Category: Education

  • Reading & Writing for Pleasure

    Reading & Writing for Pleasure

    Just read the excellent Reading and Writing for Pleasure: A Framework for Practice and Approaches to Reading and Writing for Pleasure by the Open University’s Reading for Pleasure programme. Plus the TES interview with Professor Teresa Cremin about how to encourage more children to read for pleasure.

    The takeaways seem to me to be ones involving the authenticity of reading and writing activities:

    • a critical importance of developing Writing for Pleasure AND Reading for Pleasure;
    • the importance of motivating children to develop positive identities of themselves as readers and writers (“negotiated and co-constructed in and through interaction with others in different social environments”)
    • enabling children to feel they have agency, competence and social connection through reading and writing;
    • the importance of time devoted to access to (a wide range of) texts;
    • positive reading experiences lead to a desire to write;
    • learner-led social interactions (talking about/sharing reading and writing; open-ended discusions) is motivational;
    • teachers who are readers and writers themselves are positively influential.

    Added notes to this over on my digital garden for future reference.

     

  • OFSTED try to “do” literature

    OFSTED try to “do” literature

    Amusing – and chilling – piece by the wonderful Michael Rosen about part of the recent OFSTED subject report into English. Rosen examines the controversial paragraph 90 of the report which attempts to insist that only texts of “literary merit” should be studied in schools and attempts a sleight of hand to conflate “easy” texts with ones that have contemporary social themes. He views the paragraph as an attempt to smear teachers.

    Rosen does a close analysis of the paragraph and sensibly draws attention to the ideological purpose behind its recommendations. He dismisses the idea of there being a gold standard of “literary merit” easily – though notes that it’s an aspect of “power-play” and “Control through priviledge”. (As an aside: I find that the sort of people who fervently believe in the type of “literary merit” discussed here are usually those who don’t actually read very much.).

    The crux of the matter is the way that reading in schools is reduced to something called “challenging vocabulary and structures”:

    Now we know what these people think reading in schools should be for. We are in pursuit of the ineffable, unfindable mirage of ‘literary merit’ while doing hard words and hard structures because next year, there’ll be harder words and harder structures.

    Read Ofsted try to ‘do’ literature and end up with pap HERE.

  • Make Children Happier

    Make Children Happier

    As part of a series arguing for revitalising policies a future Labour government should adopt, Polly Toynbee proposes three key educational reforms:

    • “Bring back those 1,416 Sure Start centres that have closed”
    • “Schools need just one target: make children happier and education a pleasure”
    • “kickstart FE, with the resources and respect it deserves”

    Toynbee ends her piece by pointing out the fundamental issue of education at the moment:

    Too much education is designed to weed students out, not to find out their skills and encourage them in what they can do. Too many become alienated from learning altogether. Start with the idea that education matters for every child, at every level. They will never learn much if schools are places for exams, inspections, tests and torture, for teachers and pupils alike.

    Read the whole piece HERE.

  • Indicators of an Effective Teacher?

    Indicators of an Effective Teacher?

    Digging through one of my boxes of stuff, I found this copy of Elizabeth Perrott’s 1982 Effective Teaching, a book I’d bought and intended to read but had put away for the future. It’s a weirdly prescient book: outling many of the approaches to teaching that are currently being promoted in schools. According to the book, Perrott was the director of the International Microteaching Unit at the University of Lancaster. I guess the term “microteaching” captures the general pedagogical approach to classroom practice in schools at the moment. 

    I’m particularly taken by the question of what are the indicators of an effective teacher, presented early in the book. Perrott discusses the observable indicators of effective teaching and draws on three groups of research studies (David Ryans, Ned Flanders and Barak Rosenshine & Norma Furst). Early in Effective Teaching, Perrott presents this table:

    Seems to me very clear and useful.

  • Talk for Learning

    Talk for Learning

    Notes from A Dialogic Teaching Companion by Robin Alexander (2020).

    Chapter 2 – Talk for Learning

    In this chapter, Alexander explores the relationship between talk and the development of a child. He examines the shift in the 1970s between the child as “lone scientist” to “apprentice”. The persistence of recitation and the typical oral classroom interactions are explored. Alexander goes on to explain the research-supported positive benefits of classroom talk. Much of the chapter is given to the way in which talk has been stigmatised by politicians and has been now largely removed from the school curriculum, despite the evidence of its decisive role in teaching and learning. He explains the origins of Oracy as a term and discusses talk as curriculum and talk as pedagogy. He concludes the chapter by insisting on teacher agency and autonomy in order to enable children to think for themselves.

  • Prologue to A Dialogic Teaching Companion

    Prologue to A Dialogic Teaching Companion

    Notes from A Dialogic Teaching Companion by Robin Alexander (2020)

    Chapter 1 – Prologue

    In the Prologue, Robin Alexander gives a case for teaching talk as an essential tool in teaching and learning. He describes the positive value of dialogic teaching and asserts that there is a strong evidence base for using dialogic approaches. He presents his involvement with oracy since the 1980s. Alexander goes on to consider the broader civic value of dialogic teaching in what he terms a “collision of discourses”.

