Category: Education

  • 49% of adults in UK do not read books!

    49% of adults in UK do not read books!

    Blame tv, blame radio, blame social media and video games if you want. The fact is that nearly half of the adult population haven’t read a book within the last year, according to research by Kantar Media.

    just 51% of adults in the UK read at least one book in the previous year. Not only is this a decrease from 56% in the prior year, it also means 49% – essentially half – of adults in the UK didn’t read a single book in a full 12 months.

    The article I read argued that there was a correlation between three things: an increase in young people’s use of mobile phones, poverty and government austerity (shutting of libraries).

    Hearing that half the country doesn’t read (I wonder if there’s any link between that figure and recent political results?) is, for someone who reads a great deal and believes that books are absolutely essential to be a fully-functioning modern human being, quite upsetting. I’d be interested in the break-down of ages to see if it’s younger adults who are skewing the non-reading figures upward.

    I’d also point towards the way that schools are teaching reading as a cause of the growth in antipathy by young people towards books. Treating books as a tool for simply extracting information or as vehicles of assessment puts children off reading for life. I recently worked in a school where EVERY reading activity had to be based around language analysis. The fact that the school, like so many secondaries nowadays, didn’t have a school library compounded children’s dislike of books. Over the last few years I’ve had a number of Year 11’s – intelligent, capable children – separately tell me that they were glad when their GCSE English Literature exams were over because they would never have to read another book again. One even said he was going to set fire to his copy of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

    I’d say that a vibrant reading culture in schools with libraries stocked with modern, engaging books would do more to develop a child’s vocabulary and cultural knowledge than vocabulary drills and knowledge organisers.

    This is 21st Century Britain, though. We don’t want people enjoying books. How the hell would the Department of Education be able to measure enjoyment? Enjoying books doesn’t prepare you for the world of work. Don’t be silly!

    (I also wonder how many teachers don’t read. I double-also-wonder how many English teachers don’t read anything other than the texts they teach and Facebook? I have my suspicions.)

    UPDATE: this 2018 article from The Atlantic reveals that levels of reading in the USA have not improved since 1998. The writer argues that this is due to the restrictive way early years teaching is conducted and a very narrow conception of what constitutes reading comprehension.

    The bottom line is that policymakers and advocates who have pushed for more testing in part as a way to narrow the gap between rich and poor have undermined their own efforts. They have created a system that incentivizes teachers to withhold the very thing that could accomplish both objectives: knowledge. All students suffer under this system, but the neediest suffer the most.

    I remember reading an analysis of UK literacy about 20 years ago which argued that levels of literacy in this country had remained the same between 1900 and 2000. Since then we’ve had a deliberate obscuration of how reading is assessed in primary and secondary schools so that we understand children’s reading progress only through some arbitrary government standards (KS1-2), a free-for-all approach (KS3) and relative to other students (KS4). It would be good to see some independent research about actual UK levels of reading. Do organisations like NFER still do this sort of thing?

    While I was on The Atlantic website, these articles also caught my eye:

    Every Child Can Become a Lover of Books

    Why Some People Become Lifelong Readers

    Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong

  • Vocabulary. Tiers (not tears).

    Vocabulary. Tiers (not tears).

    I’m interested to find out the actual origin of language tiers. At the moment there is an interest in vocabulary as a panacea for improving exam performance. As an English teacher I’m thoroughly supportive of improving children’s knowledge of language and literacy. Where I have my concerns is in the seemingly whole-scale adoption of a very mechanical, often decontextualised means of developing language skills. It suits non-English trained school managers as it’s an easy-to-comprehend method of tackling low levels of literacy. Obviously enabling children with a wider vocabulary will improve their educational performance. Obviously.

    Instinctively, my assumption is that the source of this approach to teaching vocabulary is Hirsch Jr and American Common Core. I can’t say I’ve definitely tracked down the origin, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the source. For those of us who grew up under the shadow of Harold Bloom, Common Core is like The Western Canon. It’s a view and, in many respects, a partial one.

    I heard tiers of vocabulary being talked about (in the same sort of reverent tones as “learning styles’) about 4-5 years ago at PiXL meetings. Then, rapidly, it seemed to be everywhere. The last PiXL conference had vocabulary as its keynote. Teaching vocabulary is seen as a means of tackling “knowledge deficit”. Or developing knowledge in a systematic way. As you know knowledge must be systematised.

