mind. Community enriched. Civilisation advancing.
5 A mainly broad mind with occasional narrowness. Community showing fledgling signs of enrichment. Civilisation inching forwards.
4 Some narrowness with outbreaks of broadening. Community just about managing, civilisation in two minds whether to go forwards of backwards
3 Quite a narrow mind, community a bit impoverished, civilisation retreating slowly
2 A narrow mind, community impoverished, civilisation in retreat
1 A very narrow mind, community very impoverished, civilisation put to rout.

(With thanks to Alex Ford for the inspiration and this great blog, written about those who, like Hiroo Onoda, are behind with the news)

A few people have asking me recently about curriculum development and wanting to know more about our attempts to create a knowledge rich curriculum that builds cultural capital. A question that sometimes comes up is, ‘Why are you doing this? How is it contributing to rising standards?’ ‘Standards’ of course being another code word for ‘great Sats results in English and maths.  As if everything has to be justified – especially major initiatives – in terms of the payback in test results. Cos that’s what the prison guards used to fixate on, so that’s what we find it hard to think beyond.

But surely, I hear you saying, a broad, knowledge-rich curriculum will result in higher standards across the board. Why, I said this myself here.  I argued that because inference depends on broad general knowledge ‘cutting back on foundation subjects to improve reading is a false economy.’   This is true, of course, of improving reading in a qualitative sense. However, while knowledge is essential for the comprehending of reading, the kind of knowledge gaps that thwart children in the Sats Reading Comprehension™ tend to be about why cats appear well looked after because they have shiny coats – not the sort of stuff you study in history and geography or science for that matter. The idea that curriculum time and financial and human resources might be poured into something that might not make that much impact on our data, on Standards™,  is one that is going to take some time for schools to get their head around. It seems reckless, profligate when looked at from a prison perspective.

Although if we dare lift our eyes above the accountability horizon and contemplate the impact of a broad, knowledge-rich curriculum on the longer term achievement of our pupils at secondary school and beyond, we will see that we have given them the intellectual nourishment they need to thrive. We need to think hard about what words like ‘standards’ and ‘achievement’ and ‘progress’ might mean, when liberated from data-jail. Maybe it looks like broadening minds, enriching communities and advancing civilization?

Education and Stockholm Syndrome: the road to recovery

The highs and lows of knowledge organisers: an end of year report

oldprimarytimer, , , , 12 Comments

In January, after one term of us using knowledge organisers, I posted this blog about how our experiment with them was going. 6 months later, the academic year over, I thought it might be useful to share my reflections upon what we’ve learnt along the way.  Since January, the importance of schools taking a good, long look at the curriculum they offer has really come to the fore, thanks to those trend setters down at Ofsted Towers. Amanda Spielman’s talk at the Festival of Education underlined what Sean Harford has been talking (and tweeting) about all year – stop obsessing about data (sort of) and the inevitable narrow focus on English and maths that necessitates[1], the curriculum is where it is at these days guys. So there is a lot of waking up and smelling the coffee going on as we begin to realise just how iconoclastic this message really is.  The ramifications are huge and startling. It’s a bit like the emperor with no clothes suddenly berates us for our poor fashion sense. We feel indignant (the data nonsense was Ofsted driven after all), pleased (we always wanted a broader curriculum), terrified (are asking to have their cake and eat it – schools side-lined the rest of the curriculum for a reason and not on a whim – how possible is it to really go for quality in the other subjects when getting good sats /gcse results is still such a monumental struggle?) and woefully ill-prepared.

I’m going to focus on the ‘pleased’ bit. It’s not that I don’t share the indignation and the terror. The indignation we will just have to get over. A broader curriculum will only happen if Ofsted want a broader curriculum – such is the power they wield – so let’s try and move on from the exasperation we feel when the curriculum poachers turn curriculum gamekeepers. As for the terror, let’s keep on letting Amanda and Sean know why we are so scared. I wrote another blog a while back about the triple constraint – the idea (from engineering project management) that the three variables of time, cost and scope (a term which embraces both quality and performance specification) are constrained by one another.  If you wish to increase the scope of a project by wanting quality in a broader range of areas than previously, then that will inevitably either cost you more time or more money. Time in education is relatively inelastic.  We can’t just deliver the ‘project’ later.  We can’t say we will get high standards across all areas of the curriculum by doing our GCSE’s when the ‘children’ are 20 (though this school did try something along those lines. It didn’t end well.)  So that leaves spending more on our project as the only other option. Mmmm, few problems with that.

But I digress. Back to being pleased. I am really pleased. After all, we started on revamping our ‘afternoon’ subjects well before Ofsted started banging on about this. We did so not because of Ofsted but because a) developments from cognitive science make a very strong case for ensuring children are explicitly taught knowledge if they are to become critical thinkers and creative problem solvers and b) children are entitled to a knowledge-rich curriculum.  I have become convinced of the moral duty to provide our children with a curriculum that ensures that they get their fair share of the rich cultural inheritance our nation and our world affords, an inheritance hitherto seen as the birth right of the rich and not the poor.

By sharing our experience so far, I hope I can save other schools some time (that precious commodity) by helping them avoid making the mistakes we did when we rolled out knowledge organisers and multiple choice quizzes last September.

A quick recap about what we did. We focused on what I am going to call ‘the big four’ i.e. the 4 ‘foundation’[2] subjects: history, geography, RE and science.  In July 2016 I shared some knowledge organisers from other schools with the staff – almost all from secondary schools as I could only find one example from a primary school at that point. Staff then attempted to write their own for these 4 subjects for the coming academic year.  It seemed to me at the time that this would be a relatively straight forward thing to do. I was wrong but more of that later. Our afternoon curriculum had been timetables into 3 week blocks, with strict cut offs one the 3 weeks had elapsed. This worked extremely well. It tightened planning – much less faff – much more deciding up front what really mattered, hitting the ground running with specific coverage in mind. It gave an excitement to the learning. Neither the children nor the teacher got bored by a topic that drifted on and on, just because that half term was quite long. It also meant that subjects did not fall off the edge of the school year never taught because people had run out of time. I would highly recommend this way of structuring the delivery of most of the foundation subjects. Obviously it doesn’t work for PE (though a good case can be made for doing it in swimming), MFL or PHSE, which need to be done at least weekly, but that still leaves at least 3 afternoons for the other stuff.

The weekend before each block started, the children took home the knowledge organiser for the new block.  The idea being that they read the KO, with their parents help where necessary. Then on Monday, the teacher started to teach them the content, some of which some of them would have already read about at the weekend. The next weekend, the KO’s went home again, along with a multiple choice quiz based on it, the answers to which were all (in theory) in the KO. These didn’t have to be given in and the scores were not recorded, although in some classes children stuck the KO and each quiz in a homework book.  The same procedure was repeated on the second weekend of the block. Then on the final Friday of each block, a multiple choice quiz was done and marked in class. The teacher took notice of the scores but we didn’t track them on anything. This is something we are changing this September with a very simple excel spreadsheet to record just the final end of unit quiz score.

Since we didn’t have KO’s for computing, art or DT, I suggested that during these curriculum blocks, children should take home the KO from a previous block and revise that and then do a quiz on it at the end of the art (or whatever) block. The ideas being that by retrieving the knowledge at some distance from when it was originally taught, the testing effect would result in better long term recall.  However, as it was a suggestion and I didn’t really explain about the testing effect and teachers are busy and the curriculum over full, it just didn’t happen. From this September, I’ve explicitly specified what needs to be revisited when in our curriculum map. Towards the end of last year, I also gave over some staff meeting and SMT time to studying cognitive psychology and this will continue next term with the revamp of our teaching and learning policy which is being rewritten with the best insights from cognitive science explicitly in mind.

Then, in the dying days of term, in mid July, the children took an end of year quiz in each of the 4 subjects which mixed up questions from all the topics they had studied that year. In the two weeks prior to this, children had revised from a mega KO, in effect a compilation of all previous KO’s and quizzes that year. They had revised this in lessons (particularly helpful at the end of term when normal service in interrupted by special events, hand over meetings and so forth) and at the weekend for homework. It hadn’t really been my intention to do this at the start of the year, but I confess to being a bit spooked by Ofsted reports that had (the lack of) assessment in the foundation subjects down as a key issue, something I wrote about here.  But having done so, I think it is a good idea. For one, it gives the children another chance to revisit stuff they’ve learnt several months previously, so improving the likelihood that they will be able to recall this information in the longer term.  Secondly, it gives these subjects status. We did the tests after our reports were written and parents meetings held. Next year I want to get the end of year scores (just a simple mark out of 10 or 15) on reports and shared with parents.  The results from the end of year tests were interesting. In the main, almost all children did very well. Here are the results, expressed as average class percentages. I’m not going to tell you which year group is which as my teachers might rightly feel a bit perturbed about this, so I’ve mixed up the order here, but it represents year groups 2-6.

History RE Science Geography
86% 93% 85% 84%
79% 85% 91% 82%
83% 95% 87% n/a
75% 75% 67% 74%
70% 76% 66% n/a

One class was still studying their geography block when we took the tests and another did Ancient Egypt as mixed geography/history block, geography coming off somewhat the worse in this partnership, something I may not have noticed without this analysis, and which we are now changing for next year.

From this I notice that we seem to be doing something right in RE and that by contrast, science isn’t as strong.  The tests threw up some common errors; for example, children confusing evaporation and condensation, something we can make sure we work on. Looking at the class with the lowest results, it is striking that the average is depressed by a few children scoring really badly (4 out of 10, 5 out of 15) but these are not the children with SEN but generally children with whom we already have concerns about their attitude to learning.  All the more reason to share these results with their parents.

Even so, the lowest score here is 66%, and that is without doing any recap once the block has finished until the very end of the year, something we will do next year.  I don’t have anything to compare these results with but my gut instinct is that in previous years, children would be hard pressed to remember 2/3’s of what they had learnt that year, let alone remembering 95% of it. As Kirschner and co remind us, if nothing has  been changed in the long term memory, nothing has been learned.[3] Or as Joe Kirby puts it ‘learning is remembering in disguise.’  So next year, I’d like us to aim for average around the 90% mark – mainly achieved by going back over tricky or easily confused content and by keeping a close eye on the usual suspects. Are they actually doing their revision at home?

So, after that lengthy preamble, what are the main pitfalls when using KO’s and MCQ’s for the first time.

  1. Deciding which knowledge makes it onto a KO is hard, particularly in history and sometimes RE. One teacher did a KO on Buddhism that had enough information for a degree! In general, the less you know about something, the harder it is to make judicious choices because you simply do not know what is and isn’t really important. In science it is pretty easy, go to BBC bitesize for the relevant topic and use that. For history you actually have to decide how to cut a vast topic down to size. Who will do this deciding? The class teacher, the subject co-ordinator, the SLT or the head teacher? For what it’s worth I’d start with the class teacher so they own the learning, but make sure that is scrutinised by someone else, someone who understands what is at stake here[4]. Quite a few primary schools have developed KO’s this year, so look at these and adapt from there, rather than starting from scratch. I’m going to put ours on @Mr_P_Hillips one  https://padlet.com/jack_helen12/czfxn9ft6n8o once I’ve removed any copyright infringing images. It’s one thing using these images on something just used in one school, quite another putting these up on the web. There are some up already by other people, so do take a look. I definitely think this hive-mind approach ton developing KO’s at primary level is the way ahead.  We are unlikely to have subject specialists for all the subjects in the curriculum in our individual schools, let alone ones who are up to date with the latest debates about makes for a good curriculum. However, by combining forces across the edu-twittersphere, I’m sure we can learn from each other, refining each other’s early attempts until we get something we know is really good. We’ve revised ours twice this year, once in January after a term of writing ones that were too long and then again in July with the benefit of hindsight
  2. Seems obvious but…if you are using quizzes, make sure the answers are in the KO! Someone – a secondary school teacher I think – tweeted a while back that KO’s are only KO’s if they can help children self-quiz. I think he was alluding to the grid sort of KO that looks like this (here’s an extract)
When did the ancient Greeks live? about 3,000 years ago
When was Greek civilisation was most powerful Between 800 BC and 146 BC.
Ancient Greece was not a single country but was made up of many city states
Some examples of city states are Athens, Spartan and Corinth
City states used to fight each other a lot. But if enemies not from Greece attacked they all joined together to fight back
The first city states started About 800 BC
All Greeks Spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods.
Ancient Greece is sometimes called the ‘cradle of Western civilisation’
Cradle of Western civilisation means The place where European culture all started
The climate in Greece is Warm and dry
In ancient Greece most people earned their living by Farming, fishing and trade
The two most powerful city states were Athens and Sparta

 

As opposed to the same information presented as continuous prose like this.

The ancient Greeks lived about 3,000 years ago

Greek civilisation was most powerful between 800 BC and 146 BC.

Ancient Greece was not a single country but was made up of many city states such as Athens, Spartan and Corinth; but all Greeks spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods.

City states used to fight each other a lot. But if enemies who were not from Greece attacked, they all joined together to fight back.

Ancient Greece has been called ‘the cradle of Western civilisation’ because writing, art, science, politics, philosophy and architecture in Europe all developed from Greek culture.

Ancient Greece had a warm, dry climate, as Greece does today. Most people lived by farming, fishing and trade

The idea with the grid being that children cover one half and write the answers (or questions) as a way of revising.  I get this for secondary children but it doesn’t seem suitable for primary aged children – especially the younger ones. The grid is just too forbidding to read. And we don’t expect them to write out answers for homework to check themselves. Again for younger children that would turn it into such as chore rather something we have found our children actually like doing.  Maybe we might develop a grid alongside the continuous prose? (I did both for Ancient Greece to see which worked better, but went for the prose version in the end).  Maybe for years 5 and 6 only?

When we audited the KO’s against the quizzes we found that the quizzes sometimes asked questions that weren’t on the KO! We spend a couple of staff meetings putting that right so I think that’s all sorted now, but if you spot any omissions when I finally do post our KO’s and quizzes, do let me know. Keep thinking hive mind.

  1. If you think KO’s are hard to write, wait until you try to write quizzes! The key to a good mcq is that the other answers – the distractors as they are known in the trade, are suitably plausible. Maybe some of our high scores were down to implausible distractors? However a really good distractor can help you spot misconceptions so are really useful formatively.

Polar explores (year 4,  joint history/geography topic)

Question Answer A Answer B Answer C
Which one of these is NOT a continent? North America Europe Russia
Which on of these is NOT  a country? Argentina Africa Hungary
Pemmican is… an animal that lives in water and has wings. high energy food made of meat and fat. high energy food made out of fish and protein.
Great Britain is surrounded by water so it is an.. island Ireland continent
If you travel north east from the U.K you will reach… Norway Belgium Austria
Shackleton’s ship was called… The Antarctica The Elephant The Endurance
When did Henson and Peary make a mad dash for the North Pole? 1909 1609 1979

 

I think this example has good distractors. I particularly like the way the common misconception that Africa is a country is addressed. With the dates, you may argue that children are using deduction rather than recall. I don’t think at this point that is a problem. Besides the fact that by having to think about the question their recall will have been strengthened anyway, we all know hard it is for children to develop a sense of time. 2009 was the year many of year 4 were born so if they think that happened a mere 40 years before they were born – when possibly their teacher was already alive, then we know their sense of chronology is still way out. But I would hope that most children would automatically dismiss this date and then be faced with a choice between 1609 and 1909. Some will just remember 1909 of course. But others might reason that since that 1609 is a really long time ago before the Fire of London whereas 1909 is only just over 100 years ago and appreciate that while the story is set in the past, it’s not that long ago and the technology needed to make the voyage far outstripped that around even in 1666. On the other hand, if the can reason that well about history they probably already know it was 1909! When at primary level we try to get children to remember dates, it is in order to build up their internal time line and relate events relative to one another. By the time children study this in year 4, they have previously learnt about the Magna Carta, Fire of London, the Crimean War and World War 1 (yr 2 ‘nurses’ topic on Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole and Edith Cavell), the Stone Age, The Iron Age, Ancient Egypt, the Romans, the Anglo Saxons and the Vikings as well as knowing that Jesus was born 2017 years ago (and hopefully beginning to understand BC and why the numbers go backwards). I would hope they would be able to group these into a sequence that was roughly accurate – that’s something else we should develop some assessments for. Elizabeth Carr and Christine Counsell explored this with ks3 children; I’m going to adapt it for ks2 next year.