    • Alexander broadly identifies the benefits of dialogic teaching for students and teachers.
    • ” Dialogic teaching is both talk and more than talk, for it enacts a dialogic stance on knowledge, learning, social relations and education itself.”
    • Dialogic teaching is more “consistently searching” than Q+A and everyday talk.
    • “dialogic teaching also celebrates talk for talk’s sake, relishing language in all its forms and rejoicing in expression, articulation, communication, discussion and argumentation. And, in so doing, dialogue takes us beyond classroom transactions into the realm of ideas and values, for dialogue is as much a stance or outlook – on human relationships, knowledge, education, culture and society – as it is a pedagogical technique.”
    • Despite this, Alexander argues that classroom talk is seen as marginal and negatively. Claims in 2012 that a minister did not want to encourage “idle chatter in class” and that fostering Tracy might imperil literacy.
    • May 2019: All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) launched public enquiry into oracy, “Speaking for Change”. Believes the report will have limited impact.
    • Alexander “emphasises the idea of repertoire and characterises dialogic teaching as an approach that encourages teachers to acquire and refine a broad array of interactive skills, strategies and moves, but to exercise their own judgement about how these are most effectively applied to the particular contexts in which they are working, using dialogic prin­ciples as reference points rather than obediently applying the nostrums of ‘best practice’.”
    • Also emphasised is the responsibility of the teacher’s talk “because although the student’s talk manifests and drives his/her thinking and understanding and is therefore our ultimate concern, it is through the teacher’s talk that the student’s talk is mainly prompted, accelerated and enriched – or not, as the case may be.”
    • Originally, Towards Dialogic Teaching was drafted as part of a QCA professional development pack but “fell mould of rivalry between the QCA and National Literacy Strategy”. This book is the successor.
    • Dialogic teaching has a “sense of a journey” (Alexander refers to Bakhtin’s “neither a first nor last word”).
    • Alexander gives an account of his own development from 1980s onwards. Early work “confirmed not only the near-ubiquity of recitation -that familiar exchange structure of closed ‘test’ teacher question, recall student answer and minimal though usually judgemental teacher feedback – but also problems in the pat­terns of teaching which at the time were being advanced as recitation’s anti­dote: protracted and unstructured reading and writing activities associated with low levels of pupil time on task and relatively superficial monitoring by the teacher; and an ostensibly gentler and more open kind of talk character­ised by teacher-controlled pseudo-enquiry rather than genuine discussion, by hyperbolic but uninformative praise {‘Brilliant!’ ‘Fantastic!’ ‘Well done!’…) rather than useful feedback, and by a low level of cognitive demand.”
    • Next stage of Alexander’s work (international in nature) culminated in Culture and Pedagogy. He identifies four subsequent strands of inquiry. The fourth, translating the insights from international study into viable classroom strategies is identified as most important, helping teachers explore alternatives to Q+A (he calls it IRF/IRE: Initiation, student Response and teacher Feedback or Evaluation).
    • From 2014 to 2017 Alexander and Frank Hardman conducted an EEF-funded project (Randomised Control Trial, the “gold standard” of educational research): “The RCT, which was wholly independent, reported that after a dialogic teaching programme of only 20 weeks, preceded by training for the teachers involved, students in the intervention group were up to two months ahead of their control group peers in standardised tests of English, mathematics and science.”
    • A dialogic stance informed the Cambridge Primary Review: pedagogy AND purpose of education. “as well as advocating dialogue in classroom interaction, we argued that education is itself a dialogue – of people, obviously, but also of ideas, arguments, values, cultures and ways of knowing.” (This is a change from pedagogic practice to educational stance.)
    • Alexander is now “increasingly exercised by what I see as a widening gulf between the ways of talking and reasoning that we try to cultivate inside the school and those that students encounter outside it.” He explains this as: ” On the one hand we have the sedimented habits and values embodied in school curriculum domains and the more or less rational and courteous ways of accessing, interrogating and verifying the knowledge that such domains embody. But on the other hand we witness the sometimes raucous free-for-all of social media, the ascendancy of ephemeral and anony­mous online content over the verifiable and attributable knowledge of book, studio and laboratory, the mischievous anarchy of fake news, the reduction of judgemental nuance to the binary ‘like’/’dislike’, the trolling and abuse that for many people have replaced discussion and debate, and the sense not so much that truth claims are open to question, as of course they always should be, as that for many in the public and political spheres truth is no longer a standard to which they feel morally obliged to aspire.”
    • He argues that dialogic teaching confronts this “collision of discourses”. The role of social media is presented (eg. Trump’s climate change denial and its opposition by young people). Dialogue is both an end-in-itself and a means to many ends, a way of being, of surviving.
  • “build a ladder of opportunity so that the able can get ahead”

    “build a ladder of opportunity so that the able can get ahead”

    Provocative New Statesman article by Adrian Wooldridge which insists that the key to the “reinvention” of the Labour Party is by going back to basics – appealing to the “new working class that is growing alongside the old one” – and reinstating a belief in meritocracy, “the belief that individuals should be treated according to their own merits rather than their family connections or membership of various pre-determined groups, and that the state’s job is to build a ladder of opportunity so that the able can get ahead regardless of where they are born”.

    Wooldridge almost exclusively focuses on education as the laboratory for this meritocratic reinvention. For him, the Tories have seized control of middle and working class aspirations which were once the ambitions of the early Labour Party and Labour governments. “Meritocracy is the most successful big idea the Labour Party has ever embraced” Wooldridge argues and asserts that when Labour has rejected the meritocratic idea it has been destroyed as a governing party. Labour embraced egalitarianism and the result has been a rejection of the party at the ballot box.