    The three tiers are simple:

    • Tier 1 – basic vocabulary (book, dog, clap)
    • Tier 2 – high frequency/multiple meaning (benevolent, industrious, cautiously)
    • Tier 3 – low-frequency/context-specific (cartographer, asphalt, isotope)

    It looks like this:

    Of course, a concept like tiers of vocabulary needs a graphic. Just to make the hierarchical systematised nature of vocabulary acquisition obvious at staff training sessions. Remember, diagrams always impress a sense of importance.

    Decontextualised vocabulary drills mostly don’t work with lower-attaining children. It’s a bit like weekly spelling tests. They seem to work and children put a lot of effort into memorising words – but after the test most children happily carry on misspelling the same words. I’ve struggled for years with encouraging children to develop vocabulary and what I’ve learned is that it’s a mixture of engaging the student in the topic, providing examples where vocabulary is used, activities where students explicitly use the vocabulary and a great deal of subsequent practice. It’s really not a case of giving children a list of tier 2 and tier 3 words to learn and then drilling them. For some – a minority – it is. For the majority, learning vocabulary is more complex, longer-term endeavour in a language-rich school. It also requires a vibrant reading culture.

    One fear I have is that those educational publishers immense media corporations who support have their hooks into American schools like teachers to think that vocabulary teaching is simple and straightforward. That you don’t even need a teacher to instruct: there’s an app that will do that in a systematic way. (When I first started teaching it was called SuccessMaker. It used to give us amazing data in all sorts of forms to show what amazing progress children made in reading comprehension. Only, in regular school activities and tests. the same children just didn’t seem to show any improvement. And SuccessMaker cost a lot of money.)

    Anyhow, I’m still fairly interested in who first created the concept of tiers of vocabulary. I’m still incredibly interested in ways of teaching vocabulary that aren’t faddish and actually work.

  • “Intelligent Education” or the Panopticon?

    “Intelligent Education” or the Panopticon?

    Terrifying article on Sixthtone.com about the use of “intelligent education” technology being developed in Chinese classrooms. The Chinese government is actively promoting an extensive AI programme, the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (NGAIDP), spending $150 billion to incorporate AI into every aspect of Chinese society.

    The article presents accounts of how cameras are being used in classrooms not only to monitor and analyse what children are doing (as well as their attitudes and emotional states) but also to read what they are writing. The degree of surveillance is quite astonishing. One particular system is called the CCS (Complete Care System) which provides continuous live analysis of how children are engaged in lessons. Classrooms have multiple cameras watching – and presumably recording – the students all the time:

    One anonymous Hangzhou No. 11 student I found on the internet tells me she felt shocked and scared when the teacher demonstrated the system in front of the whole class. “The camera can magnify 25 times of what it captures,” she says, adding: “It can see not only your face, but the characters on your notebook. After all, it’s from Hikvision.” Another student tells me his classmates were totally “crushed” after the installation of the system. Because the system gives students a public score, he and his classmates don’t dare nap or even yawn in class for fear of being penalized, an incentive that doesn’t necessarily increase focus on learning. In fact, the students spend their time focusing on staying awake until class ends. “Nobody leaves the classroom during the class break,” he says. “We all collapse on the desks, sleeping.”

    It’s early days, according to the article. There are issues with the accuracy of the facial recognition (changing hairstyle or wearing glasses confuses the AI). Supposedly the technology is to support teachers – but doubtlessly there must be concerns about where the data collected about children ends up. Part of a profile to determine other things? Criminality? Job suitability?

    Where the article doesn’t go far enough is in the danger of cameras in classrooms being used as a panopticon (worth reading this article by Tom McMullan) to encourage conformity and subservience through the fear of being under surveillance constantly.

    It’s worrying, too, about the ongoing slide into objectification (if that’s the right word) of children within school systems. (I’m in no doubt that these school surveillance technologies are not confined to China.) As Foucault‘s pointed out about the subject of the panopticon:

    “He is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication.”

  • “Learning” and “Path-following”

    I’m reading Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful The Old Ways. Early on he connects learning and path-following:

    The relationship between thinking and walking is also grained deep into language history, illuminated by perhaps the most wonderful etymology I know. The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning ‘to acquire knowledge’. Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English leornian, lto get knowledge, to be cultivated’. From leornian the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets ofProto Germanic, and to the word liznojan, which has a base sense of ‘to follow or to find a track’ (from the Proto-Indo-European prefix leis-, meaning ‘track’). (To learn’ therefore means at root ~ at route – (to follow a track’. Who knew? Not I, and I am grateful to the etymologist-explorers who uncovered those lost trails connecting ‘learning’ with ‘path-following*.

