The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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SEAs4ALL – equity, voice, community and pedagogy

What is SEAs4ALL?

SEAs4ALL is an Erasmus+ project promoting ‘Successful Educational Actions for Inclusion and Social Cohesion’ (SEAs) in England, Cyprus, Italy and Catalonia. SEAs are innovative pedagogical strategies that have been shown to improve social cohesion, inclusion and attainment, and to reduce early school leaving. Based on Flecha’s principles of dialogic learning, SEAs are in use in over 600 schools in Europe and Latin America and have proved successful in a wide variety of contexts, with all age groups and in challenging social and economic circumstances.

We suggest that SEAs, and the opportunity to participate in ‘egalitarian dialogue’ in the classroom, could pre-empt the disillusion and mistrust allegedly underlying the widespread, anti-establishment votes of recent months. We suggest also that such disillusion may be a consequence of the unintended exclusion many children experience in the classroom, given decades of evidence of teacher-dominated classroom interaction in which only a small proportion of those present actually speak. Teaching that requires learners to be passive, to speak in chorus or to answer actual questions in short, memory –based utterances can build resentment that lingers into adulthood, potentially damaging lives and communities.

SEAs4ALL offers solutions through dialogic approaches that value everyone’s contributions and encourage community participation. SEAs4ALL responds to four CPRT priorities – equity, voice, community and pedagogy – and has obvious parallels with the joint CPRT/University of York project on  dialogic teaching and social disadvantage. Our arguments are not new, but one strength of dialogic learning, is its affordances for what Louis Moll calls ‘funds of knowledge’ from family and community to penetrate the exclusive epistemic climate created by the bank of knowledge known as the national curriculum.

The SEAs4ALL project

SEAs4ALL is an extension of the  EC-funded INCLUD-ED: Strategies for inclusion and social cohesion from education research, directed by Professor Ramón Flecha at the Community of Research on Excellence for All (CREA, University of Barcelona), between 2006 – 2011. INCLUD-ED worked in 14 European countries to find and trial educational actions that succeeded in improving social and academic factors, with emphasis on the inclusion of vulnerable groups such as migrants, cultural minorities, women, youth and people with disabilities.  The research demonstrated that SEAs work with children and adults, in mono- or multi-ethnic, urban or rural, rich or poor settings – unlike context–specific ‘best practices’.

Two SEAs, ‘Dialogic Literary Gatherings’ (DLG) and ‘Interactive groups’ (IG), were adopted by six primary schools in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Peterborough in the ChiPE project  (2013-15) led by Dra. Rocío García Carrión. The positive outcomes resulted in three schools extending their SEAs to more classes in 2016. In SEAs4ALL, two lead schools, The Spinney Primary School, Cambridge, and West Earlham Junior School, Norwich, are using SEAs, supported by Cambridgeshire Race, Equality and Diversity Service (CREDS).

What does SEAs4ALL involve?

Both DLG and IG exemplify Ramón Flecha’s principles of dialogic learning. The first principle is of Egalitarian Dialogue which ‘…takes different contributions into consideration according to the validity of their reasoning, instead of according to the positions of power held by those who make the contributions’. Giving children the same right to speak as the teacher – who chairs the DLG to ensure order and fair turns – removes the ubiquitous ‘follow-up’ or ‘feedback’ move from IRF, thus allowing the dialogue to develop.  Secondly, the principle of ‘cultural intelligence’ accepts that every person has intelligence to share, whether abstract, practical, homegrown, certificated or book-based.

In DLGs, each child takes home an age-appropriate edition of a classic text (such as The Odyssey, Great Expectations, Don Quixote), reads an agreed section that everyone can read with help if necessary. While reading, participants choose an idea from the text and note the reason for their choice. In the ‘Gathering’, the teacher, children, TAs and parents (if participating), sit in a large circle. The teacher (usually) chairs the session.  Participants offer to share their choice, and when invited, read their chosen excerpt (phrase, sentence or paragraph) and explain their choice. Other participants comment on the choice and reason, agreeing/disagreeing (surprisingly politely), presenting new arguments and extending the original idea with their own ‘funds of knowledge’.  Difficult topics such as honesty, love, death, friendships, racism are common, and last 5 – 10 minutes. The children express moral and ethical arguments, in long utterances – 40 words or more. Some children change their thinking during the dialogue.  Critically, the children choose the topics, control the content of discussion, and have their ideas respected. Our observations show consistently that children do over 80 percent of the talking, with over 75 percent contributing.  Most surprising is that the teachers say little and listen.

IGs can be used in any curriculum area, and frequently in mathematics and language learning. The class is divided into four or five mixed ability groups. The teacher prepares a 15-20 minute task for each group on the relevant theme. An adult volunteer (e.g. parent, grandparent, community member, support staff, trainee teacher) sits with each group to introduce the task and then ensure that the children help and explain the work to each other. The volunteer does not teach, but facilitates the children’s supporting each other. After about 15 minutes the children move on to the next task with another volunteer, such that they have done all the tasks by the end of the session. The teacher observes, monitors, ensures smooth circulation, and might ask the class to analyse their learning before each change.  Children’s evaluative comments reveal their view that, often, other children explain the task better than the teacher.

IG and DLG allow Flecha’s ‘dialogic learning’ to flourish. Both demonstrate ‘egalitarian dialogue’ and capitalise on each child’s ‘cultural intelligence’. Both are completely inclusive. They transform children’s and teachers’ opinions about each other and about knowledge. They improve literacy, numeracy and oracy skills. They offer solutions to the problems posed in two Cambridge Primary Review research surveys

In relation to CPRT’s priorities, these SEAs:

  • help to close educational and social gaps (equity),
  • give children the floor (voice)
  • involve parents and community at home and in the classroom (community)
  • develop teachers’ listening abilities and foster high quality talk (pedagogy)

For more information about SEAS4ALL

Linda Hargreaves is Reader Emerita in classroom learning and pedagogy, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education.

Rachel Snape is Headteacher of The Spinney Primary School, Cambridge, a national leader of education, head of the KITE Teaching School Alliance, Cambridgeshire, and a member of the CPRT Schools Alliance.

To learn more about SEAs4ALL contact coordinator Maria Vieites Casado mariavc@seas4all.co.uk

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Evidence-informed practice: the affirming power of research

Life in a busy school can sometimes make us feel like a startled herd of gazelles, darting every which way as the educational landscape changes; swiftly changing direction as the needs of children change, as the leadership of the school evolves, as each framework from Ofsted is introduced, as each new curriculum test forms new challenges for our most vulnerable pupils, as the government introduce another White Paper… As professionals, we need time to stop for a moment, to look around at the landscape, to learn from each other and to deepen our understanding of what truly works in education and why. Is it possible at a time of such educational flux that some kind of research-informed practice can give teachers and schools a renewed authority to create their own destiny and to provide an environment in which teachers and pupils thrive?