    Much of the article is given to narrating how early Labour/Fabian thinkers like the Webbs were advocates of meritocracy and “wanted to turn the British education system into a giant capacity-catching machine, primarily through a combination of new grammar schools and new universities, in order to rescue “talented poverty from the shop or plough” and allocate it to the most powerful jobs in the country”. He goes on to describe how Labour leaders such as Ramsay MacDonald, Herbert Morrison, Ernest Bevin, Nye Bevan, Denis Healey and Harold Wilson all promoted meritocracy. Blair’s New Labour “was essentially an undisguised enthusiasm for opportunity and upward mobility… Out went the old collectivist dream in the form of Clause IV and trade union barons. In came enterprise, self-help and the fruits of ability”.

    When it came to schools, Blair’s meritocracy “infuriate[d] his party’s left by taking the Conservatives’ criticisms of “bog-standard comprehensives” seriously, hiring Andrew Adonis to drive an ambitious educational reform programme from Downing Street (the Department for Education being considered untrustworthy). He subjected all state schools to a Gradgrindian regime of testing, inspection, league tables and competition. He introduced academy schools, free from local educational authority control and empowered to develop their own ethos and to break the “cycle of low expectations” in the public sector.”

    Wooldridge champions grammar schools (and modern academisation) as instruments of meritocratic change. While he acknowledges that “grammar schools had a dark shadow in the form of the secondary moderns” he believes that Labour MPs turned against grammar schools due to complaints from parents. He imagines other timelines where a more grammars could have been built, a German tripartite system thrived, comprehensives could be “academically rigorous” or public schools forced to take on more scholarship children.

    He singles out Anthony Crossland and Shirley Williams as Labour ministers who abandoned the meritocratic idea and became seduced by progressive ideas (he uses the term “equality machines”). Wooldridge is clear: “The result was to reverse the great social revolution engineered by the 1945 Labour government.”

    Because Labour sought to define itself as an egalitarian party, it enabled the Thatcherism to assert itself: “By favouring equality over meritocracy and community over competition, the Labour Party had unwittingly paved the way for an ambitious programme of privatisation and “rolling back the frontiers of the state”.”

    Wooldridge describes the recent Labour Party as an organisation opposed to meritocracy, ability, acadamisation and high-stakes testing. He sees this happening at a time when “the educational reforms that had begun with Thatcher and that both Blair and David Cameron had championed were beginning to work.” He also believes that “academy schools are coming into their own” citing the highly-selective East London state school Brampton Manor Academy as an example (he says that the school won more places to Oxford this year than Eton School). “This selectivity allows Brampton to cultivate a rigorously academic atmosphere,” he asserts.

    His proposal for Starmer is “to focus on reinventing the meritocratic tradition: celebrate schools such as Brampton Manor Academy; call for a new generation of technical schools and colleges, like the ones that are so successful in Germany, that will provide a ladder of opportunity to people who don’t want to go to university; and point out that, for all their waffle about the north, the Tories are still the party of unmerited wealth.”

    I’m not sure whether Wooldridge himself has been nostalgically seduced by the supposed post-war Golden Age of grammar schools or not. His “meritocracy” seems to me to be quite narrow: enabling a minority of the most “able” middle-class children or those from vigorously upwardly aspirational working class families to go on to Oxbridge and then into public life or business. There is little about the majority of working class children who would be failed by his meritocratic ideal. The highly-selective successful academies he wants to see thrive come at the expense of the great numbers of children from disadvantaged families who end up in failing academies or joins the thousands permanently excluded from education. Wooldridge doesn’t seem to be able to see the “dark shadows” already cast across the educational landscape.

  • To Coalition and Beyond: Back to the Future?

    To Coalition and Beyond: Back to the Future?

    Notes from English and Its Teachers by Simon Gibbons (2017)

    In Chapter 6, Simon Gibbons brings the book up to date (to 2017 which – after Covid 19 and the lockdowns – seems an age ago). He presets a largely bleak and somewhat dispiriting picture of current English teaching in schools which Gibbons feels has suffered under 20+ years of direct government intervention. He points out some small attempts at presenting alternative approaches to teaching English – Looking for the Heart of English, John Richmond’s proposals and a (new) National Writing Project – but the his summation of the state of English is quite alarming.

    • 2010 general election saw Tory/Liberal Democrat government. Secretary of State for Education was Michael Gove who “had deeply and steadfastly held views on the nature of the subject and what should be taught in schools. He expressed these views in ways that left no room for debate, and which very quickly ensured he was at odds with large parts of the English teaching community”.
    • “With words like ‘birthright’and ‘proud’, Gove suggested English teachers were denying children their entitlement and there was more than the suggestion that English as a subject had an explicit job to do in establishing a culture of Britishness, however that most elusive of terms might have been defined.”
    • “Gove’s words suggested an explicit ideological reshaping of the subject.”
    • Gibbon’s argues that Gives pronouncements were not evidence-informed.
    • Gove launched curriculum review in 2010. Panel consisted of Tim Oates, Mary James, Andrew Pollard and Dylan William.
    • Gove’s style “deliberately antagonistic”.
    • Undoubtedly sympathy from some English teachers for aspects of Gove’s reforms (Leavisite tradition would have welcomed focus on Literature).Controlled assessments also meant that students’ experiences of GCSE was dominated by assessment rather than learning (“it certainly narrowed many students’ experiences of English”).