  • TES English Podcast: How to improve writing in secondary

    My notes from recent TES Podcast where English teacher, Chris Curtis (Learning from My Mistakes blog and new book How to Teach English and former Whovian) offers some great advice teaching writing. The TES gives an overview of his ideas in the podcast.

    • Encourages a degree of emotional detachment as a teacher (eg. conversations about mistakes; “if we live in fear, we’ll never push the boundaries”

    He identifies three issues confronting the teaching of writing:

    • “beige writing” – students write very standard answers. Students default to “waffle mode”, a comfortable form of writing. Needs to be challenged.
    • fluency – some students don’t have writing fluency and aren’t able to write quickly.
    • blank page – students don’t know what to write and panic.

    He offers some solutions:

    • 200 word challenge – a weekly writing task that changes each week. His department have been doing this for 5 years. (Example of these challenges from Curtis’ blog.)
    • “sexy sprouts” – starting writing with an emotion in mind. He describes this as “transformative”. (From idea about how to make a reader feel different emotions about sprouts!)

    On students’ accuracy:

    • He won’t correct student’s mistakes. He circles mistakes and gets students to self-correct. “Channeling” students to see mistakes, not fix them.
    • We have to expect a better quality of work from students. Students need to take ownership.
    • Every lesson has to be an opportunity to improve accuracy.

    On grammar:

    • Avoid teaching discretely.
    • Move away from “This is a grammar lesson.”
    • Believes you can have creativity and grammar rules.
    • Need to be explicit about grammar rules.

    On analytical essays and formal analytical responses to texts:

    • We’ve become convoluted about analytical-style writing. Everything is being thrown at an essay with the hope that it’ll sound good. Not making the clarity of ideas the priority. Good analytical writers are “pared down”. Simplify.
    • Better to start big and zoom in (when responding to texts).

    Tips for the end of term:

    • Find something that works and do it with every class.
    • Reading aloud to classes. Students listening to a teacher telling a story.
    • Find texts that “teach themselves” (that’s why the classics work).
    • Find systems that work for you.
    • Write with students. Make it a social experience.

  • English in Education, Summer 2019

    It’s a Literacy-focused issue.

    John Hodgson’s editorial explores briefly the definitions of literacy and suggests two paradigms exist: one as the functional, autonomous ability of a child to read; the other:

    …involves reading the world and reading the word… and connects personal response and social awareness.

    Hodgson cites the work of the New London Group and the concept of “multiliteracies” in the 1990s – and this becomes the touchstone for the various discussions on literacy presented in the issue.

    I found the following articles incredibly interesting:

    Literacy Constants in a Context of Contemporary Change by Margaret Mackey – using Professor Keith Oatley’s work on cognitive psychology and Reading and Writing, Mackey argues that a discussion about the nature of current literacy is founded on its psychological functions. She discusses initial literacy acquisition (as a physical activity) and agrees that, quite early on, reading is an encounter with another mind which causes us to think beyond ourselves. After that, Mackey explores children’s reading, recreational reading, literary reading (associated with the “function of thinking”), deep reading (I understand as engagement with a text that sparks thinking or response), critical reading and conversational reading (essentially social media). I was interested in a reference to Miall and Kuiken’s definition of literariness as “defamilirisation” of style or narrative that cause a reinterpretation of a conventional feeling or concept. Mackey suggests that reading behaviours overlap. Finally, she advocates for a broader understanding of what modern (multimodal, I guess) literacy and that “Pursuing what we value about reading will be better achieved by understanding our own priorities even as we respect the lively ways contemporary readers navigate today’s new possibilities.”

    The Thought Chronicle: Devaluing a Multimodal Repertoire of Response in Teacher Education by David Lewkowich – is a fantastic promotion of multimodal responses to texts. I love his assertion that “how and what we choose to read and write invariably affects how we choose to teach, and how we choose to communicate our understanding of social and individual experience, and our love of language and literature” and – especially: “Such choices, therefore, also affect how our students come to learn and how they come to know themselves in educational spaces.” Absolutely ageed! Lewkowich presents what he calls the Thought Chronicle, essentially a creative journal responding to studied texts in a variety of forms. He reproduces his assignment brief to his trainee-teachers which aims to “demonstrate knowledge in a variety of ways”. (As an aside: I think this approach is liberating in how it breaks free of the reductionist exam-response approach to measuring knowledge.) He discusses the role of teacher as expert and how sharing knowledge which is “non-authority”. His phrase “uncertain becomings” not only refers to trainee English teachers but anyone – child or adult – engaging with texts. Really love this quote from Nikos Kazantzakis: “True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own”. There are six pages of highly interesting examples of pieces from thought chronicles reproduced. Highly-inspiring article!