What does it mean for practice to be research-informed? Gary Jones argues that it is not about trying to create generalisable findings like large-scale, academic research projects but it is concerned with making decisions informed by rigorous, relevant research evidence in order to improve pupil outcomes. A better way of thinking about it might be what Phil Taylor calls ‘practice-based enquiry’. This kind of enquiry, Taylor suggests, is a form of ‘situated learning’ that is firmly rooted in the school context. The process not only draws upon published research findings, but also re-contextualises them, making research ‘useable’ within the school’s community of learners. This not only acknowledges that ‘what works best’ will not be exactly the same in every situation, but also suggests that we should be asking why something works or not.

Creating space for research

As a school leader I have found that the key to engaging school staff in this kind of enquiry is to create a time where the noise of every day life in school is stilled.  While we continue with our myriad of roles and responsibilities in school our minds are filled with ‘stuff to do’.  A more reflective and enquiring approach is only possible when we still this noise; when we spend time reading and researching; take time to deeply reflect on our own practice; ask challenging questions and engage in highly focused observations.

How was I to provide the time for my staff to engage in evidence-informed practice?  In order to create space for my staff, I had to take something away. Evaluating the impact of the training days, I concluded that although they provided valuable time for staff to be together to discuss practice and learn key skills, days like this appeared more beneficial for specific groups rather than the whole staff. As a result, I decided to translate the three training days into fifteen hours of research time for each teacher across the school. The teachers were charged with accruing these hours of research across the year.  In order to ensure teachers had a clear goal for their enquiry, I asked each teacher to publish or present their findings formally through: a research paper; leading a staff meeting; writing a blog; or presenting at a Teach Meet.

Formal Research Networks

In order to lend rigour to our evidence-informed practice, we joined the CPRT Schools Network South East Region led by Vanessa Young from Canterbury Christ Church University.  The CPRT, gathers together research-active schools in the region to share practice and link with other schools and research bodies nationally. This group has provided our school with powerful models of research and case study examples focusing on key priorities of the CPRT. A key CPRT priority area for us was one of pedagogy and quality and effectiveness in teaching and learning, including of course, teachers’ learning.

Using Appraisal to Develop a Culture of Evidence-informed Practice

Appraisal offers a powerful tool with which to target evidence-informed practice.  We trained senior staff as mentor-coaches and used the principles of ‘mentor-coaching’ and ‘appreciative enquiry’ to allow the teachers to devise an enquiry target that would develop their practice and enhance pupil learning. These enquiry targets were varied and included: looking into the impact of parental involvement with early reading; use of Google Docs to enhance learning; the impact of Twitter on professional development. We adopted a digital appraisal and CPD tracking system called Blue Sky. This allowed appraisal targets and related training activity to be linked to the school’s key priorities, and tracked. The programme also allowed staff to track their own research time and upload any evidence, while their reviewer was able to give a gentle nudge to staff who had been less than active over a period of time. The enquiry targets proved challenging: some teachers found it hard to grapple with the rigour of research approaches whilst others were trepidatious about presenting their findings. The engagement of teachers in their enquiry was tracked through the year by their mentors to ensure there was a systematic approach to the research and outcomes were disseminated across the school community.  The process saw staff grow in confidence and we noted how teaching practices were enriched by the insights gleaned from these enquiries.

The Learning Ticket

Each teacher was given a ‘Learning Ticket’ with a cash value of £150 which was to be spent on their appraisal enquiry target. In addition to the Learning Ticket, three ‘research bursaries’ were made available for teachers to bid for.  Each had a cash value of £500 and teachers could bid collectively for these.  One teacher bid for a research bursary to investigate ‘The Impact of Lego in story writing’ while another undertook an international research project into ‘The Teaching of Phonics in the USA, Japan and Finland’.

Teach Meets

With an enquiry appraisal target in place for each teacher and mentors tracking progress towards the targets, teachers developed a variety of new practices based on the research undertaken.  We needed a forum to share this practice and celebrate the success across the school and beyond school.  We therefore used the ‘teach meet’ model to provide a platform for the research outcomes for staff.  Teachers met to share their practice in short ‘micro-presentations’.  Our first teach meet focused on Irresistible Writing and the second on Irresistible Learning and shared a range of practices across the school arising from the teachers’ enquiries. The teach meet has been an exciting and engaging way of celebrating the success of research-informed practice and sharing practice within our school, across schools locally, and beyond.

Where to now?

Working in a school where enquiry-based practice is becoming embedded is a real privilege. Engaging with CPRT has allowed our staff to deepen the rigour and effectiveness of their research and has led us, as a school, to develop a culture of evidence-informed practice that helps engage our staff, raise standards for our pupils and draw high quality staff to our appointments.  The process is not easy for staff, their research often challenges their practice and the practice of colleagues. The process is, however, deeply rewarding and affirming.

As a school leader, it’s not enough just to lead and manage such an approach. I was acutely aware that I also needed to engage in the same way.  It was important to make time to be reflective myself as well as my staff. Being disciplined to find this time was a real challenge for me as principal.  I initially felt it took me away from the management roles across the school but I have grown to see the rich importance this. Finding and making time is not a luxury, it is essential.

We now intend to continue to work with the CPRT to grow the number of research-active schools in the South East. We will work with Canterbury Christ Church University to develop our research practice and Kent College to develop research with our non-teaching staff. As Julie McCulloch (at the Association of School and College Leaders – ASCL) pointed out in her recent CPRT blog there is an increasing body of evidence that genuine improvement, whether at an individual school or a system level, happens when schools work together to plan learning, solve problems and create the right solutions to local needs. We will continue to support schools in our locality as a National Support School and share our evidence-informed outcomes through publications and teach meets. We will also publish our most significant research outcomes in our own research journal this summer.

If we are to create an exciting, engaging and engaged education system, we must continue to ask questions that encourage us gently to push boundaries and give us the conviction to create our own path towards the horizon.  By providing our staff with the space to engage in evidence-informed research in our exponentially busy life within school, the benefits to our school, our staff and our children are palpable.  It has allowed us to stop for a moment, look around and breathe before creating our path ahead. Enjoy the journey!

Graham Chisnell is principal of Warden House Primary School in Kent. He was one of two recipients of the CPRT ASCL Award for Evidence-Informed Leadership awarded at CPRT’s National Conference in November 2016.

Vanessa Young is the South East Regional Coordinator of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust and a senior lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University.

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Education in spite of policy: further reflections on the 2016 CPRT conference

It encapsulated probably the defining contrast I have seen in nearly 20 years covering education: the under-rated commitment and thoughtfulness of much of the teaching profession versus the endless dysfunction, self-centredness and dishonesty of policymakers and the policy process itself.