  1. I had hoped to bring all the KO’s and quizzes together into a nicely printed and bound book ready for revision before the final end of year assessments. In fact, ideally this booklet would be ready at the start of next year, so that children could revise from it at spare moments –not only at home and during specific revision lessons, but also when they had a supply teacher for example (for part of the day) , or in those odd 20 minute slots you sometimes get after a workshop has finished or before it starts. I wanted it to be properly printed and spiral bound to look ‘posh’ and look important. However, I really underestimated how much paper all this generates. There was I worrying we weren’t covering enough content – when we gathered it all together it took up 36.4MB. The price for getting a hard copy printed for each child (for their year group only) came to over £1500 – well beyond our budget. So a member of the admin team spent a whole day photocopying everything. By copying stuff back to back we were able to make it slim enough for the photocopier to staple. These were then put into those A4 see-through plastic pouches – we call them ‘slippery fish’ at our school.  They didn’t have anywhere near the gravitas that I’d hoped for – stapled at one corner only with pages inevitably tearing off. The teachers didn’t let them home until the final weekend because they were scared they would get lost. So much for the lovely idea that we would present leavers with a bound copy of all the KO’s and quizzes they had since year 2. So unless you have a friendly parent in the printing business or can get someone to sponsor you – be prepared for a low tech, photocopier intensive solution. In hindsight if every class had had a homework book the KO’s and quizzes went into as we went along, that would have been problem solved.

So there we have it. The top tip is to learn from what is already out there, adapting and honing what others have already done. Then please share back.

[1] I’m talking from a primary perspective here. The message to secondary schools being similar, but more along the lines of ‘forget your PiXL box of magic tricks and start making sure your kids are really learning important stuff.’

[2] Yes, I know, officially RE and science are ‘core’ subjects. They are not really though, in practice, are they. That’s partly what Amanda and Sean are getting at

[3] Kirschner A., Sweller J. and Clark E., 2006. Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching, Educational Psychologist, 41(2), p77

[4] I had intended to write about what is at stake in this blog but its long enough already. Another time, maybe. I do talk about the issues in my intial blog on KO’s mentioned at the start though, if you are looking for help .

The highs and lows of knowledge organisers: an end of year report

Infernal Inference

oldprimarytimer, , , , 9 Comments

I’ve always found it much harder to teach how to infer meaning than how to decode. With decoding there’s a clear routemap. With some children, it takes a bit longer to travel that route, but if you stick to the path, in the end you will get there.[1]  But with inference…some children just get it and some really, really don’t.  And when they don’t, it’s really hard to move them on. You show them some text, you point out what you can infer from what you’ve read, they nod (on a good day) but when you ask them to have a go, they are just as clueless. It doesn’t seem to stick. Why is this?

Daniel Willingham, the cognitive scientist explains why. It seems that inference as a skill doesn’t really exist.  No wonder it’s so hard to teach! It’s a bit of a shame then that in the KS reading SATS paper between 16%-50% of the marks are allowed to come from ‘explaining and justifying inferences with evidence from the text.’   In 2016, 36% of the total marks came from questions that involved inference (18 marks out of 50).  I’m not alone in finding inference an area where children struggle.  Nationally, if we just consider the marks available for inference, the average score was just under 9 marks, or 49%.  So this year, alongside vocabulary, across the nation, improving the ability to infer has become the thing we are all working on.

What does Willingham actually mean then, and how might it help us?  In a previous blogpost I quoted Daniel Willingham on this in some detail. The quotes really stayed with me and I’ve been reflecting on them ever since,  and reading more of his writing, so although this post is covering similar ground, I hope it is still useful. Or interesting. Both would be great! So to recap, Willingham explains that inference is more of a trick than a skill. With a trick, once you know it, you won’t get any better by practising it over and over again. Skills on the other hand, improve with practice.

Willingham says that when we teach inference what we are really doing is teaching children to connect ideas, filling in the missing bits the author has left out.  That’s more or less it all there is to it as a technique; connect one idea, one sentence possibly, with another, by filling in the bits the author has left out. Authors always leave bits out; they don’t explain every last detail in the same way that when we speak, we make certain assumptions about the person listening, assuming they already know stuff and so can join the dots. The difficulty with this when it comes to reading rather than talking, is that when we talk to someone, we monitor if they are understanding us. We will look at the person we are speaking to from time to time to check for signs that they understand.   The person listening will give us some useful feedback, maybe nodding or saying ‘mhm’ or ‘uh-huh’; what linguists call giving ‘acceptance signals’ to show they get it.  If we have assumed too much and the listener doesn’t understand, they will send us a signal by saying something like ‘huh?’ or by looking baffled. This is our cue to provide more detail.  The thing about books is that they just don’t care if we ‘get’ what they are saying or not. They don’t monitor our acceptance signals, even though we might nod along as we read a recipe or set of instructions and they certainly don’t rephrase what they are saying if we exclaim ‘huh?’

Trick number one: notice if you understand what you are reading

So then, the first thing we need to teach children about inference is their own crucial role in checking they are understanding what the text is saying as they read.  The book isn’t going to stop and repeat itself or explain in more detail if they don’t understand.  Successful readers expect to understand what they read and know what to do when they spot themselves not understanding. We need to explicitly teach children to check that what they are reading makes sense to them; to nod along as they read in the same way we nod along when someone is talking to us. If something doesn’t make sense they should say ‘huh?’ to themselves and stop and reread the last sentence or two more slowly, to see if that helps. If someone was speaking, we’d ask them to repeat what they had said. Unfortunately, a book can’t rephrase was is written, but if we reread, we might find the bit that is tricky and then be able to make more sense of it.

This ‘expecting a text to make sense’ business seems obvious, but have you ever come across kids for whom being asked to read seems to be like pure torture, who stare grimly at the page when forced, avoiding engaging with the actual words, seeking any and every opportunity to be distracted?  Children who hate reading, even if they appear perfectly able to decode. It may well be that they don’t really get that it is meant to be an enjoyable experience.  I suspect that when children make the transition from reading out loud to an adult to being expected to read ‘for pleasure’ in their heads, a certain percentage just don’t realise that successful reading requires two things. Not only do you have to read the actual words but you also have to check that these strings of words make sense to you. And if they don’t, the reader has a responsibility to stop, go back and reread to try and fathom out what the writer is trying to say. Sometimes this will mean going back two or three sentences, maybe more than once.  Sometimes we might need to reread a whole paragraph again.  If children have never seen this modelled by a teacher, then how would they know that this is what they should also be doing?  Teachers need to use ‘thinking out loud’ to show how they check for meaning as they read. They need to model stumbling over phrasing or meaning and then stopping and rereading, to clarify the sense.  Children need to understand that this is a normal part of being a reader – something expert readers do all the time.

Trick number two: fill in the gaps by connecting ideas

The second thing we need to teach children about inference is that because writers leave bits out, they expect readers to join the dots and connect ideas for themselves. It would be beyond tedious if writers explained everything in minute detail.  We are so used to this as expert readers that we don’t even notice the gaps; that the sentences are connected is obvious to us.   Willingham illustrates this with this trio of sentences.  Bill came to my house yesterday. He dropped a cup of coffee. My rug is a mess.  The first connection the reader needs to make is one of coherence inference; the reader needs to connect ‘he’ with Bill.   Then there is elaborative inference; the reader is expected to draw on their life experience and general knowledge to connect the three sentences together.   In this case, the reader is expected to make the connection that the cup of coffee that Bill dropped is the cause of the mess on the rug even thought this is not stated. It is also assumed that the reader knows that coffee is dark liquid likely to stain a rug and that such stains are not usually desirable. The reader will need to access their long term memory and retrieve information about coffee, rugs, stains and mess; not just what these things are, though that too is important, but how they inter-relate. The writer is assuming the reader can make the following connections: dropping a cup of coffee would cause this dark brown liquid to escape onto the floor. Sometimes floors are covered with rugs. If the coffee fell onto the rug, its colour would remain – stain the rug – even after the rug had been cleaned. People usually clean up after spillages so when the person says that the rug is a mess, they are most likely referring to the stain as being ‘the mess’ rather than the cup and coffee themselves as it is probable that they have already tidied up the mess caused by the cup and liquid. This is because Bill came yesterday. That means the writer is writing about something that happened a day ago. People do not usually leave a mess like that for a whole day, they usually clean it up straight away. This is so obvious to us we don’t even notice we are making these connections and are baffled when children fail to make them.

Teachers need to help children understand how to do this by ‘thinking out loud’ as they read aloud to pupils, by asking themselves questions to show how they are monitoring their own understanding and seeking to make connections between different elements of the text, thus making explicit the thought processes involved in making inferences.

Global inference

The situation can be even more complicated with good stories.  Sometimes the writer will deliberately leave loads of information out.  In fact, it’s the leaving out of key bits of information that makes them so good. For example, let’s look at the beginning of the book The Imaginary by A.F Harrold and add in the extra information the writer assumes the reader already knows.

 Amanda was dead.

 Being dead is a bad thing. When you are dead you don’t exist anymore and people who like you are usually very sad about that. Most people don’t want to be dead and don’t want their friends or family to be dead either. Most people don’t even like it if strangers are dead. Amanda is a girl’s name so the dead person is female.  I have used the past continuous (was dead)  so that you realise the death has occurred quite recently. I’ve written this as a short, stark sentence to help you appreciate the shock value of this sentence to the other characters, who you haven’t met yet. I’m hoping it will shock you too.  I deliberately haven’t told you if this sentence is the narrator explaining or a character thinking. You will have to read more to find that out.

The words were like a hole in his chest, like a well he was falling down.

 By ‘The words’ I mean the previous phrase ‘Amanda was dead’.  The person indicated by the use of the male pronoun ‘he’ is very upset by these words. I have given you two word-pictures to help you understand just how upset he is. When I wrote ‘like a hole is his chest’ I didn’t mean there actually was a real hole in his chest, I was using figurative language to show that it felt really bad emotionally, in the same way that a hole in the chest would feel really bad physically. In a similar way, there is no actual well and ‘he’ is not actually falling. Again, this is a word picture to try and describe the emotional turmoil the male is undergoing as a result of hearing about the female Amanda’s death. Although strangers usually feel a bit sad when hearing about someone’s death, the figurative language shows that the sadness is very strong. Therefore, there must have been a strong emotional attachment of some sort between Amanda and ‘he’. Finding out about this attachment and why she is dead is going to be explained to you in the rest of this story. You can also expect to find out how ‘he’ gets over his strong feelings. This is a children’s story. Probably it will end happily. Don’t worry that you do not yet know who ‘he’ is; I will explain that to you at some point. Not telling you is a way of making you want to read on, to find out that information.

Writers – thank God – leave stuff out and expect us to fill in the gaps. Children need to understand this. So when they don’t understand, they know they need ask themselves what is it that the writer is assuming that I know that I don’t.  Or maybe the writer is just playing with me…

The joy of inference

If children are going to learn to love stories, they need to understand that the author sometimes deliberately leaves out information and it is the trying to work out what has been left out that creates the frisson, the excitement that makes reading stories pleasurable.  Why is Amanda dead? Who is this male protagonist? What will he do next? Will he ever recover? From the first two lines, the deliberate ambiguity makes us want to resolve our ignorance and read on.  So readers need to appreciate that sometimes the author is teasing us, dropping hints and clues but never quite enough information because it’s the not-knowing that makes reading fun.  That’s why some books are described as real page turners.  Readers have different tolerances for this not-knowing. A whodunit is all about the journey from not knowing to knowing, some poetry can remain elusively ambiguous even after several readings.  Some readers like this; others really don’t. The satisfying closure of an unambiguous – if unexpected ending – is what for many readers makes a great read.

Global inference is the kind of inference needed to make connections and predictions across whole texts. For this to happen, children need to learn about text conventions. For example, to return to The Imaginary, the fact that the author does not tell us immediately about why Amanda is dead or what her connection to ‘he’ is  is  confusing, but it is a deliberately planned confusion, to make us want to read more to resolve the tension of not knowing.  As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, the six signposts in Notice and Note are great ways of teaching children to look out for subtle hints from the author about the way a story is going to go. When Willingham talks about inference, he is not really talking about this kind of global, whole text inference.  This involves learning about how authors craft character, use conflict to drive plot and flesh out themes and use foreshadowing to hint at later developments. These do need to be taught and deserve quality curriculum time devoted to them. These are not what his research was looking at. Indeed, his point is, if we spend too much time teaching about basic inference, we won’t have time to do the important stuff. Such as…

Developing Vocabulary

It is hard to make connections if you don’t know what some of the words mean, so teachers need to develop children’s vocabularies.    I’ve written before about ways of doing this so I won’t repeat that here, beyond mentioning that if you haven’t yet read Isabel Beck’s Bringing Words to Life then you are missing a trick. To state the obvious, children need to encounter lots of unfamiliar words in meaningful contexts, especially the kinds of words that occur more frequently in books than in the spoken word.  Children need to be read to a lot and to read to themselves a lot and to enjoy reading so much that they want to do more and more of it.

The inference problem is really a knowledge problem

Willingham wants teachers to know about the research on inference.   This says that while teaching children how to infer is quite important, there is little benefit to be had in teaching this for more than a few lessons because the techniques of monitoring ones understanding and then trying to make connections are easily learnt within a few hours of instruction. No additional benefit is gained by spending any more time on mastering these techniques beyond this.  To which most teachers I know would respond ‘easily learnt my ****!’   as inference does not seem to come easily.  But the meta-analysis is clear; once you know to monitor your understanding and to make connections and have spent a few hours working on that, further practice does not make you any better and is time wasted.  That’s because once you know these tricks, what will get in the way of understanding texts is gaps in your life experience, general knowledge and vocabulary. You will realise you don’t understand something and try and make the necessary connections, but still fail because you don’t have the knowledge to know how the things you are trying to connect actually relate.  Now the very same teachers nod in agreement; it’s not that children don’t know they should try and make connections; they just don’t know what the connection is on this occasion. Or the next. Or the one after that.

I’ve used this example before; it’s from an old reading sats paper.

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

The children I was teaching didn’t know the meaning of the words ‘frustration; ‘paw, ‘reared up’ or ‘hind’.    They found the term ‘empty air’ confusing.  They were meant to be inferring why the bear ‘reared up.’  We didn’t get very far.  It was not the most successful lesson I’ve ever taught.  All the teaching in the world about monitoring your understanding and trying to connect ideas won’t help when so many words are unknown.  So instead of spending too much time on teaching children how to infer – Willingham says about 10 hours is enough – ‘acquiring a broad vocabulary and a rich base of background knowledge will yield more substantial and longer-term benefits.’  As children need to be fluent decoders before teaching the tricks of inference is really pertinent, Willingham concedes that since children develop at different rates, a little bit of inference and other reading comprehension teaching in the fourth, fifth and sixth grade (years 5, 6 and 7 in the UK system) is a sensible use of time, but beyond that, it is time wasted.