  • English in Education, Spring 2019

    Writing is the theme of this issue of English in Education. It’s an excellent collection of thoughtful pieces by English teachers and academics. The editorial sets the tone immediately:

    Trying to develop excellent writing pedagogy in a system dominated by standardised, politicised assessments makes the task even more challenging.

    The editorial, by Dr Jenifer Smith and Dr Mari Cruice, points out how the importance of the “primacy of meaning” in children’s Writing has been downgraded over the last 30 years. Towards the end of they make the point that teachers are looking back to the writing of educators from the 60s and 70s (something I’ve been doing increasingly) or drawing on their own practice as writers (something I’ve always done). The editorial ends with a warning:

    Meanwhile, in mainstream classrooms, the dead weight of a prescriptive and reductionist viewpoint is hard to shift. And yet individuals, especially amongst the young, have learned somewhere that writing is a vital human activity and that it works for us in many different ways. It has a moral and humane heft, it underpins critically, it is inventive and visionary, it can anchor us. Of course, writing resists “mapping onto levels”, but the failure to take writing seriously as a fundamental element of human growth has become a failure to take responsibility for children’s intellectual growth and moral becoming.

    Overall, the view of English teaching and Writing in particular is that our subject is in a pretty awful way. I agree!

    I found the following articles in this issue particularly interesting and useful:

    English and Meaning by Gordon M. Pradl – absolutely excellent presentation of the tradition of English teaching which I see myself as part which is child-focused and balance the “skills” and “cultural heritage” view of English with that of “personal growth” (enriching children’s social and cultural lives). There’s a terribly good section about the role of the primacy of meaning in the post-War teaching of English and its contrast with the present models: “[T]he current push for product accountability being imposed on our schools – where outcomes are often mandated by persons far removed from the actual learning encounters between students and teachers – can threaten the core ‘meaning making’ principle of our discipline. Meaning, it seems, remains resistant to measurement, especially of the short-term variety. Pradl focuses on the work of James Britton and David Holbrook.

    Teaching Bad Writing by Myra Barrs – argues persuasively that current teaching of Writing at KS2 does not improve the quality children’s writing. She believes that current assessment prioritises form over content. One piece of research conducted by Barrs points out the disparity between what teachers think are the elements of good writing (meaning) and the comments they write on children’s work (all about form). She demands that there needs to be a course-correction and that English needs to be recognised in relation to the Arts.

    “Death by PEEL?” The Teaching of Writing in the Secondary English Classroom by Simon Gibbons – Gibbons identifies the way that children’s writing has increasingly “constrained and constricted” by ever-prescriptive teaching. He says that teachers do not like structures like PEEL but find them a necessary evil (“necessary to arm pupils in their battles with assessment systems”). He concludes that “the teaching of writing is in a sorry state in many English classrooms”. There’s an excellent review of the history of Writing. Gibbons asserts that his experience doesn’t find the same issues in other English-speaking countries. He recognises that children’s experiences of learning to write are “a less than fulfilling experience”. Gibbons seems quite downbeat to me and ends on the hope that “Tides turn; times change”.

    English Teaching and Imagination: A Case for Revisiting the Value of Imagination in Teaching Writing by Helena Thomas – I found myself agreeing with Thomas’ argument about the value and importance of developing children’s imaginations in the English classroom. Thomas sees teachers working in a climate of “unprecedented accountability” where “teaching is dominated by a policy discourse that shuts down debate”. She advocates for teachers to view themselves as practising creative artists and I found the section on “A brief note on implications for practice” excellent advice.

    Additionally, the references of the articles offer a tremendous treasure trove of lost knowledge for English teachers (or for me, at least).

  • Teaching English, Summer 2019

    The latest issue of Teaching English, N.A.T.E.’s magazine, dropped through our letterbox this morning and is a always a welcome insight into the best thinking of English teachers’ professional association.

    It’s a magazine I always look forward to reading. The theme of this issue is using self-research to develop classroom practice. Among the articles, I found these ones most interesting:

    ICT: Opportunity Missed by Trevor Millum – an article that examines what’s happening to the use of digital tech in English classrooms. Millum says the “over the last 10 years, ICT has been undergoing something of a crisis in English schools”. His analysis seems accurate to me: the axing of BECTA, the perception that digital tech isn’t needed in English classrooms and budget cuts. He argues that this is different in other parts of the UK. I agree with Millum’s concerns about the way that big corporations are influencing pedagogy. He suggests that established constants, like word processors, that can be used in all aspects of English study and composition.