    EXPERT PANEL REPORT

    • “The criticism of the levelling culture – with children more concerned to know what level they were at rather than what they could do and needed to do to improve — was a refreshing public acknowledgement of what the profession knew to be the consequence of the assessment and accountability framework.”
    • The report placed emphasis on the development of speaking and listening skills and insisted that all teachers should receive professional development on how to promote oracy in their subject.

    THE NEW, NEW NATIONAL CURRICULUM

    • There was a “disparity” between the report and the new curriculum (leading Mary James and Andrew Pollard to resign).
    • “It emerged that the English draft orders had been written by a single consultant contracted by the Department for Education: Janet Brennan, a former member of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate and expert in the primary sector, particularly the teaching of phonics.”
    • The real author may have been Ruth Miskin, a commercial writer who worked for a company that sold phonics reading schemes to schools.
    • “Speaking and listening merely got a mention, and though oracy was instated to a certain extent in final drafts, beyond a general statement of importance the focus was on performance and presentation and debate, not on developing language – nor on the links between oracy and learning which had figured so clearly in the Expert Panel report.”
    • In KS1 the teaching of synthetic phonics was “central message” and in KS2 “a heavy emphasis on the teaching of grammar”.
    • “Where primary orders had page upon page of explicit content, the secondary orders, with the exception of statutory reading, set down few requirements. As one might have predicted, the reading specified was heavily weighted to the English literary canon, with Shakespeare, nineteenth century prose and so-called representative Romantic poetry all included. Scant attention was paid to speaking and listening, and whole areas of study — the media and moving image, multicultural texts, drama, etc. — were either completely ignored or mentioned only in passing. Creativity — one of the four Cs of the previous curri­culum, and something central to the work of so many English teachers — was essentially written out; the one mention of the word came in the primary orders when, in referring to the long list of grammatical terms to be taught to pupils, the document stated, with no hint of irony, ‘This is not intended to constrain or restrict teachers’ creativity, but simply to provide the structure on which they can construct exciting lessons’ (Department for Education, 2013a, p. 5). Not a single mention of children’s creativity across the whole 5-16 curriculum in English, and no mention of the word at all across Key Stages 3 and 4. The times had changed.”
    • “There were some interesting developments, too, for example in the requirement for author study in Key Stage 3, where students would be expected to study two writers per year, looking across their oeuvre rather than at individual works. This, allied with the instruction to study complete texts, certainly suggested a curriculum that was intended to encourage teachers to work with their classes on a broader and deeper range of texts, rather than studying one class novel a year as may have become the orthodox approach.”
    • Gibbons points out this reflects the “direction of travel” in the US: the influence of E.D. Hirsch and Common Core. The rhetoric was that English departments would build their own curriculum with content paying attention to the particular communities in which the schools were sited.
    • “in a sense the term National Curriculum was effectively losing whatever meaning it may once have had”.
    • Gibbons argues that 20 years of direct government interventions in English had “deprofessionalised” teachers combined with high-stakes assessment and heavy accountability. This undoubtedly influenced English.
    • National Curriculum assessment levels done away with (along with APP). These had created an “unhelpful levelling culture”. Reality was that removing levels wouldn’t change the culture. Departments acted pragmatically: some continued to use levels/APP, some used the new 9-1 grading system, some departments created their own systems (based on growth mindsets).
    • There was an “absence of the really important questions about what is valued in English, and how that is best assessed – the sorts offundamental questions about assessment that LATE had been raising 60 years before but which were no longer really part of any detectable dis­course. The conversations were about what kind of grading system would be most effective in demonstrating progress and generating data”.
    • 2015 DfE final report into assessment without levels was “informed and reasonable” warning of dangers of bought-in systems, made it clear OFSTED had no favoured form and that formative assessment should be at the heart of school practice.

    REFORMS TO ENGLISH EXAMINATIONS

    • Initial plans to reform exams – unpopular with the profession – were not enacted. GCSEs retained but replaced with numbers rather than grades.
    • Initial progress measures revamped to include Literature after initial outrage. Best score of Language or Literature would count double in league tables. “This move seemed to assure that the long-established tradition of the vast majority of pupils following an integrated language and literature course at Key Stage 4 would remain in place.”
    • Texts like To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men were no longer teachable (or not assessable). A standalone speaking and listening assessment introduced and all coursework and controlled conditions assessments were removed. An emphasis on unseen texts appearing in terminal exams was established. AS and A2 assessments were decoupled.

    OFSTED’S VIEWS

    • Two reports: English at the Crossroads (2009) and Moving English Forward (2012). Authored by Phillip Jarrett, chief inspector of English. Worrying trends particularly in early years of secondary schooling. Confusion around KS3 caused by removed of KS3 tests “reinforcing the notion that a culture had been created in which meaning and worth is only really bestowed on that which is assessed and measured”.
    • Moving English Forward criticised schools that had no rationale for KS3 other than referring to GCSE exams at some point in the future.
    • Gibbons suggests that if “blatantly traditionalist” reforms had been introduced 20 years earlier then there would have been mass rejection. Years of standards-based reform and accountability made collective action unthinkable.

    SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE: THREE PROJECTS

    1 – Looking for the Heart of English

    • Sue Horner, head of the English team at QCDA attempted to activate a debate about what English should really look like. Echoed the English 21 initiative. Began as a personal project. It “was not sustainable as a venture”.
    • “With the severe pressure exerted by the accountability framework, performance management and the demands of the school inspection framework it is surprising that any English teachers have the time or energy to devote to projects that may seem ultimately to have little chance of impact.”