It is interesting that the recent Education Endowment Foundation Guidance Report on improving literacy at key stage 2 hardly mentions developing this ‘rich base of background’ knowledge at all, beyond including Scarborough’s Reading Rope, where background knowledge is the first strand mentioned (not because it is top priority, I think the layout of the strands within the ‘language comprehension aspect is fairly arbitrary and it is just chance that background knowledge was placed on top).

rope of reading

The report says that the Reading Rope model can be used as a diagnostic tool to identify areas to focus on. What Willingham is cautioning us against is over-diagnosing problems with inference at the expense of the real culprits; lack of background knowledge and under-developed vocabulary.  In the report’s section on teaching comprehension strategies, it suggests it is useful to ‘activate prior knowledge.’  But the crucial point missed here is that for many of our pupils who struggle to understand texts, they don’t have this ‘prior knowledge’ to activate in the first place! In fact, the same section recommends ‘extensive practice’ of exactly the sort of specific strategies that Willingham warns should only be used for short periods of time, as further practice once the strategy is learnt is fruitless.

This is very scary for primary headteachers and ks2 teachers who are held accountable via a reading comprehension text, for it is saying that what we are mainly being tested on is our students’ vocabulary and background knowledge.   But since we never know in advance which knowledge and vocabulary our pupils will be tested on – white giraffes, warthogs and dodos last year, who knows what in a week’s time[2] – how can we make sure they know enough to do well?

This is where we need to take deep breaths and be brave. We are here to teach children to be good readers for the rest of their lives, not to teach children to appear to be good readers one Monday in May.  Sure, we’d be foolish not to spend a fair bit of time in the immediate run up to the tests practising test technique.[3] But we can’t let the stupidity that is the reading comprehension test warp the whole of the way we teach reading in ks2.

If having rich background knowledge is key to becoming a successful reader, then accumulating that knowledge needs to start as early as possible.  We need more non-fiction reading aloud to children in the early years and key stage1, alongside fabulous stories. The emphasis on spoken language in the early years is crucial, but we must remember to give them interesting, memorable stuff to talk about; not just great stories.  The ‘understanding the world’ strand should be the driving force underpinning the early years’ curriculum.  Practitioners should know what vocabulary and general knowledge children will have acquired as a result of their topic on ‘pirates’, for example.  Particularly in a context where children are disadvantaged and may have limited life experienced, we need to expand children’s horizons in all year groups, taking them on trips, bringing visitors into school and fully appreciating just how urgently our children need to acquire the kind of general knowledge middle class children are routinely exposed to at home. We need to understand that the humanities and science lessons are the main places where children will gain this knowledge and make sure our curriculum and pedagogy ensure that knowledge is imparted and retained.  Those children should have known what a paw was and what hind leg means. Cutting back on foundation subjects to improve reading is a false economy.

We should  also devote prime curriculum time to reading amazing books to children, expanding their vocabularies and doing all we can to get them to want to read for themselves. We need great libraries, teachers who are knowledgeable about children’s literature and who can help every child find the book that they will fall in love with; time in the curriculum for both reading to children and for children to read to themselves. And we need lots and lots of books.

 

 

[1] In 99.9% of the time. I’ll concede that for maybe 0.1% of children you eventually need to try another approach. Stressing eventually here.

[2] I’m writing this the week before the 2017 key stage 2 reading sats test. Indeed, this time in a week, the completed tests will be safely in their grey plastic bag, awaiting collection. *gulp*

[3] I saw a hilarious lesson last week where the teacher told them that the reason instructions to ‘tick ONE box’  were written in bold was because the markers were fed up with children sometimes ticking two, so the bold was the marker shouting at us to make us remember.

Infernal Inference

Test to the Teach

oldprimarytimer, , , , , , , 11 Comments

making-good-progressWhen Daisy Christodoulou told us not to teach to the test, I assumed she was mainly concerned with teachers spending too much lesson time making sure children understood the intricacies of the mark scheme at the expense of the intricacies of the subject. Personally, I’ve never spent that much time on the intricacies of any mark scheme. I’ve been far too busy making sure children grasp the rudimentary basics of how tests work to have time spare for anything intricate.   For example, how important it is to actually read the question.  I spend whole lessons stressing ‘if the question says underline two words that mean the same as …., that means you underline TWO words. Not one word, not three words, not two phrases. TWO WORDS.    Or if the questions says ‘tick the best answer’ then,  and yes, I know this is tricky, the marker is looking to see if you can select the BEST answer from a selection which will have been deliberately chosen to include a couple that are half right. BUT NOT THE BEST. (I need to lie down in a darkened room just thinking about it).

But this is not Christodoulou’s primary concern.

Christodoulou’s primary concern is that the way we test warps how we teach. While she is well aware that the English education system’s mania for holding us accountable distorts past and present assessment systems into uselessness, her over-riding concern is one of teaching methodology.  She contrasts the direct teaching of generic skills (such as using inference for example) with a methodology that believes such skills are better taught indirectly through teaching a range of more basic constituent things first, and getting those solid.  This approach, she argues, creates the fertile soil in which  inferring (or problem solving or  communicating or critical thinking or whatever) can thrive. It is a sort of ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’ or (to vary the metaphor) a ‘rising tide raises all boats’ methodology. Let me try to explain…

I did not come easily to driving. Even steering – surely the easiest part of the business – came to me slowly, after much deliberate practice in ‘not hitting anything.’ If my instructor had been in the business of sharing learning objectives she would surely have told me that ‘today we are learning to not hit anything.’

Luckily for the other inhabitants of Hackney, she scaffolded my learning by only letting me behind the wheel once we were safely on the deserted network of roads down by the old peanut factory. The car was also dual control, so she pretty much covered the whole gears and clutch business whilst I concentrated hard on not hitting anything.  Occasionally she would lean across and yank the steering wheel too.  However, thanks to her formative feedback (screams, yanks, the occasional extempore prayer), I eventually mastered both gears and not-hitting-anything.  Only at that point did we actually go on any big roads or ‘ to play with the traffic’ as she put it.  My instructor did not believe that the best way to get me to improve my driving was by driving. Daisy Christodoulou would approve.

Actually there was this book we were meant to complete at the end of each lesson. Michelle (my instructor) mostly ignored this, but occasionally she would write something – maybe the British School of Motoring does book looks –  such as ‘improve clutch control,’ knowing full well the futility of this –  if I  actually knew how to control a clutch I bloody well would. She assessed that what I needed was lots and lots of safe practice of clutch control with nothing else to focus on. So most lessons (early on anyway) were spent well away from other traffic, trying to change gears without stalling, jumping or screeching, with in-the-moment verbal feedback guiding me. And slowly I got better. If Michelle had had to account for my progress towards passing my driving test, she would have been in trouble. Whole areas  of the curriculum such as overtaking, turning right at a junction and keeping the correct distance between vehicles were not even attempted until after many months of lessons had taken place. Since we did not do (until right near the very end) mock versions of the driving test, she was not able to show her managers a nice linear graph showing what percentage of the test I had, and had not yet mastered.  I would not have been ‘on track’. Did Michelle adapt my learning to fit in with these assessments?  Of course not!  She stuck with clutch control until I’d really got it and left ‘real driving’ to the future- even though this made it look like I was (literally) going nowhere, fast.  Instead Michelle just kept on making sure I mastered all the basics and gradually added in other elements as she thought I was ready for them.  In the end, with the exception of parallel parking, I could do everything just about well enough. I passed on my third occasion.

I hope this extended metaphor helps explain Christodoulou’s critique of teaching and assessment practices in England today. Christodoulou’s book ‘Making Good Progress?’ explores why it is that the assessment revolution failed to transform English education. After all, the approach was rooted in solid research and was embraced by both government and the profession. What could possibly go wrong?

One thing that went wrong, explains Christodoulou, is that instead of  teachers ‘using evidence of student learning to adapt…teaching…to meet student needs’[1], teachers adapted their teaching to meet the needs of their (summative) assessments. Instead of assessment for learning we got learning for assessment.

Obviously assessments don’t actually have needs themselves. But the consumers of assessment – and I use the word advisedly –  do.  There exist among us voracious and insatiable accountability monsters, who need feeding at regular intervals with copious bucketfuls of freshly churned data.  Imagine the British School of Motoring held pupil progress meetings with their instructors. Michelle might have felt vulnerable that her pupil was stuck at such an early stage and have looked at the driving curriculum and seen if there were some quick wins she could get ticked off before the next data drop.  Preferably anything that doesn’t require you to drive smoothly in a straight line…signalling for example.

But this wasn’t even the main thing that went wrong. Or rather, something was already wrong, that no amount of AfL could put right. We were trying to teach skills like inference directly, when, in fact, these, so Christodoulou argues, are best learnt more indirectly by learning other things first. Instead of learning to read books by reading books, one should start with  technical details like phonics. Instead of starting with maths problem solving, one should learn some basic number facts. Christodoulou describes how what is deliberately practised – the technical detail –  may look very different from the final skill in its full glory. Phonics practice isn’t the same as reading a book.  Learning dates off by heart is not the same as writing a history essay.  Yet the former is necessary, if not sufficient basis for the latter. To use my driving metaphor, practising an emergency stop on a deserted road at 10mph when you know it’s coming is very, very different from actually having to screech to a stop from 40mph on a rainy day in real life, when a child runs out across the road. Yet the former helped you negotiate the latter.

The driving test has two main parts; technical control of the vehicle and behaviour in traffic (a.k.a. playing with the traffic). It is abundantly clear that to play with the traffic safely, the learner must have mastered a certain amount of technical control of the vehicle first. Imagine Michelle had adopted the generic  driving skill approach and assumed  these technical matters could be picked up en route, in the course of generally driving about,  and assumed that I could negotiate left and right turns at the same time as maintaining control of the vehicle. When I repeatedly stall, because the concentration it take to both brake and steer distracts me from concentrating on changing gears to match this slower speed, Michelle tells me that I did not change down quickly enough, which I find incredibly frustrating because I know I’ve got a gears problems, and it is my gears problem I need help with. But what I don’t get with the generic skill approach is time to practice changing gears up and down as a discrete skill. That would be frowned on as being ‘decontextualised’. I might protest that I’d feel a lot safer doing a bit of decontextualized practice right now – but drill and practice  is frowned upon – isn’t real driving after all – and in the actual test I am going to have to change gears and steer and brake all at the same time (and not hit anything) so better get used to it now.

Christodoulou argues that the direct teaching of generic skills  leads to the kind of assessment practice that puts the cart, if not before the horse, then parallel with it. Under this approach, if you want the final fruit of a course of study to be an essay on the causes of the First World War, the route map to this end point will punctuated with ‘mini-me’ variations of this final goal; shorter versions of the essay perhaps. These shorter versions are then used by the teacher formatively, to give the learner feedback about the relative strengths and weaknesses of these preliminary attempts. All the learner then has to do, in theory, is marshal all this feedback together, address any shortcomings whilst retaining, and possibly augmenting, any strengths. However, this often leaves the learner none the wiser about precisely how to address their shortcomings.  Advice to ‘be more systematic’ is only useful if you understand what being systematic means in practice, and if you already know that, you probably would have done so in the first place.[2]

It is the assessment of progress through  interim assessments that strongly resemble the final exam that Christodoulou means by teaching to the test.  Not because students shouldn’t know what  format an exam is going to take and have a bit of practice on it towards the very end of  a course of study.  That’s not teaching to the test. Teaching to the test is working backwards from the final exam and then writing a curriculum punctuated by  slightly reduced versions of that exam – and then teaching each set of lessons with the next test in mind.   The teaching is shaped by the approaching test.  This is learning for assessment.  By contrast Christodoulou argues that we should just concentrate on teaching the  curriculum and that there may be a whole range of other activities to assess how this learning is going that may look nothing like the final learning outcome. These, she contends, are much better suited to helping the learner actually improve their performance. For example, the teacher might teach the students what the key events were in the build up to the first World War, and then, by way of assessment, ask students to put these in correct chronological order on a time line.  Feedback from this sort of assessment is very clear –if events are in the wrong order, the student needs to learn them in the correct order.  The teacher teaches some  small component that will form part of the final whole, and tests that discrete part. Testing to the teach, in other words, as opposed to teaching to the test.

There are obvious similarities with musicians learning scales and sports players doing specific drills – getting the fine details off pat before trying to orchestrate everything together.  David Beckham apparently used to practice free kicks from all sorts of positions outside the penalty area, until he was able to hit the top corner of the goal with his eyes shut.  This meant that in the fury and flurry of a real, live game, he was able to hit the target with satisfying frequency.  In the same way, Christodoulou advocates spending more time teaching and assessing progress in acquiring decontextualized technical skills and less time on the contextualised ‘doing everything at once’, ‘playing with the traffic’ kind of tasks that closely resemble the final exam.  Only when we do this, she argues, will assessment for learning be able to bear fruit. When the learning steps are small enough and comprehensible enough for the pupil to act on them, then and only then will afl be a lever for accelerating pupil progress.

Putting my primary practitioner hat on, applying this approach in some areas (for example reading) chimes with what we already do,  but in others (I’m thinking writing here) the approach seems verging on the heretical.  Maths deserves a whole blog to itself, so I’m going to leave that for now – whilst agreeing whole-heartedly that thorough knowledge of times tables and number bonds  (not just to ten but within ten and within  twenty   – so including  3+5 and 8+5 for example) are  absolutely  crucial. Indeed I’d go so far as to say number bonds are even more important than times table knowledge, but harder to learn and rarely properly tested. hit-the-button I’ve mentioned hit the button in a previous blog. We have now created a simple spreadsheet that logs each child’s score from year 2 to year 6  in the various categories for number bonds. Children start with make 10 and stay on this until they score 25 or more (which means 25 correct in 1 minute which I reckon equates to automatic recall.  Then then proceed through the categories in turn – with missing numbers and make 100 with lower target scores of 15.  Finally they skip the two decimals categories and go to the times table section – which has division facts as well as multiplication facts. Yes!  When they’ve got those off pat, then they can return to do the decimals and the other categories. We’ve shared this, and the spreadsheet –  with parents and some children are practising at home each night. With each game only taking one minute, it’s not hard to insist that your child plays say three rounds of this first, before relaxing.  In class, the teachers test a group each day in class, using their set of 6 ipads.  However since kindle fire’s were on sale for £34.99 recently, we’ve just bought 10 of them (the same as the cost of 1 i pad). We’ll use them for lots of other things too, of course – anything where all you really need is access to an internet browser.

When we talk about mastery, people often talk about it like it’s this elusive higher plan that the clever kids might just attain in a state of mathematical or linguistic nirvana when really what it means is that every single child in your class – unless they have some really serious learning difficulty – has automatic recall of these basic number facts and (then later) their times tables.  And can use full stops and capital letters correctly the first time they write something. And can spell every word on the year 3 and 4 word list (and year 1 & 2 as well of course).  And read fluently – at least 140 words a minute, by the time they leave year 6. And have books they love to read – having read at least a million words for pleasure in the last year (We use accelerated reader to measure this – about half of year 6 are word millionaires already this year and a quarter have read over 2 million words.) How about primary schools holding themselves accountable to their secondary schools for delivering cohorts of children who have mastered all of these (with allowances for children who have not been long at the school or who have special needs)  a bit like John Lewis is ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’, we  should aim (among other things) to ensure at the very least, all our children who possibly could, have got these basics securely under their belt.