Here, in the day-long get-together that was the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s 10th anniversary conference last Friday in London, was an event to convince any observer of the multi-layered professionalism present at least in potential in England’s schools system.

Yet central to the day’s valedictory keynote by Robin Alexander – he is stepping down at the end of next month after 10 years as this remarkable review’s guiding presence – was the force against which the profession seems so often to be battling. This is the largely shallow, frequently failing and usually self-referential Westminster/Whitehall/think tank policy-spewing machine.

‘Education in spite of policy’ was the strapline to Robin’s speech. This is about as good a five-word summary of the state of play in English schooling in 2016 as it gets.1

‘Ever since the 1988 Education Reform Act started transferring hitherto devolved powers from local authorities and schools to Westminster, policy has become ever more inescapable, intrusive and impervious to criticism,’ he said.

What was needed, then, was not more ‘education reform’ but reform of the policy process itself. Hear, hear.

The Cambridge Primary Review’s Final Report, published in 2009, was unflinchingly critical of the above characteristics in a Labour government which, Robin reminded us, sent documents on the teaching of literacy at the rate of roughly one a week to primary schools in the seven years to 2004. Yet there were some aspects which contributors to the review had welcomed: Labour’s Children’s Plan, Sure Start, Narrowing the Gap and the expansion of early childhood care and education.2

The more relevant question now is whether policymaking has worsened since 2010. While Robin welcomed the concept of the pupil premium, he said the current grammar schools proposal flew in the face of evidence, dating back as far as the 1960s, as to its likely damaging impact on those not selected. ‘To have two initiatives from the same government department pulling in opposite directions, both in the name of narrowing the gap, is bizarre. But hey, that’s policy.’

On four of CPRT’s priorities – aims, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment – policy is worse in 2016 than when the report was published in 2009, he suggested. ‘Aims remain a yawning gap between perfunctory rhetoric and impoverished political reality. The new national curriculum is considerably less enlightened than the one it replaced … national assessment … is now even more confused and confusing than it was; and most government forays into pedagogy are naïve, ill-founded and doctrinaire.’

Policymakers can also be a very bad advert for the concept of education in itself, at least when they step away from the soothing rhetoric. Robin reminded us of this with reference to Michael ‘had enough of experts’ Gove and his famous observation that those teachers and academics who disagreed with him were ‘enemies of promise’ and Marxists ‘hell bent on destroying our schools.’

Listening to the speech, and sitting in on a couple of seminars and the day’s final plenary, was to be reminded of another contrast: between the decades of experience many contributors to the conference had to offer and the callowness of those often now shaping policy. I am loth to personalise, but to listen to Robin and to set his isolation from substantial involvement in policy 3 against the likes of Rachel Wolf, now opining on ‘the next round of education reform’ and the revelation that policymakers ‘must focus on what goes on inside the classroom’ a few years into a career almost entirely free of experience outside the policy bubble is to despair.4

So what of the depth elsewhere in the conference? I was fascinated by talks on the merits of philosophy in primary schools; and on the phenomenally popular, Cambridge University-based NRICH maths programme, whose director, Ems Lord, asked the provocative question: ‘is [maths] mastery enough?’ I found presentations on the ideas behind Learning without Limits,5 by academics at the universities of Cambridge, East Anglia and Edinburgh, as about the most thought-provoking I have heard.

And the final plenary, offering the thoughts of author/journalist Melissa Benn, another distinguished academic in Andrew Pollard and a headteacher in Sarah Rutty, offered much good sense. I was taken by Melissa’s description of a ‘brilliant’ – ie it sounded great – speech in 2013 by Gove, on the subject of primary education, which nevertheless showed a ‘wilful ignorance of the history of education’; welcome to post-truth politics. I was also struck by Andrew’s notion of evidence-informed, rather than evidence-based education, as the former implied the use of value judgement, which was important. However, in relation to policy, in stating that the Department for Education runs ‘consultations which turn out to be pseudo-consultations’, he reminded us how distant any kind of evidence can often feel from the directives.

Finally, Sarah launched into a quickfire, and bleakly humorous, tour de force on what it felt like to be on the end of policy suffused by a ‘lack of trust, lack of empathy, lack of joined-up thinking’, including those endless, and sometimes, she suggested, borderline incomprehensible missives from the Standards and Testing Agency about assessment changes.

‘As a headteacher, I feel a bit bullied if I’m honest. The government are not listening to our voices. They are certainly not listening to the voices of the children,’ she said.

The title of the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review, of course, was ‘Children, their World, their Education.’ Yet policy, in imposing constant change on schools because this fits both its own internal logic and the political needs of those in charge, staggeringly rarely, in reality, stops to consider the effects on those it is meant to help.

If it did, why would it have introduced major increases in the number of children likely to be deemed failing at 11 as a result of changes in the national assessment and curriculum systems without, as far as I know, having carried out any impact study as to the possible effects on pupils?

If it did, why would it have tried to force major disruptive and expensive structural change on thousands of primary schools without any good evidence that this will help pupils?

If it did, why would it publish a green paper on increasing selection without, seemingly, any consideration of the potential impact on pupils not deemed academic enough to pass a selective test?

Professionalism in spite of policy remains, sadly, the only hope for England’s schools.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007) and the recent CPRT report ‘Academies: autonomy, accountability, quality and evidence‘  (May 2016). Read more CPRT blogs by Warwick here.

 

1 – As is also implicit in a blog I wrote in the spring.

2 – CPR was not alone in this view. Another major review, the Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, England and Wales led by Richard Pring, also concluded in 2009. It investigated the notion that ‘there have been too many fragmented and disconnected interventions by government which do not cohere in some overall sense of purpose’.

3 – He has reminded me that as well as the 1991-2 ‘three wise men’ enquiry’ he has served on quangos such as CATE and QCA while his persistence over spoken language, in the face of that notorious ministerial objection that classroom talk is no more than ‘idle chatter’, succeeded in getting it reinstated, albeit reluctantly, in the current national curriculum. But my general point stands: on the one hand we have the rich but largely untapped experience and expertise that this conference brought together in abundance; on the other the supplanting of such experience and expertise by ideologically compliant special advisers and ‘expert groups’.

4 – Among several remarkable claims in Rachel Wolf’s blog is that ‘too many schools still resist testing as an “evil”’.   Really? No, they’d no doubt like to resist some of the more damaging impacts of high-stakes testing, but policymaking hangs all on test results, so…

5 – The papers on Learning without Limits will be on the programme’s website from next week.

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After Trump, what next?

President Donald J. Trump!

My mind reels, stomach churns and spirit despairs.  I’m disoriented and confused, as are about half the country.  I’ve only met one Trump supporter in the three months I’ve been in the United States; who are the other 59 million people who cast their ballots for him?  What just happened?  What comes next?  And what does it mean for us educators?