    2 – John Richmond’s alternative vision for English

    • John Richmond was central to the Vauxhall Manor Talk Project and co-author of Becoming Our Own Experts. Worked for ILEA and was a project officer on the National Writing Project, English advisor and key regional lead in the LINC project. Joined forces with Mike Raleigh and Peter Dougill. All viewed the new curriculum as a backward step.
    • Owen Education collaborated with the UK Literacy Association to publish 10 booklets on various areas of the curriculum and offering an alternative model. Booklets were well received at NATE and NAAE conferences.

    3 – A new National Writing Project

    • The Case for a National Writing Project (2008) by Richard Andrews, funded by the CfBT. ” The Case for a National Writing Project suggested designing a project that would see teachers work in collaboration with each other and with colleagues from higher education institutions, which would involve an intensive ten-day summer institute and which would contribute to continuing professional development and allow those involved to obtain academic qualifications up to masters level.” Was not funded.
    • Simon Wrigley (LEA advisor and former chair of NATE) and Jeni Smith (UEA) set up their own National Writing Project in 2009. It set up the “ambitious” task of developing teachers’ writers groups. Wrigley while “focused on writing, had at its heart the notion of teachers as creative individuals with agency”. Wrigley believed that systems of assessment and curriculum were progressively “inhibiting teachers’ creative freedom”. The project did not want the project to become some form of CPD and recommend a model for teaching writing rather it would involve teachers becoming creative, becoming producers of ideas.
    • “Modelled on the Bay Area Project in the States, Wrigley and Smith’s project’s five key principles are stated on their website as ‘teachers as agents of reform; professional development through collaboration; sustained partnership in research, analysis and experience; free and structured approaches in teaching writing; leading teachers collecting and disseminating evidence of effective practice’”.
    • “The argument of the project is that, by developing themselves as writers, and by developing a clearer understanding of the challenges of writing and what it means to be an effective writer, there will be a direct impact on the work of those involved as teachers of writing in the classroom. Teachers involved in the project do so not for any extrinsic reward – they are giving up their own time but do so not only to develop but to regain a sense of agency in an era of deprofessionalisation. It is this that makes the project so striking, and the fact that it is not really funded, and that no teachers involved are rewarded in any material sense, makes it all the more laudable that by 2016 the National Writing Project had managed to establish 24 writing groups from North Wales to Nottingham and from Cardiff to Camden. Some of these groups have more explicit focus on the pedagogy of writing; others are much more concerned with enabling teachers to engage in their own writing in the context ofsupportive peers. There is not a one-size-fits-all model but the groups share some central premises; for Wrigley these are that the writing process needs to be opened up, rather than made formulaic and commercial, and that – essentially – learning should come through creativity.”
    • Introducing Teachers’ Writing Groups: Exploring the Theory and Practice (2015).
    • Gibbons: ” it is perhaps over optimistic to imagine that the national writing project will ever be truly that”. It does offer an alternative, progressive approach to writing pedagogy (child-centred but also with writer as teacher).

    https://www.nationalwritingproject.uk

    A FINAL WORD ON THE GRAMMAR QUESTION

    • Another project, The Production of School English, led by Professor Gunther Kress (London IoE) between 2000-2003. Used “multimodal” research methods to see what the reality of English was in challenging urban schools.
    • English in Urban Classrooms (2003)
    • Grammar for Writing? (2003?) – a project coordinated by Debra Myhill from University of Exeter.
    • “Grammar for Writing was a project that addressed the perennial question for English teachers – does the explicit teaching of grammar and its associated termi­nology have a positive impact on the quality of pupils’ writing. The common-sense view, and one that supported those who argued for greater emphasis on grammar in the curriculum, was that it did, but evidence… had stubbornly refused to support such assertions.”
    • “The research did indicate that explicit teaching of grammar, within the context of meaningful work, did statistically speaking have a positive impact on pupils’ writing, but it’s fair to say that the findings were far from unequivocal; they certainly didn’t strongly support a case for those who wished to argue for explicit grammar teaching across the board. Teachers’ own knowledge was key, and where there were positive impacts these tended to be with those who were already more able writers, with the potential for negative impact on those who may have been struggling already.”
    • Myhill thought that less able writers were confused by too much terminology.
    • Quotes Myhill: “The connection between knowing grammar and knowing and identifying terms and becoming a better writer … that’s what I think is the real problem. There’s no connection between the two at all. And never has been. Being able to name a noun doesn’t make you a better writer.”