(My teacher husband and I now pause to have an argument about what should make it to the final list.   Shouldn’t something about place value be included? Why just facts?  Shouldn’t there be something about being able to use number bonds to do something?  I’m talking about a minimum guarantee here – not specifying everything that should be in the primary curriculum. He obviously needs to read the book himself.)

Reading

My extended use of the metaphor of learning to drive to explain Christodoulou’s approach has one very obvious flaw. We usually teach classes of 30 children whereas driving lessons are normally conducted 1:1. It is all very well advocating spending as much time on the basics as is necessary before proceeding onto having to orchestrate several different skills all at the same time, but imagine the frustration the more able driver would have felt stuck in a class with me and my poor clutch control.  They would want to be out there on the open roads, driving, not stuck behind me and my kangaroo petrol.  Children arrive at our schools at various starting points. Some children pick up the sound-grapheme correspondences almost overnight; for others it takes years. I lent our phonics cards to a colleague to show here three-year-old over the weekend; by Monday he knew them all. Whereas another pupil, now in year 5, scored under 10 in both his ks1 phonic checks.  I tried him again on it recently and he has finally passed.  He is now just finishing turquoise books. In other words, he has just graduated from year 1 level reading, 4 years later.  This despite daily 1:1 practice with a very skilled adult, reading from a decodable series he adores (Project X Code), as well as recently starting on the most decontextualized reading programme ever (Toe by Toe – which again he loves) and playing SWAP. He is making steady progress – which fills him with pride – but even if his secondary school carries on with the programme[3], at this rate he won’t really be a fluent reader until year 10. I keep on hoping a snowball effect will occur and the rate of progress will dramatically increase.

Outliers aside, there is a range of ability (or prior attainment if you prefer) in every class and for something as technical as phonics, this is most easily catered for by having children in small groups, depending on their present level. We use ReadWriteInc in  the early years and ks1.  Children are assessed individually by the reading leader  for their technical ability to decode, segment and blend every half term and groups adjusted accordingly.  So that part of our reading instruction is pretty Christodoulou-compliant, as I would have thought it is in most infant classes.  But what about the juniors, or late year 2 – once the technical side is pretty sorted and teachers turn to teaching reading comprehension.  Surely, if ever  a test was created solely  for the purposes of being able to measure something, it was the reading comprehension test, with the whole of ks2 reading curriculum one massive, time wasting exercise in teaching to the test?

I am well aware of the research critiquing the idea that there are some generic comprehension skills that can be taught in a way that can be learnt from specific texts and then applied across many texts, as Daniel Willingham explores here.  Christodoulou quotes Willingham several times in her book and her critique of generic skills is obvioulsy influenced by his work. As Willingham explains, when we teach reading comprehension strategies we are  actually teaching vocabulary, noticing understanding, and connecting ideas. (My emphasis).  In order to connect ideas (which is what inference is), the reader needs to know enough about those ideas, to work out what hasn’t been said as well as what has been. Without specific knowledge, all the generic strategies in the world won’t help. As Willingham explains

‘Inferences matter because writers omit a good deal of what they mean. For example, take a simple sentence pair like this: “I can’t convince my boys that their beds aren’t trampolines. The building manager is pressuring us to move to the ground floor.” To understand this brief text the reader must infer that the jumping would be noisy for the downstairs neighbors, that the neighbors have complained about it, that the building manager is motivated to satisfy the neighbors, and that no one would hear the noise were the family living on the ground floor. So linking the first and second sentence is essential to meaning, but the writer has omitted the connective tissue on the assumption that the reader has the relevant knowledge about bed‐jumping and building managers. Absent that knowledge the reader might puzzle out the connection, but if that happens it will take time and mental effort.’

So what the non-comprehending reader needs is  very specific  knowledge (about what it’s like to live in a flat), not some generic skill.  It could be argued then that schools therefore should spend more time teaching specific knowledge and less time elusive and non existant generic reading skills. However, Willingham concedes that the research shows that even so, teaching reading comprehension strategies does work. How can this be, he wonders? He likens the teaching of these skills as similar to giving someone vague instructions for assembling Ikea flat pack furniture.

 ‘Put stuff together. Every so often, stop, look at it, and evaluate how it is going. It may also help to think back on other pieces of furniture you’ve built before.

This is exactly the process we go through during shared reading. On top of our daily phonics lessons we have two short lessons a week of shared reading where the class teacher models being a reader using the eric approach. In other words, we have daily technical lessons,  and twice a week  we also have a bit of ‘playing with the traffic’ or more accurately, listening to the teacher playing with the traffic and talking about what they are doing as they do it.  In our shared reading lessons, by thinking out loud about texts, the teacher makes it very explicit that texts are meant to be understood and enjoyed and not just for barking at and that  therefore we should check as we go along that we are understanding what we are reading (or looking at). If  we don’t understand something, we should stop and ask ourselves questions.   It is where the teacher articulates that missing ‘connective tissue’,  or ‘previous experience of building furniture’  to use Willingham’s Ikea metaphor, sharing new vocabulary and knowledge of the how the world works, knowledge that many of our inner city children do not have.  (Although actually for this specific instance many of them would know about noisy neighbours, bouncing on beds and the perils of so doing whilst living in flats.)

eric

For example, this picture (used in ‘eric’ link above) gives the the teacher the opportunity to share their knowledge that that sometimes the sea can get rough and that this means the waves get bigger and the wind blows strongly. Sometimes it might blow so hard that it could even blow your hat right off your head. As the waves rise and fall, the ship moves up and down and tilts first one way, and then the other. (Pictures are sometimes used for this  rather than texts so working memory is relieved from the burden of decoding).

When teaching children knowledge is extolled as the next panacea, it’s not that I don’t agree, it’s just that I reckon people really underestimate quite how basic some of the knowledge we need to impart for our younger children. I know of primary schools proudly adopting a ‘knowledge curriculum’ and teaching  two hours of history a week, with two years given over to learning about the Ancient Greeks.  I just don’t see how this will help children understand texts about noisy neighbours, or about what the sea is like (although you could do that in the course of learning about Ancient Greece if you realised children didn’t know), or, for that matter, what it is like to mill around in bewilderment.  The only kind of assessment that will help here is the teacher’s ‘ear to the ground’ minute by minute assessment – realising that -oh, some of them haven’t ever seen the sea, or been on a boat. They don’t know about waves or how windy it can be or how you rock up and down.   This is the kind of knowledge that primary teachers in disadvantaged areas need to talk about all the time.  And why we need to go on lots of trips too. But it is not something a test will pick up nor something you can measure progress gains in.  The only way to increase vocabulary is one specific word at a time. It is also why we should never worry about whether something is ‘relevant’ to the children or not. If it is too relevant, then they already know about it – the more irrelevant the better.

I don’t  entirely agree with the argument that since we can’t teach generic reading skills we should instead teach lots more geography and history since this will give  children the necessary knowledge they need to understand what they read.   We need to read and talk, talk talk about stories and their settings -not just what a mountain is but how it feels to climb a mountain or live on a mountain, how that affects your daily life, how you interact with your neighbours.  We need to read more non fiction aloud, starting in the early years.  We need to talk about emotions and body language and what the author is telling us by showing us.  A quick google will show up writers body language ‘cheat sheets’. We need to reverse engineer these and explain that if the author has their character fidgetting with darting eyes, that probably means they are feeling nervous. Some drama probably wouldn’t go amiss either.  Willingham’s trio of  teaching vocabulary, noticing understanding, and connecting ideas is a really helpful way of primary teachers thinking about what they are doing when they teach reading comprehension. What we need to assess and feedback to children is how willing they to admit they don’t understand something, to ask what a word means, to realise they must be missing some connection.  None of this is straightforwardly testable. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

Writing

Whereas most primary schools, to a greater or lesser degree, teach reading by at first teaching phonics, the teaching of writing is much more likely to be taught though students writing than it is through teaching a series of sub skills.  It is the idea that we ensure technical prowess before  we spend too much time on creative writing that most challenges the way we currently do things.

Of course we teach children to punctuate their sentences with capital letters and full stops right at the start of their writing development. However, patently, this instruction has limited effectiveness for many children.  They might remember when they are at the initial stages and when they only write one sentence anyway – so not so hard to remember the final full stop in that case. Where it all goes wrong is once they start writing more than one sentence, further complicated when they start writing sentences with more than one clause. I’ve often thought we underestimate how conceptually difficult it is to understand what a sentence actually is.  Learning to use speech punctuation is far easier than learning what is, and what is not, a sentence. Many times we send children back to put in their full stops, actually, they don’t really get where fulls tops really go.  On my third session doing 1:1 tuition with a year 5 boy, he finally plucked up the courage to tell me that he know he should but he just didn’t get how you knew where sentences ended.  So I abandoned what I’d planned and instead we  learnt about sentences. I told him that sentences had a person or a thing doing something, and then after those two crucial bits we might get some extra information about where or why or with whom or whatever that  belongs with the person/thing, so needs to be in the same sentence.   We analysed various sentences, underlining the person/thing in one colour, the doing something word in another colour and finally the extra information (which could be adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, the object of the sentence – the predicate minus the verb basically) in another. This was some time ago before the renaissance of grammar teaching, so it never occurred to me to use the terms ‘subject’ ‘noun’ ‘verb’ etc but I would do now. It was all done of the hoof, but after three lessons he had got it, and even better, could apply it in his own writing.

What Christodoulou is advocating is that instead of waiting until things have got so bad they need 1:1 tuition to put it right, we systematically teach sentence punctuation (and other  common problems such as verb subject agreement), giving greater priority to this than to creative writing. In other words, stop playing with the traffic before you’ve mastered sufficient technical skills to do so properly.  This goes against normal primary practice, but I can see the sense in this. If ‘practice makes permanent’ as cognitive psychology tells us (see chapter 7 of What Every teacher Needs to Know About Psychology by Didau and Rose for more on this), then the last thing we want is for children to practice again and again doing something incorrectly. But this is precisely what our current practice does. Because most of the writing we ask children to do is creative writing, children who can’t punctuate their sentences get daily practice in doing it wrong. The same goes for letter formation and spelling of high frequency common exception words. Maybe instead we need to spend far more time in the infants and into year 3 if necessary on doing drills where we punctuate text without the added burden of composing as we go. Maybe this way, working memories would not become so overburdened with thinking about what to say that the necessary technicalities went out the window. After that, we could rewrite this correctly punctuated text in correctly formed handwriting.  Some children have genuine handwriting or spelling problems and I wouldn’t want to condemn dyslexic and dyspraxic children to permanent technical practice. However if we did more technical practice in the infants  – which would mean less time for writing composition – we might spot who had a genuine problem earlier and then put in place specific programmes to help them and/or aids to get round the problem another way. After all,  not all drivers use manual transmission, some drive automatics.

Christodoulou mentions her experience of using the ‘Expressive Writing’ direct instruction programme, which I duly ordered. I have to say it evoked a visceral dislike in me; nasty cheap paper, crude line drawings,  totally decontextualised, it’s everything my primary soul eschews (and  it’s expensive to boot). However, the basic methodology is sound enough – and Christodoulou only mentions it because it is the ones she is familiar with. It is not like she’s giving it her imprimatur or anything.  I’m loathed to give my teachers more work, but  I don’t think it would be too hard to invent some exercises that are grounded in the context of something else children are learning; some sentences about Florence Nightingale or the Fire of London for example, or a punctuation-free excerpt from a well-loved story.  Even if we only did a bit more of this and a bit less of writing compositions where we expect children to orchestrate many skills all at once, we should soon see gains also in children’s creative writing. Certainly, we should insist of mastery in these core writing skills by year 3, and  where children still can’t punctuate a sentence, be totally ruthless in focusing on that until the problem is solved. And I don’t just mean that they can edit in their full stops after the fact, I mean they put them (or almost all of them in ) as they write. it needs to become an automatic process. Once it is automatic is it easy.   Otherwise we are not doing them any favours in the long term as we are just making their error more and more permanent and harder and harder to undo.

Certainly pupil progress meetings would be different. Instead of discussing percentages and averages,  the conversation would be very firmly about the teacher sharing the gaps in knowledge they had detected, the plans they had put in place to bridge those gaps, and progress to date in so doing, maybe courtesy of the ‘hit the button’ spreadsheet, some spelling tests, end of unit maths tests, records of increasing reading fluency. Already last July our end of year reports for parents shared with them which number facts, times tables and spellings (from the year word lists) their child did not yet know…with the strong suggestion that the child work on these over the summer!   We are introducing ‘check it’ mini assessments so that we can check that we we taught three weeks ago is still retained. It’s easy, we just test to the teach.

[1] Christodoulou quoting D. Wiliams, p 19 Making Good Progress?

[2] Christodoulou quoting D. Wiliams, p 20 Making Good Progress?

[3] I say this because our local secondary school told me they didn’t believe in withdrawing children from class for interventions. Not even reading interventions. Surely he could miss MFL and learn to read in English first? As a minimum.  Why not English lessons? I know he is ‘entitled’ to learn about Macbeth but at the expense of learning to read? Is Macbeth really that important? Maybe he will go to a different secondary school or they’ll change their policy.

Test to the Teach

What if lesson observations were every week? How we reduced stress by observing staff more often.

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Every year I commission a staff survey and every year – although the overall findings are always really positive – I  have to lock myself away to read it as it always makes me so cross initially!  It is of course done anonymously but with results reported separately for teachers and support staff.  Because we are a relatively small school – 1 form entry – the temptation is to try and second  guess exactly which miserable ***** it was who disagreed (and strongly) that ‘the SLT provides them with the support and guidance they needed to do their job effectively.’ The fact it was a teacher rather than a TA makes it worse.  Teacher results are always more positive than TA results. But not, apparently, in this case. And there are only 11 possible people it could be.  So I run through the eligible candidates, thinking about who this Brutus could possibly be. I summon my deputy (I know it’s not her) and together we run through the remaining 10 teachers and together decide it has to be teacher X and find ways to dismiss their opinion as totally invalid. Then we move on to pinpoint which Judas TA (from the 16 who completed it) does not agree ‘they are treated with fairness and respect.’ And so on through 100 or so criteria. I’m sure we don’t make for a very edifying spectacle which is why I make sure to give myself time to through my hissy fit in private.

Considering I commissioned the survey in the first place, you’d think I’d welcome the honest feedback. I suppose I assume that everybody thinks everything is absolutely marvellous, so am always disappointed that I get any negative feedback at all. In my heart of hearts, I don’t quite understand why people only vote ‘agree’ rather than ‘strongly agree’ that everything within my kingdom, I mean our school, is 100% amazing.  The anonymous thing is necessary, I get that, but so frustrating. It hurts that there is a member of staff out there who really feels that they are not treated with fairness and respect. Hissy fit aside, I want to hear what it is that has made them feel that way and to reassure that of course I value and respect them and if something has made them feel otherwise, I want to put that right straight away. But I don’t know who it was, so maybe they still feel the same now as they did in May, when they did the survey.