    Confronting Gradgrind: Employability and English by Robert Eaglestone – looks at why numbers of students studying English at A-level and university is in decline. Dickens’ Gradgrind is used to illustrate the current perception of education simply being about employability. Eaglestone goes on to use examples to show how English is advantageous in furthering a career, citing Google’s Project Oxygen and the company’s desire to recruit employees with skills in “communication, collaboration, critical thinking, independence and adaptability”.

    39 Steps… To Engaging With Poetry by Trevor Millum and Chris Warren – here are steps 13-15 of what has been an incredibly useful series so far.

    The Case for Language by Dan Clayton – reminds us how important teaching Knowledge About Language is.

    Rethinking KS3: A Novel Approach by Barbara Bleiman – a fantastic report on teaching a novel with Year 9 classes. I liked the way in which the department developed a shared (planned) approach to the novel, group work, no explicit planning – or teaching – to a test, encouragement of broader written responses rather than tightly structured ones. There were positive outcomes, most notably that boys were more engaged.

  • The Great Pedagogical War is over? Huh? Since When?

    The other day I was sitting in a staffroom browsing through the April 2019 edition of Teach Secondary. My attention was drawn to an article by Ben Newmark, Whose Curriculum Is It, Anyway?, in which he argues that “the Great Pedagogical War is over” and that “‘what’ has beaten ‘how’“. A little like the recent series in the TES, Newmark seems to believe that those working in schools are now engaged in some sort of post-revolutionary process of redefining what it is they are actually teaching in schools.

    I’d agree with some of Newmark’s more general points, especially when he says things like “Deeper, more profound questions need to be considered and answered“. Like many reflective educators, he knows that there are fundamental issues affecting the development and wellbeing of the UK’s children which schools simply aren’t addressing (and it’s nothing to do with lack of funds). He quickly wanders off the main topic to express his views about “wrongheaded” History curricula (he’s worried that there are History teachers who think the subject teaches “The National Myth” and isn’t diverse enough). I’ve been in a number of schools recently and seen History lessons where the topic has invariably been… the rise of Nazi Germany! He spends time discussing the role of Mary Seacole in History teaching and ends his article:

    We do need to have this conversation, we really do. But this is a big, big debate, which might involve deep structural changes for many history curriculums. Erecting strawmen won’t help. Nor will blunderbuss non-specific accusations of racism. Nor will defensiveness from curriculum planners when faced with legitimate challenge over perspectives they have, for whatever reason, overlooked.

    Like the rest of – what I’m sure are genuinely-motivated – expressions about the shift towards curriculum-focused school models, I simply don’t believe them. There won’t be fundamental changes to the schools’ curricula. Like a lot of things in education, the chatter around the curriculum acts as a salve on the conscience of school leaders. It’s a little like the protracted discussions about “life after levels” assessment in secondaries several years back which saw a smorgasbord of models adopted which in practice became a HappyMeal of GCSE gradings (some honest secondary schools ditched any pretence and simply used GCSE criteria). It made school leaders feel that they had some control over what they were doing and gave the impression that they were somehow liberating classroom teachers from the tyranny of the old National Curriculum assessments. For most teachers it actually meant more work, more assessments, more data collection. It’s led, I’d argue, to the fallacious fashion for what’s currently called “knowledge-based learning” (which is, behind all the guff, an excuse for protracted exam-teaching).

    All the time that the toxic obsession with GCSE outcomes dominates schools practices there won’t be any fundamental changes to the cultures of schools. Lots of schools have for all intents and purposes started teaching GCSE in Year 7. I’ve even seen a number of schools where GCSE exam papers in English are used for assessment purposes from Year 7 onwards. Certainly, there are few schools where GCSE isn’t explicitly taught from the start of Year 9 (even though, as OFSTED reminds us from time to time, GCSE is meant to be a two-year course).

    It’s essential to remember that the purpose of education in the UK is quite limited and is thoroughly politically-driven. It’s about passing exams and finding work. “Strategies” like the social mobility agenda and Dweck’s mind-sets are tied into this. The purpose of the curriculum in the UK isn’t to encourage and enable young people to develop into happy, fulfilled human beings with a love of learning, critical faculties, creative imagination and understanding of justice and responsibility to others.

    As for the end of the “Great Pedagogocal War”? All the time that mechanical, high-stakes lesson observations exist in a culture of schools insisting that professional educators adopt teaching approaches based on no evidence at all, the war continues. Newmark needs only to read the other articles in Teach Secondary to see that some quite aggressive pedagogies (more ideologies, really) still dominate. It was only a couple of months ago I was in a school where there was a huge display celebrating Learning Styles…