It’s hard to see this election outcome as anything but a systemic failure of the democratic process.  Hillary Clinton was not an ideal candidate, but Trump?  Here’s part of the editors of non-partisan The Atlantic summary of his candidacy:

 …has no record of public service and no qualifications for public office. His affect is that of an infomercial huckster; he traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic; he expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself. He is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse…

I’d add to that list Trump’s fundamental lack of respect for democratic norms, perhaps best captured by the chilling exchange in the second presidential debate in which Trump threatened Clinton with ‘if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation’.

In response, Clinton noted that ‘it’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country’.

‘Because you’d be in jail’, Trump quipped, to audience applause.

Similarly, he’s encouraged violence at his rallies, questioned the integrity of a federal judge on account of his ethnic ancestry, advocated barring Muslims from entering the U.S., sought to undermine the legitimacy of the elections (when it appeared he was losing), and embraced torture ‘even if it doesn’t work’.  There’s plenty more – see for example Andrew Sullivan’s essay on the dangers to democracy of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies.

So what happened?  Recalling the Brexit vote, it appears that a combination of identity politics, economic insecurity, fear of foreigners, patriotic nostalgia, and a loss of faith in government led white working class voters to overwhelmingly support Trump.  Voters wanted an ‘outsider’ who would ‘shake things up’; Hillary Clinton appeared as the ultimate insider and continuation of Obama. Trump’s name-calling and lies undoubtedly contributed to Clinton’s troubles.  Also, I fear, sexism and racism.

But understanding the Trump phenomenon requires that we go beyond the specific demographics, attitudes, issues and campaign strategies to consider the root conditions that enabled such a fundamentally flawed candidacy to develop and thrive.  I have in mind, first and foremost, the media environment that legitimated and even rewarded political behaviors that the pundits considered to be candidacy-destroying.

To help think about this media environment, and its educational implications, I recommend Neil Postman’s extraordinarily prescient book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, about how television shapes our political culture.  Though published over thirty years ago – before cable, reality television, social media, or smartphones – the book’s relevance has only grown with age. Postman argues that television is better suited to entertain than inform, better at communicating images than arguments, and better at spectacle than deliberation. Moreover, since its (economic) success is measured in viewer ratings rather than their enlightenment, spectacle, images and entertainment dominate our television culture. Postman argues that one consequence of this cultural change is a change in our relationship to the truth:

If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude. I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to anyone, not even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying.

No matter that Trump out-lied Clinton at a rate of 67 to 9 in the first two debates; he lied confidently and unapologetically, all the while dragging ‘Crooked Hillary’ through the mud of outlandish, false accusations.

Trump, the veteran reality television star grasped that image is more important than ideas, and that drama sells.  Consider, for example, the ‘you’d be in jail’ incident: as democratic politics, it was an appalling threat to abuse presidential powers; as dramatic spectacle, it was riveting.  Moreover, it further cemented Trump’s image as the straight-talking, no-holds-barred boss from the boardroom of The Apprentice.

When Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, U.S. television was controlled by the three networks.  Now it is fragmented into hundreds of cable channels, which are amplified and echoed by innumerable social media accounts.  One consequence of this fragmentation is that Democrats and Republicans are getting their news, ideas and images from different sources, further eroding the possibility of achieving a common truth, a common good, or a public conversation.  I’m crushed today by the outcome of the election, terrified by the prospect of the Trump presidency, but I’m also aware that had Clinton performed two percentage points better in a handful of states the other half of the electorate would have been equally crushed and terrified. American democracy cannot survive that divide.

The quality of public discourse is a democratic problem, of course, but it is also an educational problem. Who we are and what we think is to a large extent shaped by the discourses we participate in and are exposed to – on the television no less than in the classroom. Our sense of what is true and right, and conversely what is crazy and outrageous, is at least partially affected by the combative and ugly discourse that pervades the televised public sphere.

Six weeks before the U.S. election I joined over 250 teachers at the Teaching About the 2016 Elections conference at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Many participants were concerned about how to respond to the hateful rhetoric to which their students were exposed while also maintaining a neutral, non-partisan stance. Moreover, they were particularly worried about the ‘Trump Effect‘: ‘an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color… [and] an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail’.

At the opening panel at the conference, Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings advised teachers to fill the void created by popular culture: to shift the focus from the cult of personality to deliberating the issues, from the presidential race to local and congressional elections, and from the here and now to international and historical understanding of the elections.

Ladson-Billings’ advice makes sense as a way of teaching in the heat of the elections, constructively and in a non-partisan manner.  But addressing the radical problems of a dysfunctional public sphere and a deeply divided electorate requires more fundamental rethinking of the form and aims of education for democratic participation.  Learning how to live democratically is facilitated by, in the words of the Cambridge Primary Review, helping ‘children to become active citizens by encouraging their full participation in decision-making within the classroom and school’. This includes bringing into the classroom controversial issues, in order to learn how to discuss them democratically: that is, respectfully, with people we disagree with, based on evidence and argument, and with a genuine openness to hear, consider, and try to address the others’ concerns.  Furthermore, if Postman’s analysis is on target, pupils also need to learn to look critically at the media environment: to become accustomed to assessing the quality of claims, to develop awareness of how they’re influenced, and to go beyond the identification of the features of different genres (as is currently popular) to assess their advantages and limitations.  I suggest these practices not as another supplement to an already crowded curriculum, but as principles for the teaching and learning of existing texts and topics.

Unfortunately, the urgent need for this democratic and critical educational agenda will likely grow under the Trump administration.

Adam Lefstein is Associate Professor of Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. He is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Find out more about his book Better than Best Practice at www.dialogicpedagogy.com

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Re-thinking professionalism in teaching

Professions have standards for entry, early career formation and on-going practice that are set by members and leaders of that profession rather than through legislation or government policy. These standards are set drawing on an agreed body of knowledge and/or principles, again agreed and maintained by members of the profession. They are framed with reference to a code of conduct which will include ethical considerations. The whole is overseen by a professional body formed of members of the profession and governed by experienced and expert members, elected by and answerable to the membership.  In the UK these bodies usually have a legal status conferred by grant of a Royal Charter.

The teaching profession first set up a chartered professional body to oversee teaching in the 1840s. Unlike many other professions, where membership of such bodies is an unquestioned and valued part of professional identity, The College of Preceptors (later Teachers) never quite achieved that central status. It had some success over the centuries in fostering innovation and raising standards; it established one of the first training colleges for teachers at a time when the value or need for such training was in doubt. However its charter fell short of the authority of those in other professions and the power to set vital standards for entry or progression stayed firmly in the hands of policy makers, not expert practitioners.  After nearly 200 years, all this may be about to change.