The day after I first read the survey, I re-read it and now I am able to have a bit of distance, be a bit more objective and to learn from it.  The most useful learning comes from statements where quite a few people disagree. Usually these are things I can put my hands up to with relative ease or are long running problems – for example 45% of teachers do not feel they are able to strike the right balance between their work and home life. The previous year it was 62% so we’re heading in the right direction although *gnashes teeth* 3 teachers ‘do not agree that senior leaders are looking at ways of reducing teacher workload.’ (Strangled cry of ‘yes we are, it’s in the bloody development plan; I’ve banned marking for God sake…deep breaths Clare, deep breaths)

The stand out finding from last year was that 37% of support staff ‘did not feel the received regular and constructive feedback.’  This was not entirely unsurprising – we knew only too well that we had never found a workable system for appraisal for TA’s and the SENCO started each year with the best of intentions regarding coaching those TA’s who worked supporting children with statements or EHCP’s, with other matters somehow taking precedence in real life. But in some ways it was also surprising; our major school development initiative that year had been implementing the MITA project (Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants), which I have written about here. It had been, by all accounts incredibly successful and we all wanted to build on it this year.  It involved a lot of feedback – including watching video footage of your own teaching – from one’s peers with some teacher involvement from the 3 teachers running the project. We deliberately did not include the SLT (apart from myself as I was part of the team) to make the project less intimidating.  But we appeared to have uncovered a desire for better, more regular structured conversations with line managers about how well TA’s were doing their jobs. What manager could ask for more! What a gift!

At the same time, I was anxious to do all I could to reduce the stress-load on teachers.  Reducing the workload might be a Sisyphean task, but I could try and make the work less stressful. Top of the list of stressors came lesson observations and teaching and learning reviews. How could I make sure I had an accurate picture of our strengths and weaknesses in the classroom in a way that was less stressful? We already didn’t grade lesson observations, but the termly half hour visit was still perceived as being incredibly stressful however much I chucked around terms like ‘developmental’ and ‘helpful.’

By chance, I was reading Leverage Leadership by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo.  At the centre of his school improvement work, in the centre of his leadership in fact, lay a system where he (or other leaders) observed every teacher for 10 minutes every week for a low stakes observation, followed by a very brief 10 minute feedback session.  He goes through  and dismisses all the excuses about the impossibility of timetabling this and is pretty persuasive. (I’m not quite sure about how big his school is – obviously it is smaller than a typical secondary school – but I’m sure an adapted form of this could be used in even the largest school). I wondered if this might provide a model that enabled the senco to get around her TA’s, allowed us to build on the success of the MITA project, reduced stress in teachers and gave me a stronger picture than the traditional model we had been using. More than that, I hoped be a strong lever, as Leverage Leadership alleged, for further school improvement.  We were in a strong position that every one of our teachers was at least good – many were very strong indeed – and here lay a system of observation and feedback that would enable really great teachers to make incremental improvements every week, which when taking altogether would lead to a substantial school-wide improvement. In other words, we were embracing the UK Olympic Cycling team’s philosophy of going for marginal gains.

I was a bit wary about how staff would feel about it. It could come across as even more stressful. The SLT thought it a good idea so I dropped the idea into conversation with various teachers, stressing how light touch the approach was and promising no reviews by outsiders this year. these intial soundings were all positive. Then I discussed it formally in our end of year INSET day (held on June 23rd when the school was closed for the referendum) and no one objected, so in it went into our development plan.

Over an enjoyable dinner in early September with my two former deputies, both now head teachers in their own right, there was much chortling about how impossible I would find it to fit it in. This actually was a great spur to prove them wrong. We had already set up our new diner date for early December. I was determined to come back with tales of how well it had worked.

How it worked was as follows. We didn’t start until the third week back, to give people a bit of time to get to know their classes. In my experience, the first two weeks are full of realising you’ve pitched work too low or too high – so I thought a bit of grace time to sort that out would be more productive all round.  There are 8 class teachers plus the deputy who teaches groups in the morning. Of these 9 teachers, I would aim to see 7 a week while the deputy would see the remaining 2 (obviously she didn’t observe herself). The senco would dedicate Thursdays every week to seeing TA’s when they were explicitly supporting children with SEN, aiming to get through these every 3 weeks.  She saw each TA with each child – so where TA’s work with more than one child, she would do a different observation for each child (rather than per adult). The Early Years leader would use part of her nct each Friday to see at least two of her support staff (out of a team of 6) each week. I would then mop up anyone not included in the system (for example a couple of TA’s who do not work with  statemented/EHCP children at all), staying  5-10 minutes longer in the class where I was seeing the teacher so I could also take notes on their role. Notes were written up as bullet points on an excel spreadsheet and feedback was given during either assembly or the next break or after school. Sometimes if a TA was in class just before lunch/end of the day they would cover the last 10 minutes so feedback could be done then.

I immediately loved the new system. I got into classes so much more regularly and could give bite sized feedback that was acted on immediately. I also timetabled myself to sometimes go at unusual times – at the very beginning of a lesson as the children came in, or during story time – for example, to check that every minute of the teaching day was being exploited for maximum learning gain. Often feedback was all positive, with only the most minor point being picked up on (that green pen on your whiteboard is hard to read from the back of the class – try something with better colour contrast*[1]) or suggestions for how to build on what I’d seen rather than development points as such.  Often when there were points they were about getting smoother, slicker transitions, something we need to introduce as proper whole school system in due course. It did allow me to introduce things I’ve got waiting in the wings for the right time such as SLANT to teachers for whom it seemed appropriate. For example in one class children listened really well to the teacher but possibly in a less focused way when their peers were addressing the class. Getting pupils to track each other when talking has really increased pupil attention to each other. Most of my comments were generic about teaching itself – use of voice, transitions, questioning routines rather than subject specific as such, although these did feature.

Alongside these ‘drop-ins’ as we called them, the maths leader continued to coach and team teach with teachers new to our mathsmastery programme for the full hour during her nct, the early reading teacher has a coaching programme for all staff (teachers and TA’s) teaching phonics and rotates around them, sometimes coaching, sometimes modelling and our literacy lead is in different classes each week helping staff implement our new system that has replaced guided reading and to model how to give feedback on writing now that we do not remotely mark any writing. Obviously if during drop ins we had encountered concerns about teaching, we would have had to adapt the drop in programme for something more formal for the person concerned, but that is not where we are. I did see one (10 minute slot of a) lesson that did not work – it was in a guided reading lesson before we replaced them and exemplified everything about why we moved away from that model – independent groups busy doing activities that don’t actually help them learn much – so we had a discussion about what learning the teacher had assumed would occur and problem solved why reality and aspiration were so adrift and moved on.  I already knew this teacher is usually fabulous but under this system I was back the next week anyway, and the next and the next, so any sustained loss of form would have been quickly picked up. But the system allowed me to see it for the blip it was – we all make mistakes.

We also still do work surveys, although we now see pupils books in lots of different ways. Most staff meetings involve bringing books along for us to share together what’s working and what’s not and we now make sure every full governing body meeting and some committee meetings involve looking at pupils work. again, because books are looked at so often, problems are picked up early and the whole thing becomes routine rather than a make or break high stakes stress-fest.

All the staff doing the drop ins liked them and felt they knew so much more about learning in the school than previously. The senco managed, more or less to stick to her Thursdays-for-drop-ins timetable, although time for feedback can be an issue. Unfortunately due to ‘exigencies of the service’ the deputy is now teaching almost all day so has had to drop out of the rota after a few weeks – she maybe manages one a week on a good week. But how did the staff feel about them?

But by bit various teachers volunteered feedback.  One nqt said she loved the new system and found it so much less stressful (the previous year she was a TeachFirst trainee) and more helpful getting regular small steps to work on. One teacher who gets ridiculously nervous around observations said it really helped because now they happened so regularly she just couldn’t get herself all worked up about it. As a result I’ve actually seen her teach really well rather than impeded by nerves. A teacher new to the school who previously came from an outstanding school where, reading between the lines, observations had been extremely high stakes, said initially she thought it sounded a bit barmy and lacking in rigour but having had it for a term she now found it simultaneously less stressful but more rigorous – in that it actually moved her practice on more effectively. Previously she would go to extreme effort and put on an all singing all dancing show and be given very positive feedback. Whereas now we saw her bread-and-butter day in, day out teaching, warts and all, so she received feedback that helped her improve without feeling she had failed in some way. She could risk teaching normally.

In order to get a more rounded picture, I wrote a quick 7 question survey using Survey Monkey and attached it to the weekly calendar I send out every Friday, asking colleagues to let me see how it was going. Out of 19 respondents, 17 preferred in and 2 did not have a preference –so no going back, that’s for sure. The next question asked how useful was the feedback they had received.  11 (again out of 19) said it was very useful, 6 fairly useful and 2 occasionally useful. Considering some people are so strong that I failed to find anything of significance to feedback most visits and it is meant to be about mainly finding marginal gains, I’m more than happy with this.  Asked if they agreed with feedback given 10 said yes always, 7 said often and 1 said sometimes (1 person didn’t answer that question). Asked if they thought they had improved as a result, 7 said they had improved a lot, 9 said they had improved in the areas identified and the remaining 3 a bit. I can’t know for certain but I’m assuming that’s from the strongest teachers who are being tactful in the face of my not very helpful feedback.

Timetabling the drop ins was the biggest headache, so I was hoping that the staff were now so blasé about them that they wouldn’t need any prior notice and would be happy about me popping in at any time… in my dreams. 5 staff would be happy with this and 1 – the one who used to get really nervous – said she would be ok if she knew the day but not the time. The remaining 7 said a resolute NO, so I guess that is not going to change. Not yet anyway.

The other bugbear is time for feedback.  Sometimes I feel it would work just as well by email – as long as both parties reserved the right to ask to meet in person, either prior or post observation.  This really divided opinion. 5 said this was a great idea, 6 didn’t mind either way, 4 would prefer face to face but didn’t hate the idea whereas 4 hated it as far too impersonal. So next term – people will get a choice between email or in person – although the person dropping in will reserve the right to meet them in person if what they need to say is too complicated or needs the human touch. So I’m hoping that will save loads of time with 11 people opting for email.

Finally, I asked them if they would like the opportunity to drop in on colleagues themselves.  6 said they would find this very useful, 9 quite useful and 2 said yes but it would need to be for longer to be useful. The remaining 2 said no thanks, they would find this too awkward.  I also asked colleagues to email any further thoughts, although these comments would not be anonymous. Only 1 teacher did. She reminded us that when we launched the idea, sometimes the SLT were going to cover the class teacher so the class teacher could observe (and subsequently better guide) their TA.  In class they are too busy doing their own role to observe their TA as well, yet this would be really useful. We had forgotten this and it was great to get the reminder and something we must remember to do next term.

So overall it’s been a great success and one that we will continue to build on. It’s been particularly useful in enabling me to track the implementation of key development plan initiatives as week by week things move from being innovations to becoming routine.  Or not.  At my evening out with my former deputies I reported back that I had missed one week when I was ill, 1 week when everyone was either out training, on a trip, doing an art workshop or performing in a concert and the last 3 weeks of term when it was assessments and nativity plays I had done every week – 8 weeks in all. Next term I will skip the first week as we are doing pupil progress meetings and probably the last but intend to do every week. Some weeks I’ll be covering teachers so they can observe their TA’s. I’ve also started teaching year 6 science 1 lesson a week, so I will have to get myself dropped into at least occasionally.

It may not be suitable for all situations. One of my former deputies has recently taken over a school that was in a bit of a mess (though thought it was amazing). She didn’t think it was ready for this yet, particularly as she didn’t have a strong leadership team around her who she would trust in their judgements yet.  And it’s a bigger school so she would absolutely need colleagues to help out. She’s thinking about starting it with her leaders though.

If I could change one thing about how we implemented it, I’d change how we recorded it.  I copied Leverage Leadership and created a spreadsheet with a page per teacher. However, maybe they either are much more familiar with excel or used a different programme but this has been so unwieldly.  I finally now know how to use the return key and add a bullet point using excel but have to remind myself afresh every time I use it. Then there was the problem that if one person had the spreadsheet open, no one else could use it. We are only a small school so don’t think we need an expensive web based system like BluSkyEducation (although do leave a comment if you have a suggestion of a system that might work) so we will probably transfer over to a word based system next term.

Looking back, I’d never return to the old system. It seems so inflexible and uninformative.  This system tells me what I need to know about the school improvement journey, helps staff improve, reduces the stress they feel and reaches all staff – not just teachers.  I’m looking forward to our staff survey next May and hoping various key indicators show a marked improvement.  I’ll still be grumpy initially though.

[1] They’d only used the green pen for a couple of comments – not for the main text.

What if lesson observations were every week? How we reduced stress by observing staff more often.

Michaela Prime – is the atmosphere breathable?

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This is part two of my thoughts about how well the kind of education outlined in ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers- the Michaela Way,’ a book published in November 2016 featuring chapters written  by a range of staff at Michaela Community School. This part looks at the ethos and discipline. In part one I discussed whether didactic teaching emboss and a knowledge- led curriculum are suitable for younger, primary age pupils.

There seems to be concern in some quarters about the atmosphere at Michaela; the no-excuses discipline, the bootcamp, the stress on adult authority. Some worry that this atmosphere is toxic for children, and therefore, we may surmise, even less suitable for younger primary children than it is for secondary pupils.  Others argue that, on the contrary, while the atmosphere can be bracing at times, it is just the tonic our children need to excel. Indeed, maybe it is the ‘progressive’ atmosphere in schools that is poisoning our education system; by contrast traditionalism represents a veritable breath of fresh air.

Michaela likes to boast about how strict it is. It’s probably sub-editors rather than the school itself that styles it as ‘the strictest school in Britain,’ but we get the picture; it’s pretty strict. Would this ethos be appropriate in a primary school? Would younger children be able to cope with the demands? Should they have to?

I think this is a bit of a red herring.  There are already plenty of very strict schools around, in both primary and secondary phases. I have friends whose children go to their local Catholic primary who are terrified of the headteacher. The parents are terrified – not just the children; waking up in a cold sweat because they had a dream about forgetting their book bag kind of scared.  What appears to be different about Michaela, and what really appeals to me, is the ethos of kindness and love that is articulated. They are strict, but it is because they really care about the children and not for its own sake or as some kind of power trip and in a way that empowers, rather than crushes the children.

My two sons went to different secondary schools. At the first, the discipline was terrible, particularly at KS3, and he was kicked down the stairs twice by pupils, his books went unlooked at and unmarked – and not in a ‘let’s look at your book in class with a visualiser’ kind of way either.  Several of his teachers just didn’t look at his work – and once he cottoned on to this he stopped trying very hard.  Of course, within this mess, some teachers were fantastic. But the structures weren’t.   At the second (chosen in reaction to the first), authority was draconian. Screaming in children’s faces for not having their shirt tucked in or eating a chip with your fingers – majoring in humiliating children – my son detested the regime (though he liked individual teachers and it’s obvious to me, if not to him, that many staff were really passionate about empowering inner city children through education). There are at least three secondary schools who operate this kind of authoritarian regime within a couple of miles to where I live – it’s nothing new. So for me, Michaela represents some calm, sensible middle ground, between brutal authoritarianism and lassier-faire  regimes where the authoritarianism is pupil-led, by the scary big kids. I wanted somewhere neither feral nor oppressive. And yes, of course I am aware that other alternatives exist – not quite so hard core as Michaela. The school most of our pupils transfer to for example, seems to mainly get the balance right.