    CONCLUSION

    • “In reality it is difficult not to believe that a great deal of what goes on in English classrooms has been changed quite radically over the course of the years since the introduction of the first National Curriculum.”
    • Gibbons expresses his view of current English teaching (“an indictment of what English has become”):
    • Learning objectives or learning outcomes – in one way or another – frame the lesson. These may be differentiated, and they may be closely or more loosely linked explicidy to one form of national or local assessment criteria or another.”
    • Speaking and listening, although undoubtedly still happening, is at the margins. It is seldom, unless part of a single standalone assessment for GCSE, the focus ofthe lesson -talk is rather used as a vehicle to transport pupils to the written work that is to be produced. Talk is a tool for the production of other types of learning, rather than viewed as learning in and ofitself.”
    • Drama may still take place, but again this is rarely seen as an end in itself, rather as a precursor to writing or demonstration of comprehension.”
    • When writing occurs in the classroom, this is heavily prescribed by the teacher in terms ofform and content, little time if any is given to free, creative writing or for pupils to choose their own topic. Though there may be attempts made to talk about audience, these are rarely real audiences and the focus is predominantly on purpose, and even more than that on the form that will enact that purpose. A model of writing instruction that is genre based prevails, with some ideas from a grammar for writing approach scaffolding pupils’ efforts to write in a given form by a focus on particular types of word, phrase or rhetorical construction that a given form is seen to employ. Assessment criteria variously describe the types of forms and structures that typify achievement at incremental levels.”
    • “In the sphere of reading, there may be some time given to independent reading and individual choice, and pupils may occasionally be encouraged to offer a genuine personal response to a poem or story, but predominantly the text choice is the teacher’s, governed ultimately by what are seen to be the demands of a GCSE examination, and responses to reading are highly controlled. Where there is personal response invited, this is ultimately sacrificed in the pursuit of a framed response governed by a point, evidence, explanation (PEE) model of one form or another that constricts pupils and insists – even implicidy – that they are searching for the right answer and that there is not only a right answer, there is, too. a correct way to express this.”
    • A successful lesson ends with a plenary in which pupils are invited to confirm they have indeed met the preformed objectives; that they may have learned other things – arguably more interesting or valuable – does not form part of the discourse. Pupils who haven’t met the objective may be asked to say what they found difficult, or what they didn’t get, and this may inform future work – but that work will be a return to ensure they do get it. There’s not an invitation to explore what other things pupils might have wanted to discuss about a topic or text, or what else they might like to explore. The lesson is part of a sequence, and the sequence needs to be followed to ensure things are covered.
    • Gibbons feels that there are significant numbers of teachers who still have “within their professional compass” a progressive, growth-inspired, child-centred model.
    • Gibbons ends: “The story of the age of intervention is one that has seen wave after wave of central intervention into curriculum, assessment and pedagogy in English. The policymakers have become smarter, or mote ruthless, or both, in their methods – reducing to a minimum the profession’s involvement in devising policy whilst making claims to consult, exploiting evidence to support dubious claims for the effectiveness of interventions, and publicly casting those that resist reform as unprofessional, self­ interested, even immoral. The stakes have been raised and the deregulation of the school system has made teachers more vulnerable and thus less able to resist, even when offered supposed freedoms. Yet there are still English departments and teachers who have failed to fall into line and who remain stubbornly resolute in the face of the politicians. They suggest that English has a future, and one that can potentially learn from, and build upon, the best ofthe past.”
  • Writing Wrongs, TES

    Writing Wrongs, TES

    Great article in this week’s TES about the teaching of writing. Liz Chamberlain (Open University) and Rob Drane (English subject lead at the University of Cambridge) argue that writing is being taught in primary schools causes “a disconnect between how we view writing in the real world, and how writing is taught in schools. And, in some classrooms, this is having a detrimental effect”.

    Chamberlain and Drake assert that the complexity of writing is too frequently reduced to separate components/threads – transcription, composition, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation – when it is actually a “complex and personal process”. They refer to the work of Eve Bearne (“writing teachers” or “teachers of writing”) and Frank Smith (authorship or secretarial skills) when how the activity of writing is considered.

    Their contention is that the primary National Curriculum places emphasis on what can be easily measured and that elements like vocabulary, grammar and punctuation are presented as separate processes. They refer to this as a “misalignment of the curriculum” and argue that it affects how children view themselves as writers: “Studies suggest that most pupils define writing as a set of transcriptional skills, rather than as a means of communicating or as a creative process of self-expression.”

    They note the work of Debra Myhill who “has shown that teaching grammar and sentence structure out of context does little to improve children’s writing. Instead, she argues, knowledge of how sentences work in texts comes from children’s understanding of how sentences work in the text they are reading.”

    Chamberlain and Drake recognise “that teaching any element of the process in isolation is not helpful” and that teachers need to see writing as “a collection of interwoven threads, but we must also be able to step back from that understanding and appreciate that we are ultimately aiming to weave together a single rope”.

    They believe that what is missing is a shared definition of what writing is and its purpose. Children view “writing” is a “schooled” way and do not approach it with purpose and investment in the writing task.

    They urge teachers to “to see themselves as writers – we need them to be, to reuse Bearne’s words, “writing teachers”, rather than teachers who teach writing.” They go on to discuss the importance of collaborative professional development in developing teachers’ understanding of the writing process.

    It seems to me that this “disconnect” between authentic writing and writing for assessment purposes also continues at secondary. (Artificially) distinguishing between the teaching of writing as Craft and as Creativity – using a similar approach as Frank Smith – could be a way of tackling this. I like the emphasis on encouraging children to become authentic writers.

  • New Labour, New Policies

    New Labour, New Policies

    Notes from English and Its Teachers by Simon Gibbons (2017)

    In Chapter 5, Gibbons focuses on New Labour’s impact on English. The Labour government sought to tackle the underachievement of poorer children. This was when I started teaching and remember all too well the exhausting period of the National Strategies. Gibbons examines how schools were directed to look at boys’ performance, the radical impact of the National Literacy Strategy on primary schools and its KS3 counterpart (objectives-led lessons with a focus on non-fiction genres). The impression given is that the £4 billion Strategy had limited impact. Finally, Gibbons presents the QCA as attempting to develop a discursive relationship with English teachers – mainly through the English 21 project.