On the 8th June 2016  the Privy Council granted a supplemental charter to the College of Teachers. This marks a major milestone in the professionalisation of teaching as it grants the power to create a true Chartered Status for teachers. Chartered status is a mark of excellence in a profession, granted to practitioners who have achieved a recognised level of expertise and who continue to practise at that level. Perhaps the most important aspect of this change is that the decisions on how that level is set and how fellow professionals are deemed to have reached it, will be made by the members of that profession. Not by politicians, or civil servants or by other experts who take a view on what the profession should or could do, but by working professionals who are trusted to determine what true expertise looks like in their sphere of activity.  Moreover, the benchmark for excellence is set with reference to the best possible outcomes for those the profession serves.  So Chartered Teacher status will be set and awarded by fellow teachers, through the powers granted to their own professional College, owned and governed by its members.  It will recognise those who make a difference.

So given the huge potential this creates for teachers and teaching, how to proceed in a practice as varied and complex as teaching? Clearly there is no singular ‘right way’ to teach.  Teaching is a complex and nuanced activity, constantly influenced by context and content, moderated through the thousands of interactions between teacher and taught.  Against this backdrop, can there be a meaningful professional status that carries weight and recognises genuine expertise?  Moreover, how can working towards such a status support teacher development and offer practical support in the classroom, and yet avoid becoming another unwelcome administrative burden?

Clearly if the Chartered College of Teaching is to add power to the teaching profession it must rise to the challenge of creating a professional community of teachers that supports and develops its members, offering real benefits and professional recognition. After many years of consultation, a model is emerging based on the appetite for a knowledge-sharing professional community, and the development of shared professional principles.

Developing professional knowledge

Teaching is a complex practice, involving as Ted Wragg observed, as many as 1000 individual interactions by the teacher over a typical school day.  If there was one, reliable, repeatable, universal method guaranteed to produce effective learning then it would have been defined and replicated by now.  In place of the one size fits all model, there is a nuanced web of practices that vary depending on the context.  Teaching and learning are social and cultural practices which are shaped by who is learning, what, where and when.  That said, this does not justify an entirely organic approach where the decisions made on curriculum, pedagogy, behaviour and all the other elements of practice are entirely based on opinion and anecdote. Instead, as CPRT argues, there is a need for teachers to develop a command of a repertoire of knowledge, skills and strategies.

What might a body of shared professional knowledge look like? One option could be to follow a highly diversified approach, similar to that taken by the National Board for Professional Standards in Teaching in the US.  Over a six year period they developed highly specific standards for a range of subjects in different phases. This raises issues of practicality as well as value – the process of developing and maintaining such standards is complex, time-consuming and costly.  Setting up a similar model in the UK was estimated by McKinsey to need £30 million of funding. Moreover the adoption remains far from universal, even after 27 years, the number of teachers taking up the US NBPST standards and seeking accreditation against them is a small percentage of the profession.

Another option is to seek to distil the essence of sound and effective practice in teaching.  This model, premised loosely on the Australian teaching standards, focuses on the kind of teacher you are and the culture in which you work. This model is potentially more powerful and more sustainable. Building on this it is possible to codify a common epistemology for teaching – how you know being as important as what you know.  Is teaching practice sufficiently analytical? When an intervention or innovation is planned, is there engagement with a relevant evidence base (gathered within and beyond the school) to inform the design? Are the results monitored and evaluated through meaningful collection and examination of the evidence of development of learning? These ideas are encapsulated in the CPR Final Report’s recommendations on pedagogy which propose that:

We need now to move to a position where research-grounded teaching repertoires and principles are introduced through initial training and refined and extended through experience and CPD, and teachers acquire as much command of the evidence and principles which underpin the repertoires as they do of the skills needed in their use.

The transformed College offers an opportunity for the teaching profession to come together and answer these questions for itself, to take ownership of the professional principles that should guide practice and push back against fads and fashions that wash over schools in a constant stream.  The College offers a rallying point, under the auspices of a Royal Charter, for teachers to found a new bastion of professionalism.

Angela McFarlane is former Professor of Education at Bristol University, and former Chief Executive and Registrar of the College of Teachers.

 www.collegeofteaching.ac.uk

 For further discussion about the College of Teaching read this article published in Education Today (June 2016)

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Learning global

Before you’ve finished your breakfast this morning, you’ll have relied on half the world. (Martin Luther-King)

The Cambridge Primary Review Trust prioritises a rounded primary education that does not shirk the ‘everyday complexity’ of the contemporary world. In February 2016, it published the report Primary Education for Global Learning and Sustainability, which called for further work on ‘the development of a pedagogy of global and environmental social justice.’

The following are some thoughts about what ‘learning global’ looks like. It draws on insights from a project at Tide~ global learning which involves teachers from the UK, Spain, Kenya and The Gambia.

What are we trying to do?

CPRT’s February 2016 report points out that ‘learning about global and sustainability themes raises wider points regarding the purpose of education.’

Our aims will dictate the approaches that we take. Most serious commentators on the purpose of education go beyond test results to consider both individual and societal purposes. CPRT aims for ‘Self, others and the wider world’ are particularly (but not exclusively) relevant here. The following two aims deserve a careful reading:

Promoting interdependence and sustainability. To develop children’s understanding of humanity’s dependence for well-being and survival on equitable relationships between individuals, groups, communities and nations, and on a sustainable relationship with the natural world, and help children to move from understanding to positive action in order that they can make a difference and know that they have the power to do so.

Empowering local, national and global citizenship. To help children to become active citizens by encouraging their full participation in decision-making within the classroom and school, especially where their own learning is concerned, and to advance their understanding of human rights, democratic engagement, diversity, conflict resolution and social justice. To develop a sense that human interdependence and the fragility of the world order require a concept of citizenship which is global is well as local and national.

It is also worth noting that a set of outward-looking aims are also now enshrined within the globally-agreed UN Sustainable Development Goals as SDG 4.7.

What are our theories of knowledge and learning?

The next step on our pedagogical journey is to consider knowledge itself. How do we know the world?

Let’s take the issue of climate change as an example. Knowledge about it is contentious. Scientific predictions and solutions vary. We are dealing with change itself, so new knowledge is coming into being all the time. Our response therefore needs to be flexible, rather than fixed.

With an issue like this (or conflict, the refugee crisis etc) Mr Gradgrind’s ‘facts’ are only going to get us so far. If we think that human suffering, injustice and environmental devastation actually matter, we need something more.

Since climate change is already a pressing reality for millions of human beings, meaningful knowledge about it is not just a moral imperative but a growing necessity. It is not accidental that countries like Bangladesh have made it a compulsory element in their National Curriculum.