What I love most of all when I read about Michaela is the explicit ethos of kindness. This seems very ‘primary school’ to me – although as it is described in their book, it seems like Michaela are doing this even better than how we do it – beating us at our own game. A good few years back, I attended the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers (LPSH). This fantastic training on leadership taught us about leadership styles using the Goleman model.  This model contrasts visionary leadership (called authoritative leadership in the LPSH) with commanding leadership (which LPSH dubbed ‘coercive’ or ‘authoritarian).  Visionary leadership is often highly successful whereas commanding leadership can have very negative effects. Visionary, authoritative leadership inspires people and explains how and why people’s effort contributes to the dream. Commanding, coercive authoritarian leadership by contrast, looks superficially similar but has a quite different emotional tone with its ‘do it because I say so’ mentality that people instinctively rebel against. What Michaela seems to have done is work hard to get pupils as well as staff to buy in to their vision of kindness, gratitude, hard work and empathy. In the chapter by Jonathan Porter, ‘No-excuses Discipline Changes Lives,’ he is clear that at Michaela they reject the old-school Miss Trunchball-style authority-for authority’s-sake approach, just as they reject more democratic or affiliative approaches as the leading paradigm for adult:child relationships. When people accuse Michaela of terrible crimes against childhood, I think what they have failed to distinguish is the difference between being cruelly authoritarian because you like controlling people and strong visionary leadership that encourages and motivates people to do amazing things they never realised they were capable of.  That’s the kind of leader I strive to be most of the time (though as Goleman makes clear, all styles have a time and a place; in a crisis you might need to be authoritarian to get people out of a hole).

Our school has a strongly articulated set of values. We believe in trust, friendship, togetherness, thankfulness, compassion, justice, peace, forgiveness, creativity, endurance, hope, responsibility and awe and wonder. (Yes it’s a long list – not exactly pithy).  We refer to these values with children all the time in terms of developing as a good, moral person; be compassionate, take responsibility, be a peacemaker. But what I realise we don’t do enough of – and should do – is link these values with learning for pupils. We do more so with staff, spelling out how these values must shape how staff  interact with children; we don’t really make those kind of links with children. We don’t make enough of how amazingly lucky children are to be receiving this excellent gift called education; about how excited and grateful they should be to be given this brilliant present. At Michaela they do this a lot.

Sometimes they do it in ways that I’m not comfortable with.  I’d spend all day sitting at Barry Smith’s feet learning about how to teach French from him, but his chapter ‘Top of the Pyramid’ – which is all about inspiring pupils to work hard so that they can be better than other people – doesn’t chime with my values.   I don’t believe in pitting school against school.  In church circles, the metaphor of a farm in the outback is sometimes used to describe two different ways that churches can see their membership.  In the outback, land can be farmed and livestock kept close either by using fences – to keep dangerous animals out and to stop livestock straying off into danger; or by having a really deep well in the centre of your ranch that naturally attracts livestock to stick around. Some churches use a ‘fence’ approach, policing their congregations to toe the line; outside of the fence lies danger, bad people.   Behave lest you will be cast out beyond the fence!  Others are more like farms that have a deep well at the centre; animals are naturally drawn to these safe sources of drinking water; why would they want to stray too far from their source of life?  Such farms don’t need to categorise people as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the fence. There is no fence; only people closer or further away from that which they need to thrive. In a bounded set, your position, in or out is all important.  In a centred set, it’s the direction you are moving – towards or away from the centre – that matters.

So rather than tell children they are really lucky to come to our school because our school is better than the other schools, and children from our better school go on to be better people, I want to explain to the children that school (in general) is a wonderful life-enhancing opportunity for them – and how children in some countries do not have the opportunity to go to school and how sad that is for them because they miss out on so much that is good and exciting and interesting. And how grateful we should be to all the grown-ups in this country for agreeing that education is such a wonderful thing that all children in Britain deserve. So all the grown-ups – even those who don’t have any children – agreed to give some of their money to the government, so that every single child could benefit from this wonderful opportunity. And the richer grown-ups had agreed it was only fair that they give more of their money than the poorer ones. (I never miss opportunities to tell children about the great good that is taxation; taxation being the hallmark of any civilised society. British values and all that. Besides, they need to know in the same way their parents can’t just get money from the cash machine on the wall but have to work to earn it, neither do governments have any money save that which people agree to give through taxation.)

So what I need to develop is something like this:  Without education life would be so boring and empty.  You wouldn’t be able to read any amazing stories so you would never have met Beowulf or Boudicca or Theseus or Varjak Paw or Stanley Yelnats or Hermione Granger. You wouldn’t know about all the amazing people who have done incredibly brave, difficult things like Mary Seacole or Harriet Tubman or made awesome discoveries or great inventions like Alan Turing or Charles Darwin or Ada Lovelace  – so you wouldn’t be inspired to try and do something amazing with your own life. You wouldn’t have learnt about equality from Guru Nanak or forgiveness from the Prophet Mohammed or compassion from Jesus or endurance from Moses or selflessness from the Buddha.  Because you come to school, all of these stories now live in you; they are part of you. When life is tough you can go to them to learn about resilience, courage, hope and doing what is right.  When life is good they can spur you on to doing what you can to make this world a better place, to search for the hero inside yourself, to be the very best ‘you’ that you can be.

Learning can be really hard sometimes and you will learn to develop grit and determination in the face of challenges. But do you know what – when you finally learn your 7 times table or how to add fractions or you finally understand what a really hard poem is saying you will feel so proud of yourself and feel so exhilarated. Well, the people of this country believe in you – they believe you can do it – you can rise to the challenge and you will be successful.  They will never give up on you so never give up on yourself. Work with us and we will help you do things you never believed were possible.

Education: because you are worth it. The state’s gift to you, little one. Use it wisely and be grateful.

(Obviously this is a primary school version stated in primary colours.)

Knowledge-led curricula should promote the value of knowledge on their own terms; not on some instrumentalist premise about how we can be better than other people.  We don’t want to look down on people; we want to be in a position to raise them up. (I really don’t like that chapter, do I).

But there are loads of chapters I do like.  The pyramid that Barry Smith is talking about is, I think, based on this triangle used throughout the school. (I may not have the wording 100% correct as this is the version we use where I am headteacher and I think we adapted in slightly; you get the gist.)

motivation-triange

This triangle narrates the vision behind the school to the children (and it is perfectly possible to narrate this vision in a centred, rather than bounded way.)  The staff work here, it implies, because they want to help you become the sort of person who behaves well for its own sake, because it is the right thing to do and not as a tactic to avoid trouble or build reputation, although it will start as that. The triangle exemplifies a journey in moral development. I think it would work even better if the top level was ‘so I can help everybody have a great future.’  I shared this with the staff about a year ago, in a low key way. Having read Battle Hymn and about family lunch and bootcamp and the daily sermon and how demerits are always explained in terms of the school’s vision, I am definitely going to relaunch this and make it much more centre stage.  It sets up the route map we want our children to go on. Young children all start seeing being good as primarily about not getting into trouble as I know only too well from too many sessions sorting out KS1 scuffles.

‘So why don’t we hit people when we feel cross with them Hamid?’

‘Cos you’ll get in trouble.’

Remember that visionary leadership inspires people and explains how and why people’s effort contributes to the dream.

‘Hamid we don’t hit people when we feel cross with them because that just makes them cross too. So now we’ve got two cross people. That’s not what we want. We want no cross people. I wonder if you could have done something else when you felt cross? I know, you could have told Zahid that he was making you feel cross.’

In one of my favourite chapters on no-excuses discipline Jonathan Porter reiterates the importance of explaining why rules exist and encouraging pupils to think about what the school would be like without them. He absolutely repudiates imposing sanctions on pupils without narrating to them the reason for the system’s existence.  He contrasts the US style ‘do-as-I say-because-I say-so’ regimes found in some charter schools and one animated by a vision of kindness, gratitude, hard work and empathy. The former is indeed a toxic environment that breeds resentment and disaffection; the latter an atmosphere that allows for flourishing.

It is also an atmosphere predicated on respect for teachers.  Alongside Jonathan’s chapter, I also really liked Hin-Tai Ting’s on respect.  More than that, Hin-Tai moved on my thinking.  He contrasts the respect that Chinese pupils have for their teachers with the respect more usually found in British schools. Before Michaela, he assumed this was an artefact of living within an authoritarian culture. Were that to be the case, then I’d put up with tutting and eye-rolling any day rather than live under an authoritarian regime.  But working at Michaela changed his mind. Here, because they narrated why disrespect was not acceptable in terms of learning to become a responsible citizen and not at all by means of pulling adult rank; as a result children at Michaela behave respectfully towards all staff.

This is something I really want to get us to do. It’s not like we are a million miles from it; we certainly don’t like eye rolling or tutting but this narration thing is going to take some work for some staff. In particular, some staff who do feature lower down the hierarchy and supply teachers (especially supply teachers) who, when respect is not given by pupils, bristle and pull rank, sometimes in ways that aren’t particularly respectful themselves. Then the child is really disrespectful and someone in the SLT has to sort out a big old mess.  The narration approach allows the child to keep their dignity; nobody is being humiliated into submitting. Rather they are being taught what is a civilised way to behave. Rolling one’s eyes and tutting are rude.  We need to be polite and kind to each other, not rude.  If you think something is unfair, then at the right time come and discuss it. Not now in the heat of the moment. Of course as soon as one member of staff doesn’t toe the line and pulls rank then the whole system gets put into disrepute. As Katharine Birbalsingh said over and over at the launch of Battle Hymn ‘we all row together.’

I can see why bootcamp week is so important in getting both pupils and staff onside.  Particularly the repeated explicit explaining about accepting the role of the adult in the same way that we accept (well sort of) the authority of a referee in sport. They are there to make a decision so that the game can go on. They are not there to get it right 100% of the time. We could have referees more like that and have endless interruptions while cameras are looked and the second and third referees confer – but it would make the game really boring.  Learning time in schools is too precious to waste doing endless autopsies about who ‘was also calling out.’  Of course there should be some sort of mechanism were serious miscarriages of justice are addressed; Michael Fordham writes well about this really well here.

Part of the problem is with the word ‘strict’. Some people here this and hear ‘harsh,’ ‘severe’ whereas others hear ‘precise’, ‘scrupulous.’ Without doubt the routines at Michaela are precise and scrupulously upheld by the staff.  Sanctions for non-compliance are consistently applied in every classroom.  Jonathan uses the example of a pupil ‘Tom’ who found following rules very difficult at primary school but who learnt, after a couple of wobbly weeks, to allow the rules to contain him in a way that actually set him free. Tom’s difficult family background was not taken into consideration to cut him some slack. And Tom rose to the high expectations set of him.  If we give children the message ‘you couldn’t possibly cope with this’ then I guess they won’t. Beside the sanctions at Michaela are so mild. Get two demerits in a lesson and that’s a 20 minute detention doing a bit of revision. Er, that’s it.  We are harsher at our primary school – we make a point of not allowing reading to take place because boredom is part of the punishment. But actually, reading Michaela has made me reconsider. Michaela has made me more liberal!  Presently we tell the children – you have to sit in silence and think about the choice you made and what better choices you could have chosen instead.  Of course they probably don’t think about that at all – they mainly watch the clock or try and catch the eye of a friend. What is doesn’t do is help them buy in to our vision of school as a precious gift that mustn’t be wasted.  From next term, reading your knowledge book it is.

However, it wouldn’t do to be fundamentalist about no excuses.  I get it removes grey areas and stops weak-willed liberal folk such as myself perhaps being too soft. But I’m sure what the policy really is in practice is ‘no excuses 99.9999% of the time except on very rare occasions that are so unusual it is difficult to specify in advance what exactly they might be.  But that’s not very pithy and also gives unhelpful wiggle room both to staff and to students. Once students know that there is a chink in the disciplinary armour then you get into students contesting decisions – wasting time – getting annoyed when what they see as their valid excuse is not taken into consideration. But, as Tom Bennett says in this great blog on inclusion and behaviour, ‘exceptions must be exceptional.’  Tom’s article is so good on the tensions between inclusion and setting firm boundaries for behaviour that I suggest you read that rather than me trying to witter on about it, but I will make the following points.

First of all, we should start using different language to describe what happens when a child’s behaviour becomes so extreme that it jeopardises the education and/or well-being of everybody else.  If I go to my G.P. with some condition that is too specialised for her to deal with, she doesn’t expel me from general practice; she refers me to a specialist who knows more about this particular problem.  There’s no stigma or blame attached, it is just obvious my problem needs looking at by someone who looks at that sort of problem all the time.  Why can’t children with emotional and behavioural problems that need specialist attention be perceived in the same way?

Secondly, primary school children are obviously younger than secondary children (who knew!) Particularly in the early years and KS1, they are still learning emotional self-control.  To go back to the above example of Hamid hitting a child because he feels cross, it matters a great deal whether Hamid is three, six, nine or twelve.  At three it is fairly unremarkable (though of course needs firm dealing with), at six it should be unusual – with maybe one or two children taking a bit longer to accept this is unacceptable and to be able to use alternatives instead – by nine specialist help is being brought in to help the child. And I’m assuming a twelve year old who hits people when they are cross is in danger of permanent exclusion. (See what I mean about language? How much better would it be to say ‘is being transferred to the specialist unit for the time being’ – which I suppose happens in secondary schools with behaviour support units).

The idea of a pupil at Michaela hitting another seems unlikely, but I am sure it would happen at Michaela Prime from time to time. Hamid (who is of course not actually called Hamid) is based on a real child.  Not only does he hit children when he is angry with them, he sometimes hits them if he thinks someone else might be angry with them.  He is a bit of a lone ranger who sees his role in life as punishing wrong doing.  Except his own of course – which he perceives as people receiving their just deserts. So for now, when he feels the kind of burning anger that makes him want to lash out, he is allowed to remove himself to the side of the classroom, get his ‘angry book’ and draw in it whilst he composes himself, any work missed being made up in his own time. And it is working, instead of lashing out, he draws intricate cartoons of angry monsters and then within 5 minutes is back on track.  Now he needs to grow out of this pretty quickly; he is not going to be having his angry book when he is in year 4, but for now it is working. Michaela Prime could have its strict routines and no-excuses discipline, but it would also need to be able to find ways to help those whose emotional development is not yet age appropriate.

Perhaps half you now think that’s cruel and draconian and the other half outrageously namby-pamby.

Apart from Barry’s chapter ‘From the Top of the Pyramid’ there is one more I really dislike; ‘Dani Quinn’s Competition is Crucial’.  Dani tries to convince us that being bracingly honest with pupils about how well they are doing in relationship with one another is actually, in the long run, doing them a favour because true self esteem comes from

‘being able to face the challenges and setbacks of the world outside the school gates, knowing that you have the resilience to cope with it, knowing from experience that working harder and acting on advice is an essential response to achieve success.’ (Battle Hymn p 134)

Well yes, but Dani believes that this sort of enviably copious self-esteem comes from being tested and knowing where they stand in relationship to others. She contrasts this with pupils (presumably in other schools) who are oblivious to how badly they are doing. I contest this.  Children who struggle academically know exactly how badly they are doing and feel terrible about it, even when their teachers go to great pains to disguise or minimise differences.  The problem with public ranking of children  – how ever kindly done – is that it is rubbing the faces of children who know only too well how much harder they find things in their failure. The younger one is, the more difficult this is to cope with. It’s pretty hard when you are an adult or almost adult! When I was 16, I moved for sixth form to the French Lycée in London (Le Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle de Londres). I moved schools because although I wanted to do science A levels (I wanted to be a doctor at the time), I also wanted to do French – but doing 4 A levels was unheard of at the time – particularly mixing and matching sciences with languages.  For some reason that have nothing to do with growth mindset or applying myself, I had found learning French at school really, really easy. The final O level exam was an hour and a half paper. I’d finished it in 20 minutes. I got an A (there were no A*’s in my day). Apart from the native French speaker, I was the best at French in my school by a long way, though my accent was very –er, English.  Imagine, if you will, the horror of transferring to a school where everybody else speaks French fluently, either having it as a mother tongue, or having been taught in French since the age of 5. I was in the English stream so my science A levels were fine – apart from a few hilarious moments trying to ask the very French lab techs for specific pieces of equipment – Pictionary with laboratory glassware – but French A level was taught entirely in French.  If you asked how a word was spelt, it was spelt in French. If you asked for a definition, it came back in French.