    • Gibbons argues that New Labour’s focus was on under-attainment and the link between poor educational performance and deprivation.
    • “Whatever history makes of the New Labour years, it is difficult not to believe that the focus on educa­tion was in part an attempt to address the huge underachievement of certain groups of children in England, most notably those from socially deprived backgrounds.”
    • “There was a recognition, perhaps overtly for the first time, that the real scandal of the English education system was the huge tail of under­-achievement.”
    • OFSTED’s Boys and English report (1993): girls did better than boys. The report had “some relatively bland central findings”.
    • A SCAA Boys and English working group established.
    • Publications:
      • Can Do Better: Raising Boys’ Achievement in English (1998)
      • Yes He Can: Schools Where Boys Write Well (2003)
    • “boys tended to be treated as a homogeneous mass, with phrases like ‘the average boy’ – whatever that meant – being commonly employed”.
    • “A less-than-benign view of the inspectorate and curriculum authorities would suggest that gender was a convenient area around which to focus the debate about underachievement. Effectively this placed the onus for remedial action in the hands of English teachers. Recognising socio-economic factors as contributory to underachievement might legitimately result in a call for government action, but there was nothing government could do about gender.”
    • “data on differing groups of pupils’ attain­ment became progressively sophisticated” led to reports:
      • Mapping Race, Class and Gender (2000)
    • “The links between low levels of literacy and a dysfunctional society did perhaps illustrate there was some element of a social, as well as economic, agenda in the New Labour programme for education.”

    NATIONAL LITERACY STRATEGY

    • “Nowhere was the New Labour focus on education more pronounced than in the domain of English.”
    • A “radical shift” saw Literacy replacing English in primary schools.
    • NLS launched in 1998 and was the “main plank” of the government’s strategy to transform the teaching of reading and writing (it was a product of both New Labour and Conservative policies).
    • Features of the NLS:
      • a framework of “almost innumerable” objectives
      • a “Literacy Hour”
      • “in what was the major shift in central intervention”: recommended teaching approaches
      • a “genre-based” approach to the teaching of literacy
      • supported by an infrastructure that saw regional directors monitor local authorities who employed teams of literacy consultants (supposedly non-statutory but schools were forced to “buy into” this pyramid scheme).
      • challenging targets set for expected numbers of children to attain Level 4 at the end of KS3 (David Blunkett vowed to resign if targets not met by fourth year of NLS).
    • “It was without doubt the largest centrally driven intervention into teaching in England, and it is difficult to say what the total cost was, given the numbers of staff and the volume of training material generated.” (Seems to suggest over £1 billion.)
    • “It is difficult to say with any certainty how effective the NLS was.”
    • “The NLS did, however, have a profound impact on the nature of teaching of English in a large number of primary schools; of this there can be little doubt. A new vocabulary was added to the teacher’s lexicon – starters, plenaries, text types, word level – and for many children, English was no longer what was taught in the primary schools, instead it was literacy.”
    • Surprise at how many primary teachers followed NLS instructions. Teachers “toed the line” because of poor test results and because a majority of primary teachers did not have English degrees.
    • “Without a strongly informed alternative view, and with increasing pressure from
    • schools, local authorities, and central government, it is not difficult to see why the NLS had such impact at the primary level; if for whatever reason the children in your class were going to fail to reach the expected level in the SATs then at least if they failed following the prescribed advice then as a teacher you couldn’t be entirely blamed. Although the NLS was never statutory, for a teacher to pursue an alternative vision for the teaching of reading and writing was to put herself in a position of huge vulnerability. There were teachers who had this strength of belief in their own knowledge, but they were in the minority.”

    KS3 FRAMEWORK FOR ENGLISH

    • In 2000 a Secondary National Strategy was agreed with a specific English strand.
    • “In some ways the plans for the secondary English strategy mirrored the NLS; there would be a framework of objectives across the years of Key Stage 3, training material for English departments, and a veritable army of consultants employed by the Strategy and working through the local authorities to deliver training and offer support to schools. Also, pedagogies recommended through the NLS were extended to the secondary sector – particularly exploring texts at word, sentence and text level, and using shared, modelled and guided approaches in the teaching of reading and writing. There was not a literacy hour as such, but a recommended four-part lesson structure – beginning with a starter and ending with a plenary. There was much more explicit rhetoric about teaching, as opposed to learning, with whole-class teaching being strongly recommended as a central approach. Implicit was the suggestion that some ofthe failings of pupils in English resulted from the progressive methods of group work, investigation and explora­tory learning; there needed to be a re-emphasis on the teacher as the expert and a shift away from a child-centred pedagogy.”
    • Many English teachers saw this as turning English into literacy. Literature “did not really play any meaningful part in the Framework”.
    • The Strategy’s approach to writing inspired by the work of Donald Graves (Gibbons suggests that English teaching of writing was through osmosis: let it happen and teach through correction).
    • Aspects of teaching that were controversial in the profession (grammar, spelling) were introduced. Gibbons suggests that secondary English teachers saw teaching spelling as a primary school task.
    • ” the implication of a new way of working and a recommended pedagogy was that English teachers had got it wrong”.
    • Data on significant student progress in English suggested that “was something rotten in the state of English teaching”. Implication of the “process model” of writing was that the “growth model” was failing.