It is that wider narrative that makes all the messy information meaningful. However, a nine year old child may need specific stories to access that big picture: the polar bear stranded on an ice floe; the teenager generating renewable energy from a hamster wheel; the Maldives’ president holding an underwater press conference to draw attention to his islands’ plight; a demonstration or a summit that brings people together around a call for change. Some of those stories will want to counter potential pessimism with tales of hopeful action.

If we are to make sense of big, messy issues, then we are most likely to do so as active makers of meaning. We can start to make sense of the stories and information we encounter through investigation, comparison, experimentation, experience, dialogue, drama, debate, critical reflection, synthesis and application. To borrow from Jerome Bruner, we will mostly be using ‘narrative’ ways of understanding the world.

Learning may ultimately happen in each individual brain, but the business of effective global learning is a social activity. As CPRT’s final aim and seventh priority remind us, dialogue is paramount. Our ideas – and the values that inform them – are in play with those of other people. We make meaning together.

Rather than imagining a helpful and omniscient answer-book for big global issues, I like Edward Said’s idea of thinking ‘contrapuntally.’ He takes his metaphor from an orchestra, and how its individual instruments play distinctive lines that together make a greater whole.

In the example of climate change, these instrumental lines can be played by different subjects (Science, Geography, Citizenship etc), by accounts from contrasting parts of the world (big carbon emitters like the USA, vulnerable countries like The Gambia, rapidly-industrialising countries like India), or by the stories of people with different roles and viewpoints (the climate scientist, the fuel company employee, the Alaskan villager needing to move her home). When we put them together, we make a bigger whole, and in so doing we avoid the trap of ‘the single story.’

How do we connect action to learning?

If we are talking about global learning, challenging pessimism and fostering hope, then we are not only talking about understanding but about positive action.

I think that it is best to imagine action and learning in a dialectical relationship, where one constantly leads on to the other. Positive action, as part of a learning process, is not only informed by new knowledge, but leads on to further knowledge.

Seen this way, positive action can serve as a way into deeper learning. For example, a Year 4 class adopts a simple energy-saving measure, switching lights off in empty classrooms. This only makes sense if pupils locate what they are doing within the bigger picture of climate change and energy use. (‘We are doing this because …’)

Pupils can then subject their idea to scrutiny. Is this the best course of action, given the big picture? How much energy does it save? Where does the electricity come from? (e.g. if it is all generated from renewable sources, is it having any effect on climate change?)  Are there safety or security benefits to sometimes leaving lights on? If so, is there a way around this (e.g. installing movement sensors)? And so forth …

In this instance, positive action leads to legitimate learning, and thus to further action. All-knowing adults are not grooming children into predetermined forms of ‘behaviour change’ (where switching off the lights is always an unquestionable good), but empowering them to arrive at their own ideas about what is responsible and effective. Children are acting as agents both of their own learning and of social and environmental change.

Moreover, 2016’s solutions are unlikely to be those of 2056, so children’s growing ability to criticise, analyse and imagine plausible courses of action is not only educationally richer, but more likely to be useful and sustainable. Professor Bill Scott describes this as ‘learning as sustainability.’

Global learning lenses – a useful scaffold?

The following offers some useful pedagogical scaffolding. It comes courtesy of Tide~’s Spanish project partners at FERE-CECA in Madrid, and takes the form of four ‘global learning lenses.’ These can help us look into any global issue, for example the international food trade.

The Magnifying Glass opens up the issues, including becoming aware of hidden questions about values and the way we use language. We might start by looking at food labels, identifying where things have come from, and finding the places on the map.  Using a questioning framework like the Development Compass Rose we can investigate images of growers and producers in some of these places. We could give them thought or speech bubbles, freeze frame the images, and discuss why they are thinking or saying those things.

The 3D Glasses offer diverse perspectives. These could be subject or place perspectives, the viewpoints of different people in the production cycle. Who earns what from growing a banana?  We could debate-in-role as a banana grower, an importer and a supermarket manager. Are the processes just? Older pupils could look at an international news website and consider what people in different countries are saying about the latest trade talks.

The Microscope looks deeper and more critically into the issues. What would happen if we were to fill a lunchbox using different criteria, such as trading fairly, being environmentally friendly, healthy eating, living on a budget, tastiness?  What would go into only one box? Into all? Which would we opt for and why?  Older children might look at the way a big supermarket chain or a leading brand works. Who is involved and what are the processes?

The Telescope envisions solutions and engages us in ‘utopian thinking’. We might write or draw an imaginary classroom, school or community of the near future where all its food is provided fairly and with the environment in mind. From this, we might decide to set up a food growing project at the school, or to support a particular producer, and present our work to peers and parents. Outputs of this kind not only concentrate and focus learning, but lend it real purpose.

Like any pedagogical journey, we need to consider our aims, the kind of approaches that best suit the content (and the children) and to have some useful tools at our disposal. I look forward to hearing how readers’ global learning journeys go.

Ben Ballin works for the educational charity Tide~ global learning. He is also a consultant to the Geographical Association and Big Brum Theatre in Education.

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Reading: re-asserting the potency of the personal

In countries where the language of schooling predominantly focuses on measurable and often oversimplified notions of attainment, children can come to be viewed and discussed in relation to their current standards of performance, rather than as unique individuals.  In such audit-driven cultures the vital personal and affective dimensions of teaching reading and of being a reader can easily become obscured, and the potential for richly reciprocal reader relationships between children and children and between children and teachers reduces.

Yet it is possible to build human connections between readers and texts and to make the life-to-text and text-to-life moves which are core to reading in the real world. A balance needs to be wrought between teaching the skills of decoding and comprehension and fostering reading for pleasure. Such reading is essentially volitional, intrinsically motivated, child-directed and choice-led. It has making meaning at its heart.

In order to build reciprocal communities of readers who can and do choose to read and who think and talk about what they are reading, I believe we need to re-assert the potency of the personal in reading. Personal emotional responses include care, concern, sympathy, sadness, excitement, exhilaration, fear, boredom, anger and indifference, to name but a few.  Our responses motivate us as readers to persevere and to read on, or to exercise our rights as readers and step away. Either way our responses often prompt us to talk to others about our reading, whether it’s a worrying news item, an amusing text message, a surprising Facebook entry, or an unnerving novel. Reading opens up conversations between readers about their views and values, lives and experiences, it enables us as humans to consider who we are, what we and others stand for and what we feel about personal, social and cultural issues.

Such conversations cannot be left to chance. They are a crucial element in a rigorously planned and responsively executed reading for pleasure pedagogy that creates communities of readers. Pedagogy is one of CPRT’s eight priorities. Indeed as CPRT asserts, teachers need to

Develop a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance, with a particular emphasis on fostering the high quality classroom talk which children’s development, learning and attainment require.