‘Qu’est-ce  que blême’ veut dire?’

‘Ça veut dire ‘blafard.’

‘Qu’est-ce  que ‘blafard’ veut dire?’

‘Ça veut dire ‘blême.’

(They both mean pale, by the way)

The worst bit of the week was La Dictée. This was marked with a starting score of zero, with +1 for every correct word and -1 for every incorrect.  Scores were read out to the class by the teacher starting at the bottom.  I was always bottom – except for once and boy did that guy get some stick ‘you scored lower than Clare man – you loser!’ I think my very first score was about -85. I did get better week on week and around January I got a round of applause from the whole class when I finally broke even and scored 0.  At 17 this was uncomfortable but I could laugh it off. At 13? I think I would have been reluctant to try if it meant being so exposed.  I’m trying to imagine what Dani would say to the adolescent me. I’m sure she would be very encouraging that my score had risen from – 48  to – 26 and big this up as the most improved score. Maybe this would have motivated me? All I can say is that with younger primary children in particular, for children who know only too well that they can’t write as well as their peers, this very knowledge becomes such a stumbling block they can become increasingly reluctant to even try to do something, especially when they fear their effort may be made public or it is some sort of official test.   And what about children with a diagnosed learning difficulty? Guess what child with  Down Syndrome*[1] – you are bottom again! Like every week, like you always will be – how ever hard you try. Of course Dani didn’t write her chapter as a mandate for primary schools. She is writing from a secondary school perspective about secondary school pupils. It’s me who is hauling it into a primary context – maybe she would exclaim ‘of course I don’t think it would work in a primary school!’

Dani seems to see a dichotomy between publically ranking children and deluding children as to how well they are doing compared to what’s ‘normal’ for their group. Our nursery children, despite us trying really hard to blur things, already know that some children are better at certain things than others.  I just don’t accept that children sail through school thinking they are doing fine when they are not. There is only one group for whom this may be true: the ones who find academic success comes easy. Especially the arrogant, cocky sort who have never had any sort of rival. For these kids, competitions with other children like them from a bigger pool might be instructive.

I also refute Danni’s statement that most pupils don’t participate in external competitions and there is little opportunities for authentic competition within schools. Where does she get this from?  In Tower Hamlets through the Tower Hamlets Sports Foundation we have inter school competitions almost weekly across a whole range of sports.  Plus accelerated reader in class competitions, mathletics, timestables rockstars, auditions for plays and performances, interviews to be a play leader. This is not unusual – it is what schools do.  I think Danni is talking about the ‘80’s.

So then, I’d be adamant we needed some kind of filtration before sending children into a Michaela- type atmosphere, removing the ranking and the looking down on other schools, bigging ourselves up by comparing ourselves favourably with other people. If something is really good, it doesn’t need to do this. Like the deep well on the ranch, people will be drawn towards it. Truth is its own propaganda, as Gandhi possibly said.

But looking at ourselves through a Michaela lens allows us also to see the toxins in our own atmosphere.  Rightly rejecting authoritarianism, we have become squeamish of anybody having any authority over children, even wise, authoritative leadership that might make things better rather than worse. This is an over-reaction.  Visionary leadership that seeks not its own end but the empowerment of others should be embraced rather than feared. Where the atmosphere is kindness, gratitude, hard work and empathy, whether at Michaela or elsewhere – there all may thrive.

[1] Yes I do know that having Down Syndrome does not necessarily mean you will be bottom of the class as children with DS are on an ability spectrum with some well able to read, write etc. and some go on to get degrees. The bell curve, however, is shifted to the left – even it is does overlap with the bell curve of children without DS – and having a mild or moderate learning difficulty is more common.

Michaela Prime – is the atmosphere breathable?

Journey to Michaela Prime-A New Hope?

oldprimarytimer, , 24 Comments

How far, and how suitable would the pedagogical and behavioural approaches espoused with such passion and publicity by Michaela Community School be in the context of a primary school? Would a Michaela-style primary work? Would it be appropriate? Should we be leaving the safe, familiar orbit of contemporary primary practice, embarking instead on the journey to Michaela Prime?*[1]  I am not the only primary practitioner to wonder what such a transplant might look like.

Which is unusual, because usually the discussion is about how secondary schools could emulate the best of primary school practice, rather than the other way around. It is a commonplace to hear about secondary teachers visiting years 5 and 6 and being astounded by the high quality work the children routinely produce. I remember one visit by our local secondary where the English teachers looked at the page of typed A4 text I had given the children to read and explained that they would never think to give the children so long a piece of text to read; they would assume that it would be too difficult for a sizable minority of children. Yet here was the whole class reading and responding without difficulty.  Our local secondary school is, by the way, an outstanding institution and gets some of the highest GCSE results in the country despite its very challenging intake, with pupils making exceptional progress. I remember thinking ‘blimey, if that’s what the expectations are in a truly outstanding school – whatever are they like elsewhere?’  And then seeing my own children’s exercise books when they were at their respective secondary schools (not the one cited above) and being frankly appalled. And those endless battles over shoddy homework my primary teacher colleagues and I moan about when our own teenage children –  all of whom were writing at a level 5 standard in year 5 –  scrawl some diabolical, badly spelt, unpunctuated, ungrammatical, scruffy rubbish for their history homework that would barely scrape a level 2 – and refuse to do it again ‘because my teacher says it’s ok.’   Even the one who went to one of the top performing schools in the country – progress 8 above 1.  And then watching Educating Essex/East End/Cardiff and while admiring the compassion, passion and tenacity of the teachers thinking that the behaviour was awful.

Because [provocative statement alert – Quirky Teacher, find a chair and possibly, smelling salts] I reckon the ‘progressive problem’ is really more of a secondary problem.  By ‘progressive’ here, I am meaning the bit where ‘chalk and talk’ is frowned on and the teacher as the ‘guide on the side’ is championed; pedagogical progressivism as it were. As contrasted with behavioural progressivism or possibly curricular progressivism.  We don’t all come in neat little packages with all our ‘progressivisms’ – or ‘traditionalisms’, neatly lined up.   But if it is pedagogical progressivism we are talking about, I don’t think discovery learning has really been the dominant paradigm in primary school since the national strategies came along in 1997. (Except in the Early Years, which operates in its own strange universe).  I remember the excitement, the frisson of getting my hands on a bootleg copy of what was then the National Literacy Project and being so excited that here was all this explicit ‘stuff’ we were directed to teach the children; text types and grammatical structures and punctuation and all sorts. This, after years of children being expected to learn to read by osmosis and to rediscover the entire cannon of western culture afresh on a child-by-child basis.  When I started teaching in 1989, we were meant to do the ‘integrated day’. Now that really was ‘progressive.’  You’d have 5 different activities going on simultaneously with one table of children doing screen printing while another taught themselves some maths, another table wrote a story whilst the fourth table composed something on glockenspiel with the last group doing a history project. I kid you not.  Actually, only the really devoted put up with the glockenspiel but seriously, that was how we were meant to teach.  You didn’t so much teach as track who had finished what. The whole of Friday was given over to ‘finishing off’ with those who had finished everything doing ‘choosing’ for the rest of the day.  There was also a fair bit of designing fancy borders for written work and colouring in illustrations as all writing had to be ‘published’ for a real audience in order to be meaningful for the child. After a while, desperate to have time to actually teach some maths to the whole class, I would do something radical – behind closed doors natch – like teach the whole class art at the same time one afternoon, so leaving the morning free for some maths with the added bonus of being able to tell all the children at the same time something about the art we were doing. This was really seen as terribly bad practice, so I did it furtively. There were no such things as lesson observations or Ofsted in the olden days, so doing your own thing on the sly was a bit easier.

So take it from me, the primary sector was once deeply pedagogically progressive but ran enthusiastically en masse towards the more didactic alterative proffered by the strategies around about the late 90’s.   Instead of Michaela we had ‘the Three Wise Men’ report, the National Strategies and David Blunkett allowing primary schools to focus almost entirely on English, maths and science.  This led to the de facto abandonment of the National Curriculum. That’s not to say we embraced a ‘knowledge curriculum’. But it was the death knell of the teacher as primarily facilitator and rebirth of the teacher as one who taught something to the whole class at the same time.  Whereas secondary schools had a revised National Curriculum in 2008 with its stress on personalised learning and greater emphasis on pupils’ understanding of the concepts, ideas and processes of subjects and on cross-curricular themes, the later Rose Review of the primary curriculum –a wholesale skills based approach – was never put into practice since it was junked by the Coalition government who came into power shortly after it was published. Due to this accident of history, the ‘progressive problem’ is much more a secondary phenomenon than it is a primary one.

It is interesting to note that the Rose Review was intended to move primary teachers away from their didactic focus on the retention and recall of facts and instead to promote personal development, more speaking and listening, more ICT: skills for ‘learning and life’ i.e. to make primary schools less traditional and more progressive. Indeed the Cambridge Review of the Curriculum led by Robin Alexander criticised the Rose Review for not going far enough in attacking primary traditionalism with its privileging of retention and recall of facts, valuing of ‘shallow’ as opposed to ‘deep’ learning, and teachers who operated in ‘transmission mode’.  Both of these heavyweights were alarmed by how traditional primary teaching was and were trying to make it more progressive.

So when I first discovered through the twittersphere the progressive versus traditionalist debates, I must admit at first I was one of those who simply didn’t believe that anyone – save the odd lunatic fringe – was actually doing any of this ‘progressive’ stuff. I was, apparently, in denial.  But then I remembered a very odd course I’d been on, promoting outstanding teaching.  This course, which was cross phase (i.e. included secondary teachers) advocated telling the children absolutely nothing and instead, getting the children to research the topic you were meant to be teaching them. So in a history lesson, the teacher would set up various stations; one would have some books about the period under study, another some photos, another a website, yet another some audio tape of something or other. The children were on a carousel and would spend 10 minutes at each station ‘researching’ with the aim of discovering what the teacher could have told them in 10 minutes.  It was the integrated day all over again, but within one subject.  Then I also remembered a friend – a secondary school teacher – sadly recounting how he had been graded as Requires Improvement because during his yearly lesson observation the observers had arrived too late to see Year 9 act out the trial scene from…whatever book it was…and read aloud the speeches they had painstakingly written and instead came for the 15 minute section where they had to listen to the book being read to them by the teacher. I thought he clearly went to a school run by madmen but slowly I realised what I saw as isolated incidents of barmy tyrants running crazy schools was, in fact, as testified on twitter, rampant in secondary schools.

However, Michaela is bidding us all to up our game and however more traditional primary schools might generally be than secondary schools, clearly the example of Michaela throws down a gauntlet. Michaela-style traditionalism is explicitly knowledge-led.  Imparting knowledge is at the very centre of what it does.  Whereas primary schools, however didactic in their teaching methods, tend to be more skills-focused, with whatever knowledge the skills are currently wearing being seen as more of an accessory than the educational star of the show.   That children may acquire some scientific knowledge as a result of learning the scientific skill of analysing results is seen as a fortunate by-product, collateral grace, as it were.  Would a shift to the Michaela knowledge-led approach be suitable for younger children?

We first need to tease out what we mean by ‘the Michaela approach’ because upon the Michaela table d’hôte there are several things the school espouse that don’t necessarily have to go together.  There is the advocacy of explicit, didactic teaching, the unequivocal stress on knowledge, there is the ‘no excuses’ discipline policy, the commitment to reduce teacher workload, its disavowal of powerpoint as akin to some sort of thought-crime, its philosophy of inclusion, the way it works with parents and its professional development ethos. There are lots of schools that have a very strict ethos; the Harris Academies, or Mossbourne for example, but not in the same way that Michaela does and without the other elements of the Michaela approach. It may be that some of these strands would be effective with younger children whereas others wouldn’t. Let us now consider each element one by one and reflect on whether this approach would work on Michaela Prime. There’s a lot to talk about – too much for one blog so I’m going to split this up. In this part one I’m going to look at didactic teaching and the knowledge-led curriulum.

Didactic teaching

As I have already argued, as far as I can see, in the primary schools I have visited as well as the ones I work in, almost all of the teaching I see from year 1 onwards involves a teacher, or possibly teaching assistant, standing at the front of the class and telling, explaining and modelling stuff to children.  After all, sound-grapheme correspondences are hardly going to explain themselves are they?  Or what each numeral represents, or the maths operator signs. You can’t ‘discover’ what a fronted adverbial is all by yourself. For all of this you need experts who know what they are talking about.   As a result, in primary schools, we do bucket loads of standing up the front telling children stuff. Occasionally this might be interrupted to do a special project for a few lessons; for example where I work years 3 and 4 have just done ‘dramatic maths’ for a lesson a week for a few weeks. But that was on top of their ordinary maths lessons and was more about getting maths into drama than drama into maths and was consolidating what they had already knew by applying it in a dramatic context (find the axe to rescue Red Riding Hood by using co-ordinates) rather than teaching new content. Similarly, children might respond in a ‘groovy’ way to initial teacher input, but the input is still teacher-led and imparts facts. E.g. year 1 children are taught didactically by their teacher that in the past, certain materials like plastic had not yet been invented, so toys were made out of other materials such as wood, china and metal. The children might then be asked to respond by writing labels for our collection of old toys to make our toy museum; labels that include what materials the toy is made from. Because their writing goes on cards next to exhibits rather than in an exercise book does not make this lesson suddenly madly ‘progressive’ or an exercise in pandering to a childish demand for edutainment. If you can do something in a way that is even more interesting than recording knowledge in an exercise book and it doesn’t incur huge opportunity costs along the way – then why not do the more engaging of the two options. Unless we want to make a fetish of avoiding ‘engaging’ opportunities at all costs and are phobic about anything that might stray into being ‘fun’.  The museum idea had the added benefit of getting the children to read everybody else’s work as they acted as tour guides to their parents after school.

I reckon the problem with this sort of approach is when it is seen as suitable for year 10. With younger children, because their reading and writing skills are in their infancy, what they can read and write about is so limited, so adding a bit of extra ‘wow’ to make the game worth the candle is a great idea.   Just like year 5 who are learning the recorder and can only play about 4 notes – enough for jingle bells anyway.  Their teacher adds a backing track and suddenly it sounds amazing and they are as pleased as punch with themselves.  But when you are 14 and have the world of knowledge available for you to read about, backing tracks and making museums and such likes are unnecessary gimmicks. So with the caveat that the younger the children are, the greater the need to embed some of their reading and writing  – and occasionally maths – in a real world context, then I don’t see any problem at all in saying that the vast majority of teaching at Michaela Prime will be didactic. As it already is in most primary schools, most of the time. Especially in the mornings when we teach English and maths. More of afternoons later.