    THEORETICAL UNDERPINNING FOR THE STRATEGY

    • Most English teachers associated their view of English with the “growth model” articulated by Cox. (” This model was a progressive one, with an emphasis on the student’s own language development, autobiographical writing and the reading of relevant literature. It was decidedly child centred.”)
    • Strategy approach was “objective-focused, teacher-led lessons” with teaching that focused on “non­-fiction genres and prioritised technical aspects of language use rather than expres­sion”.
    • Key Stage 3 English: Roots and Research (2002, Harrison) published. Gibbons describes it as an “interesting read”. It struggled to find evidence to support focus on grammar teaching. David Crystal likened it to suggesting that a mechanic ought to be a better driver because she knows the parts of an engine. Grammar is an area of “acute sensitivity” for English teachers.
    • Gibbons describes Harrison’s treatment of the Strategy’s writing pedagogy. Drew of Australian genre theorists. Mentions Cope and Kalantzis’ project on disadvantaged children’s writing. Gibbons shows how the findings from one project are over-extended.
    • “Perhaps most interesting about Roars and Research is the overall impression one gets from reading it. One doesn’t come away with the impression that the research was done prior to the implementation of the Strategy and that the resulting policy decisions were informed with a strong, coherent, underpinning vision for English. Rather the document seems to treat each element of the Strategy in isolation and find snippets of research to back the approach in that particular area. This cherry picking, one might even say manipulation, of research was a feature of both the primary and secondary strategies.”
    • Roots and Research “failed to convince” secondary English teachers.

    THE REACTION OF THE PROFESSION

    • “Parti­cularly for teachers who had a notion of a progressive model of English, the new approaches seemed a particular affront; hardly surprising since its roots were in genre pedagogies in Australia and here the ideas were developed in response to a sense that progressive methods in that country’s English classrooms were failing children from less literate family backgrounds. Somewhere in the genesis of this attempt to reframe English was an assault on progressive pedagogy.”
    • Local authorities perceived to be underachieving “were dealt with more firmly”.
    • The “driving force” of the strategy was the performance of underachieving groups.
    • Gives an account of training by John Wilks, a head of English in Tower Hamlets: no space for discussion or debate, the “right way” to teach – “specifically focussing on text types in the teaching of writing” – was set out. Wilks saw the basis of the strategy as “anti-intellectual” and genre theory “limiting”.
    • Literacy Across the Curriculum (2001) was published. Almost monthly folders sent to English departments.
    • Some “genuinely excellent material” unnoticed in the “deluge” sent to schools eg. Material on developing group talk (drew heavily from oracy work of Neil Mercer.

    LEGACY OF THE STRATEGY

    • Strategy ended in 2009. £4 billion spent.
    • Framework for English (2008) that “reverted to traditional organisation around the concepts of reading, writing and speaking and listening” and included KS4. It made little impact on teachers due to withdrawal of Strategy, new curriculum, new GCSEs and abolition of KS3 tests.
    • Gibbons gives a personal account of how he sees the effect of the Strategy evident in the work of new entrants to the profession (page 96-97). There can be “little doubt” he says that the Strategy affected the structure of lessons.
    • Guided group reading failed in secondary English where the “twin concepts” of the class reader and independent reading time were entrenched.
    • Speaking and Listening remains the least prioritised area of English.
    • Sue Hackman felt the lasting achievements of the English Strategy was a “narrowing of the gap in terms of pupils’ achievement in writing”. Adopting the genre approach was to make the “invisible visible”. A limited success.
    • “However, ifsuccessive reports by Ofsted, culminating in 2015’s Key Stage 3: The Wasted Years? (Ofsted, 2015), are any true measure then it appears that the lasting impact ofthe Key Stage 3 strategy has been negligible.” By 2015 OFSTED saw KS3 English as lacking a clear direction in terms of an overall vision for English and a failure to adequately address the issues of continuity and progression from KS2 to KS4.

    MEANWHILE, THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM

    • The 1995 version of the curriculum had 3 versions: “’over my dead body, what we could live with and what we wanted” (Sue Horner). Final version between what we could live with and wanted.
    • A “more humane curriculum” and ” it is fair to say that the 1999 version showed continued improvement in terms of articulating a notion of English closer to the progressive model at the heart of many teachers’ practice”.
    • ” Key Stages 3 and 4 were presented for the first time as a single programme ofstudy, and within the orders ‘language structure’ was used in preference to any explicit reference to grammar.”
    • “For many suggested a move in the right direction for English”.
    • QCA seen as “increasingly more progressive and humane”. QCA adopted a more consultative approach in working towards the revision of the National Curriculum.
    • QCA’s “more discursive approach”:
      • The Grammar Papers (1998)
      • Not Whether but How (1999)
      • New Perspectives on Spoken English in the Classroom (2003)
      • Introducing the Grammar of Talk (2004)
    • English 21 “English 21 was an invitation to join an apparently big-picture discussion about the nature of the subject in a changing world”.
    • “The result of English 21 and Playback was an apparently radically reshaped English curriculum, using what were known as the four ‘C’s-Competence, Creativity, Cultural Understanding and Critical Understanding – as a lens to frame the traditional areas of speaking and listening, reading and writing.”
    • QCA launched curriculum that was “more widely welcomed than any since the original Cox report”

    CONCLUSION

    • “I suggested (Gibbons, 2007) that the effects of nearly 20 years of central reform had created not only a culture where only that which was tested was valued, but had deprofession­alised English teachers to the extent that freedom would be meaningless.”
    • “English teachers, I suggested, had so long been under the tyranny of central imposition and central testing, that these had become their raison d’etre; without them they would question their existence.”