But how is the profession to develop such a pedagogy for volitional child-led reading? And how can this be planned for and integrated into the daily fabric of school life when, as a deputy head told me this week ‘It’s not assessed, so frankly we find it hard to give any time to it’. While the profession undoubtedly wants to avoid ‘measuring the pleasure’, volitional reading demands careful nurturing, ongoing invitations to engage, imagine and be inspired. A planned reading for pleasure pedagogy is needed, based on evidence and principle. The UKLA research project Teachers as Readers suggests that this encompasses four core elements:  enticing reading environments (physically and socially), a rich read aloud programme, the provision of quality time for independent choice-led reading, and space and time for informal talk about texts .

In the UKLA study, many of the teachers (from 27 English schools) started by conducting an audit to determine the opportunities currently on offer for children to read for pleasure and the space made available to talk about their choices with one another and with teachers.  Most found that adults were the ones controlling the reading on offer to children. In particular, talk about texts was confined to the official literacy curriculum, to guided and shared reading where children’s responses were commented upon and evaluated according to the daily learning objectives. There were few real spaces for non-assessed relaxed reading conversations (in pairs or small groups), and few opportunities to talk informally about children’s responses (to literature or non-fiction), to discuss personal preferences, home practices or what being a 21st century reader might involve.

I fear this is still the case in many schools where literature is seen as a resource for literacy, staff are not encouraged to widen their pedagogic reading for pleasure repertoires and lip service is paid to children’s intrinsic motivation as readers. Too often extrinsic motivation rules. This may be evidenced through ongoing and high profile tests and targets, school-wide competitions about reading at home, and awards for those children who read higher numbers of books.  In such schools limited talk and creative interaction around texts is likely to be heard, constraining personal responses to reading.

In the Teachers as Readers project, teachers’ talk about self-chosen children’s books was initially dominated by a professional focus: they concentrated on what literacy objectives the book was good for (e.g. teaching character, plot, setting and specific language and literary devices) and often talked about how long the book would sustain a literacy focus and the amount of work it could generate. This talk was largely at the expense of mentioning the content or meaning of the narrative, or of how individual books affected them personally or might affect children.

In complete contrast, when the teachers discussed their self-chosen adult books, meaning and affect were foregrounded; personal views and emotional responses were voiced about both fiction and non-fiction and emerging social, cultural or moral issues were spontaneously discussed.  The teachers shared myriad connections to their own lives and in the process got to know more about one another – their values, families and life histories for example. This disconnect between talking about children’s texts and their own adult reading material was significant. It was fed back to the teachers, who began to re-consider what counts as reading in their homes and schools. Gradually, as they began to  read much more children’s literature, they came to talk about it as worth reading for its own sake – to be experienced, enjoyed (or not) and debated. Recognising that affect and engagement were crucial in motivating their reading, the practitioners began to share their own responses to texts in class and gave increased attention to children’s personal and emotional responses. They also set considerably more time aside for reading aloud.

Reading aloud offers an invitation to children to engage, imagine, predict and participate in the classroom community of readers; though much will depend on the quality of the text, who chose it, and the teacher’s capacity to bring it vividly to life, as well as whether it is read as a precursor to related writing activities.  It is not an ‘extra’ to be included if time allows or the children’s behaviour is deemed satisfactory.

This crucial pedagogic practice has personal, social and cognitive benefits and offers an externalised model for silent, independent reading, enabling children to experience the patterns, language and tunes of texts which they could not yet read independently.Significantly, the shared experience of being read to draws the class together in a kind of bonding time and establishes ‘texts-in-common’ whichprompt interaction. Other ‘texts-in-common’ emerge when teachers and children and children and children recommend reading material to each other; such two-way recommendations also trigger conversations and connections. Whilst these chats may happen in the interstices of the school day, making time to touch base with others and voice your thoughts and feelings about a text helps build connections between readers. These opportunities for personal interaction, reader to reader, offer invaluable support and help create a reading culture.

Reading Teachers – teachers who read and readers who teach – can often draw on a wide repertoire of children’s literature and other texts and their knowledge of the young people as readers. They are better positioned to reach out to individual learners and share texts that will interest and intrigue them, this is a much underrated professional skill which can make a profound contribution to the development of individual readers. Their classrooms are often characterised by informal text talk and book gossip as readers swap, recommend, debate and discuss their reading. Additionally Reading Teachers may foster wider human connections and empathetic responses to the plight of others. As Neil Gaiman, the children’s writer, notes:

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

EmpathyLab, an exciting new social action start-up led by Miranda McKearney (ex CEO of the Reading Agency), is exploring ways to nurture children’s empathetic innerstanding through words and stories. As the team argue, children’s social and emotional skills are increasingly recognised as vitally important for their wellbeing; they represent the basis of sound relationships and a trusting classroom ethos and can be fostered through talk and interaction about texts, potentially leading to social action. Their team’s work with schools has myriad connections to CPRT’s aims for primary education. As Robin Alexander’s recent CPRT submission to the House of Commons Education Committee reminded us, these aims focus on the individual – their wellbeing, engagement and autonomy, and on the relationship between self, others and the wider world – in particular encouraging respect and reciprocity and foregrounding the role of dialogue in learning.

Reciprocity and interaction are key markers of reading communities. In these, teachers share something of themselves as readers and as humans and make the time to find out more about the children and their everyday reading lives. They might do this through undertaking Reading Rivers (where children and teachers create collages of their recent reading in all its diversity), and build upon the variety documented by widening the range of reading material welcomed in class.  When children are invited to bring something of their reading selves to school, are offered engaging spaces and dedicated time to read their self-chosen texts, and experience texts read aloud evocatively, then the boundaries between reading in school and beyond begin to blur and reading discussions become more shared. In such communities there is a high degree of informal interaction around reading and a sense of reciprocity – of giving and receiving as readers, and as individuals.

We need to re-assert the potency of the personal, the essential reciprocity of human relations and the significance of affect and interaction in reading and in learning.

If you are interested in these issues, do consider joining UKLA’s research symposium Reading for Pleasure: What next? at the OU Camden, London, on March 23rd 2016. Cutting-edge research will be shared from colleagues in Oslo, Sheffield, Nottingham and Manchester, and there will be opportunities to debate research, policy and practice with the CEOs of BookTrust, the Reading Agency, the Reader Organisation and the NLT.

For other CPRT blogs by Teresa Cremin click here and or/download CPRT’s book Primary Colours.

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Marvellous teachers

As a head I want to do all that I can to enable a happy school and ensure that our children have the time of their lives, love learning, and are inspired and aspirational.