A knowledge-led curriculum

Dominating all else in primary schools, warping all that lies within its purview is the accountability field. Since primary schools are held accountable via sats for English and maths and not for all the other subjects we are meant to teach, English and maths get the lion’s share of everything.  Now I really don’t want to get too bogged down in the arid skills versus knowledge debate, which often seems to turn on semantics, but it seems to me that in learning English and maths learning how to use these tools (skills) is just as important – and takes up more time – than learning the knowledge inherent in these disciplines. Certainly, previously there has been a tendency to see English and maths as all skill. Whereas reading and writing cannot even get started without knowing what words mean, what the sound-grapheme correspondences are, what the graphemes look like. However being able to blend those phonemes together into an actual word is surely a skill – and one that can take some children a really long time to learn.  Similarly, children just have to learn that certain numerals correspond to certain quantities whereas other squiggles are instructions (or operators) to do something with the numerals.  And while I’d go to the stake for saying that children need to have automatic recall of their number bonds to and within first 10 and then then 20 and excellent times table knowledge, they also need to understand when multiplying numbers might be more useful than adding them. Is this a skill or knowledge?  There are limits on transmission teaching – especially in maths. I can explain to you again and again why multiplication is a quicker, more efficient method than using repeated addition, but at some point, each individual child has to ‘get’ why – to see it for themselves in some magical internal process that can’t be drilled into being, but has to be…dare I say…discovered? But not discovered in a vacuum – discovered by scaffolding from an expert other, as Vygotsky put it.

However, it is fair to say that in the stress primary teachers lay on children really grasping what the maths they are taught actually mean, there has, hitherto, been some throwing out of the baby with the bathwater.  Not enough time spent on learning times tables, for example –although the demands of first the SATS mental arithmetic test and now the arithmetic paper mean that every school I know has been drilling children in these for at least the last 5 years. 10 years ago we would have shied away from drilling until we were really sure the children ‘understood’ what multiplication actually means – these days we get that some children learn by rote and then understand whereas others understand and then learn by rote. My bête noire is poor knowledge of number bonds.  How many children become overwhelmed by maths around about year 4 because they are still counting 5+7 on their fingers?!  No wonder they find understanding column methods hard because all their working memory is taken up counting on from one 1-digit number to another.  I blame the numeracy strategy for over-prioritising number lines over partitioning methods (5+7=5+5+2=12) that involve calculation allied with instant recall. We need to spend far longer on ensuring no child leaves ks1 without all their number bonds in and within 10 secure.  Never mind the phonics check, bring in a number bonds check too – even more important – but harder to learn – than times tables. We teach using the mathsmastery curriculum which does devote a considerable amount of time to number bonds. Not enough for all children to have them securely, unfortunately.  So we drill the children in them frequently, often using this marvellous game (which also tests table knowledge for those further along the line).

So what with reading, writing and maths dominating the curriculum and teachers perceiving what they are doing as teaching skills (even though in fact they teach a fair bit of knowledge), and knowledge-heavy subjects such as history, geography and science having miniscule amounts of curriculum time, knowledge has taken a bit of a back seat. Or possibly has been relegated to the boot. So in the afternoons when primary schools finally get around to teaching something that isn’t English or maths, at that point, it may be that some schools – maybe most– (who really knows) come over all progressive.

I confess a good few years ago we did have a brief dalliance with the International Primary Curriculum which does operate in a progressive paradigm both in terms of what the teacher does and what is taught; students first researching whatever they are meant to be learning about and then recording it. It’s actually really hard for 9-year-olds to research stuff properly. The teacher usually ends up telling them or making resources where the knowledge they need is so explicit that they might as well have cut out the middle man and just told them in the first place. The naturally curious, self-motivated middle class girls quite liked it; everyone else found it frustrating and boring.

The IPC used to market itself by telling us about its exciting year 3 topic on chocolate.  The logic seemed to be, because chocolate is nice to eat, learning about the history of chocolate will be more interesting than learning about the history of the Romans.  Actually both are fascinating – but which is more important?   Which is more powerful in helping you understand more about British and European history, how Christianity became a global religion?  Knowledge may be power, but some knowledge is more powerful than others.  Since curriculum time is a precious, finite resource, we must spend it wisely on teaching areas with the biggest pay-offs for the children. The IPC developed in the context of International schools serving Western children of the oil industry employees in Middle Eastern states where learning about the Tudors was irrelevant to, say, Dutch, Swedish and Bengali children growing up in Qatar. So it intentionally had topics that were as generic as possible, focusing on transferable skills.  But for schools based in Britain, surely learning mainly about British history makes sense.  And just as importantly, which has more resources readily available to the hard-pressed teacher, Aztecs or Romans?  Which is more likely to further skew the teacher’s work:life balance in the direction of burnout?

I think we can all take it as read that they won’t be doing the IPC at Michaela Prime.  I think they’ll be doing something more like what we started this September – influenced a great deal by what I had read about Michaela and in particular blogs written by staff who work there. I remember being particularly shocked when I read something by the headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh saying that we should expect children to remember the knowledge we teach them so that 5 years after we taught it, they still know it.  I was shocked not because I disagreed but because up until then, I hadn’t ever thought about what we taught the children – except in English, maths and possibly science – in that way. Before reading Katharine, if the National Curriculum said to teach year 4 the Aztecs, we’d teach it. Whether they remembered anything about the Aztecs by the time they got to year 5 was not something that had ever, in my wildest dreams, occurred to me.  But now someone had said it, of course it was important. Why were we teaching history to primary pupils anyway? (Secret generally understood guilty primary teacher answer: to get them to do more writing, without calling it literacy and maybe to up the amount of art they do – I mean writing in role as a soldier stationed at Hadrian’s Wall and making a papier mâché  Egyptian mummy  is  history, isn’t it?)  So with Katharine’s words ringing in my ears, and then reading all about knowledge organisers from Joe Kirby and how they  specify, ‘in meticulous detail, the exact facts, dates, events, characters, concepts and precise definitions that all pupils are expected to master in long-term memory,’ I took another look at our curriculum and decided we could do better.

The overweening problem in the primary curriculum is time.  With the mornings colonised by English and maths, that leaves us with 10 hours a week to teach 10 subjects plus PHSE, or 7 and a half if we want to include an end of day story, which we do. In our school, PE and music take up one afternoon – being taught by specialists while teachers have PPA– and French another part afternoon. So that leaves geography, history, RE, art, DT, science and computing crammed into 3 afternoons.  171 hours a year or, if we divide time equally between these 7, 28 and a half hours each a year.  You can see why double counting making an Egyptian mummy as both art and history appeals now can’t you?  But if we want to do history properly – teaching the children some actual historical facts for example – that possibly they may remember into adulthood and certainly will help them with their GCSE’s – then we need to think really hard about exactly what facts, dates and people we want them to know about given the very limited time they will actually have to be taught this.

Our solution was to divide the year into 3 week curriculum blocks, each fitting into a 12 week ‘term’.  So in each ‘term’ a year group will study four different subjects, each for 3 weeks*[2]. When the 3 weeks are over, even if the teacher hasn’t finished, they have to start the next block on the next subject.  This focuses the mind wonderfully – unlike our old block system where topics went on and on endlessly and then we ran out of time for certain subjects altogether. Sometimes these terms are shorter than calendar terms – for example in the Autumn term we’ve just had there were two spare weeks at the end for a mini topic on Christmas which included RE (based on some element of the significance of Christmas for Christians), rehearsing and doing a nativity play, a literacy focus on poems with a Christmas theme and a Christmas party. Next term is 12 weeks and the final term is 13, giving us a spare week at the end of the year for taking your new class for a couple of days, doing some art for your new classroom, learning some more poems (we have a poetry week at the end of every half term with all classes learning a poem by heart and performing it on the Friday) some extra phse reflecting on the year and having a class party. When Easter is earlier it does mean the second ‘term’ gets split across the Easter holidays – which is annoying. Personally I am all in favour of decimalising the date of Easter but since I am unlikely to be Pope anytime soon, I doubt that’s an argument I’m going to win.

The teachers like the new system. It makes them feel less guilty. On top of everything else teachers endure, they feel guilt about not being able to teach all the subjects properly because there isn’t enough time – as if they had any control over that.  Now they don’t feel guilty. I say ‘you must teach geography for the next three weeks and then stop’ and they do. The finite number of lessons and not too distant cut off point make planning a sequence of 9 lessons really straightforward.  No timewasting fluffy activities, lots of whole class reading and then some writing – but proper geographical writing, not literacy with a vague geographical theme. Yes, Egyptian mummies and Roman shields still get made – in art lessons! We can still use a topic approach – the artwork just comes after the humanities. Often the humanities learning links to what we are learning in literacy. For example, year 4 study Beowolf in English, learn about the Saxons and Vikings in history and make a fabulous Grendel in art.  The children seem to like it too. Certainly it could be dry and boring in the hands of a teacher with poor expository skills, but any teacher worth their salt will be able to bring the subject alive and make it engaging in its own right.

At Michaela they have subject teams who produce subject booklets for each year group. This is not an approach that transfers easily to a one form entry primary school!  The main problems with introducing a knowledge-led curriculum into primary schools would seem to be logistical rather than pedagogical. We are not subject specialists. There may well not be a single person on the staff team who has an A level – let along a degree – in the subject we want help with. Text books for the topics we want to teach don’t exist. Non fiction books are expensive and not always pitched at the level we’d want.  For art and computing, we buy in expert help. For the content heavy humanities plus science, we’ve had a go this year. These CGP books for ks2 history were a start but contain far more information that it is possible to cover in the time given – but we really need to write better material for ourselves for next year. That will be our job for staff meetings in the summer term.

At Michaela they do two trips a year – the whole year group going out at the same time.  I don’t know what’s typical for a secondary school, although I don’t think my own children went much more frequently.  However, I’d want more trips than that.  Maybe if the school were situated somewhere remote the cost:benefit analysis would be different, but since we are situated just outside the City of London and have three museums in walking distance (The Museum of London, the  Museum of Childhood and the Geffreye Museum) and can get to Tate Modern and St Paul’s Cathedral in 20 minutes on a bus and the South Kensington museums in not much longer, it would be criminal not to exploit this, especially since not many of our children visit this sort of place with their families.  We tend to do a trip every half term – trying to get it to fall within the weeks when that particular block is occurring. On top of that we have visitors into school – the London Sinfonia with year 1, for example, or Spitalfields Music with years 3 and 5, or various arts organisations.  Where possible we schedule these to happen in the morning – to interrupt English and maths- subjects that get plenty of air time, rather than taking precious time away from subjects that do not get enough time anyway. Of course, trips need to be planned well to augment what is going on in class and not just as a diversion.

But how do we make sure that children remember what we have taught them? At Michaela the knowledge organisers are revised for homework. Pupils quiz themselves on one knowledge organiser from one subject every night. They cover up the concept, write out the definition and then check they have got it right, checking themselves again and again for at least 30 minutes until they are sure they are ready for their quiz in class the next day. Would that work with primary pupils?

At primary school, our first priorities are that children learn to read fluently and for pleasure and know their times tables and number bonds. Nothing is more important for their learning than this. So while we do give children their knowledge organisers for homework, it is a lot less intense than the Michaela regime, since we want them reading at home and learning their number facts at home.  And doing some Matheletics. So, the weekend prior to each block, the knowledge organiser is taken home and shared with parents. This is a good way of parents knowing what their child will be learning in the coming weeks.  They are encouraged to read their knowledge organiser every day.  Then the first weekend of the first week of the block, children do a multiple choice quiz with their parents based on the knowledge organiser, which they are encouraged to consult to find any answers they do not yet know.  The second weekend they do a second quiz, again consulting their organiser if they need to, then on the last Friday they do a final quiz  in school without their knowledge organiser. Almost all children score 9/10 or 10/10 in these final quizzes.  But here is the important part. Unlike Michaela, we do not have knowledge organisers for all subjects. We do not have them for art, DT or computing – so when the topic block is one of these subjects, children revise from a previous block and have a quiz from that subject.  As Joe Kirby reminds us in his chapter on homework as revision, the overwhelming consensus from cognitive science is that we should quiz ourselves frequently on stuff we have learnt as testing, especially testing a few weeks after material has been learnt, interrupts forgetting. We haven’t been doing this long enough for us to see whether children actually are retaining information in the longer term. But I’m certainly going to introduce end of year super quizzes to gauge how well it has worked.  One thing I haven’t done yet is gather all the knowledge organisers and quizzes into one ‘knowledge book; for each year group. This is then used not only for revision but also a source of work for if a teacher is off sick, a child is sent out of class or hasn’t got their library book or PE kit etc.   Then they read their knowledge book.

In conclusion, then, the didactic teacher-led approach of Michaela is easily transferable to a primary setting – mainly because that is pretty much what most primary schools do anyway, at least from year 1 up and with the possible exception of the afternoons. Having a knowledge-led curriculum would have practical challenges given the primary teachers are generalists, and that the primary curriculum is ludicrously over full, but there is nothing inappropriate about a knowledge-led curriculum per se for younger children.  I would wish for more trips and visitors to enrich the curriculum than happens at Michaela – particularly in schools lucky enough to be situated within easy travelling distance of great cultural centres. At Michaela they do use talk partners. However, given the younger age of primary children and the importance of them being able to communicate confidently orally as well as on paper, there would be more talk partner and paired work and in the unlikely circumstance that Katharine Birbalsingh should ask my advice prior to setting up a primary school, I’d strongly advocate some drama work prior to writing.  I’d also tell her that  I don’t think the sky would fall in if every now and then the children at Michaela Prime worked in a group to discuss something. For example, while a thorough knowledge of RE is important, part of RE is also about working out what your own commitments are and group discussion is invaluable for this.  Persuasive writing means being able to respect and indeed argue in favour of points of view you actually disagree with, so opportunities to orally debate and argue with peers are a necessary part of a primary curriculum. There’s also no chapter on maths in the Battle Hymn. I’d be adamant that primary children need a concrete-pictorial-abstract approach alongside high quality teacher exposition.  So maybe I’m advocating a Michaela-lite approach.

What Katharine and the Michaela gang have done is move the Overton window of educational debate towards the traditional. The Overton window is a term from politics which describes to range of ideas that the public (or in our case the teaching profession) will accept. Anything outside of the window is dismissed out of hand as mad extremist claptrap. So, for example, some Tories were dismayed when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour party because it meant that the kind of Socialism they thought had been discredited for ever was now perceived as a valid option.  Only a very few of years ago, traditional teaching would have been laughed out of town. Now discussion of it flows through the blogosphere, the Battle Hymn is flying off the shelves and people flock to see Michaela with their own eyes.

In part two I will reflect on the approach to behaviour at Michaela and maybe more.  Will their ‘no excuses’ philosophy work in a primary setting, and if it does, should it?

[1] Call me childish, I just think Michaela Prime sounds cool –like a planet far beyond our galaxy that would take a long and possibly perilous journey to get to. Much more fun than referring to ‘a Michaela-style Primary School.’ Then adding ‘a new hope’ seemed irresistible.  Maybe Part 2 will be ‘the Enquire(er) strikes Back?’ Followed by Part 3:  The Return of the Vygostki. Actually Michaela should henceforth be known as Rogue One…ok I’m going to stop now…

[2] Yes, the maths doesn’t quite work with there being 7 subjects and 3×3 week blocks . So the odd numbered year groups do 2 lots of geography and one lot of history, vice versa for the even numbered year groups, you only do art or dt in a given term, not both and for one term out of the three a year group will skip either RE or computing and your art will be done…in the morning!

Journey to Michaela Prime-A New Hope?

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.

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