I rely on our teachers to make this happen. Recently I have found myself focusing on nurturing their  wellbeing and asking how we enable teachers, as well as pupils, to ‘love learning, be inspired and aspirational’? How can we get the pride and passion back into the profession and use it to have a positive impact on teacher recruitment and retention? One of the aims of CPRT, wellbeing, can help here. Lately we have been prioritising this aim to help us to consider how to re-engage our learning communities with the benefits of a broad and rich curriculum.

Eighteen months ago Seabridge became the lead school for the Keele and North Staffordshire Primary SCITT (KNSPS) and as part of our recruitment drive we’ve been creating an advertisement  with our children focusing on what makes a ‘marvellous’ teacher. We have used Neil Baldwin (Nello), who comes from Newcastle under Lyme, and is the subject of a BBC award winning film Marvellous as our inspiration. His story is inspiring and the film is a great tonic.

In its final report, the Cambridge Primary Review recounted (pp 147-50) what children told the review team they looked for from their teachers. Similarly, and inspired by Neil Baldwin, our children have come up with their own versions of the ‘marvellous’ teacher.  When they think of Baldwin they speak of optimism and a ‘can do’ attitude. The staff at Seabridge have been moved by our children’s expectations of the profession. These have made us pause and take a moment to consider not only what makes for a marvellous teacher, but through the endeavours of such teachers what makes for a marvellous curriculum.

On reflection, and this should not be a surprise, Neil’s story and our children’s hopes have many connections with the aspirations of CPR and CPRT for an effective and purposeful primary education. The CPR/CPRT aim of wellbeing is about attending

… to children’s capabilities, needs, hopes and anxieties … and promoting their mental, emotional and physical wellbeing and welfare … Caring for children’s wellbeing is about inducting them into a life where they will be wholeheartedly engaged in all kinds of worthwhile activities and relationships, defined generously rather than narrowly. It is about maximising children’s learning potential through good teaching and the proper application of evidence about how children develop and learn and how teachers most effectively teach … It requires us to attend to children’s future fulfilment as well as their present needs and capabilities. Wellbeing thus defined is both a precondition and an outcome of successful primary education.

As a CPRT Alliance School, we have developed links with Keele University and KNSPS. This has led to a series of research breakfasts for senior leaders. Both KNSPS and the research breakfasts have focused on the wellbeing of staff and children alike through a broad and balanced curriculum.The research breakfasts provide much needed time to sit and think, discuss and reflect. They have  helped to rekindle my passion and confirm why I love teaching so much. At each breakfast we consider a research paper from CPRT.  Our most recent event focused on the curriculum and assessment, with a discussion of Wynne Harlen’s CPRT research report  on assessment, standards and quality of learning.

We considered how best to prioritise the time to deepen our subject expertise across the entire curriculum. Subject expertise has been recognised as an essential ingredient in being a good teacher by evidence from CPR and many other sources. (Children themselves told the Cambridge Primary Review team that ‘good teachers know a lot about their subject’). We agreed that teachers need time for reflective practice and opportunities to discuss pedagogy and share ideas practice as without this they cannot build professional resilience. The ‘culture of compliance’ criticised in the CPR final report (pp 495-6) has, for many, stripped away their informed creativity, so why don’t we apply to teachers those CPR-evidenced principles that we know are so very enabling for our children?

To achieve this we must invest time and energy in nurturing the well-being of our teachers, so that they can continually develop their professional knowledge and expertise across a curriculum informed by disciplined creativity, one that is broad and balanced while also mindful of teachers own wellbeing.

At Seabridge we have been focusing on fine tuning core subject planning and delivery and refining our marking and feedback to allow us to deliver a curriculum which is more relevant and engaging. We have been busy prioritising and taking the opportunity to highlight the aims and purposes for each subject in order to ensure we have a curriculum which pursues key strands rather than merely a busy curriculum ‘full of stuff’.

This won’t be a quick fix, but the evidence of CPR/CPRT helps us to base our work on informed evidence rather than simply a sense of what works.

After so many years of compliance teachers need to know that it’s acceptable to draw on their passion and pedagogic repertoire, not just the ring binder. Using the aims and principles of CPR and CPRT has encouraged us to move forward in our thinking. It has given us the language to use in order to enable and engage teachers, explore CPR aims such as pupil wellbeing, engagement, empowerment and exciting the imagination.

For school leaders, a culture of engagement and autonomy is needed alongside a level of trust based on professional dialogue. If we don’t allow time for this to happen our teachers might as well be programmed robots.  We need to invest the time to build relationships between teachers, teachers and children, teachers and leaders and teachers and the curriculum: everyone needs to feel valued and relationships in a school are paramount if we want to foster a climate of trust. If we don’t get this right nothing will flourish.  Children, curriculum and teachers all need nourishment.

Our research breakfasts give leaders in our locality the time and space for thinking , while reading and discussing CPR/CPRT evidence gives us collective energy and a license to explore, and being informed deepens our sense of well-being.  If our teachers to grow and become those marvellous teachers that our children deserve they need such opportunities, living their conviction to support and justify a rich curriculum which provides the breadth and balance, inspiration and thirst for lifelong learning that our children need.

In this, school leaders must be the role models. Notwithstanding OFSTED grade descriptors on outstanding effectiveness of leadership and management, take heart from how one of our children put it: ‘a child’s mind only explores how far a teacher allows it!’ This is very close indeed to that famous Cambridge Primary Review quote (final report, p 296): ‘Pupils will not learn to think for themselves if their teachers are expected merely to do as they are told.’

So come on leaders, let us lead with optimism and imagination to ensure our teachers have time to grow and flourish, develop their subject knowledge and cultivate their passion. We know that a ‘one size fits all’ approach doesn’t deliver what children need. At Seabridge we started by making time for research and professional dialogue between teachers and school leaders, and made their wellbeing a priority in the school development plan. Teachers are the essential ingredient for ensuring our children succeed. Mind you, if Neil Baldwin has anything to do with it our school will have no teachers left! He has already signed one of our teachers up to play in his football team.

Sandra Mitchell is headteacher of Seabridge Primary School, Newcastle under Lyme, and a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance. Seabridge Primary School is within CPRT’s West Midlands network. If you would like to support the development of the region’s activities please contact the coordinator, Branwen Bingle.

 

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Reflections from an NQT: surviving or thriving?

Last June, Sadie posted about training for primary teaching and looked forward to becoming an NQT. Here’s the sequel.

Rewind to Sunday 31st August and you would have found me sitting on my sofa staring down the barrel of my first year as a teacher, wondering what the new academic term would bring. My classroom was beautifully decorated, I had planned my first few weeks of teaching and I was armed with plenty of ‘back to school’ activities to get to know my new class. Adrenaline had kicked in and I was looking forward to making a difference to the children of the inner-city academy I had chosen for my first teaching role. I felt well-rested, eager and raring to go.

Flash forward to present day: I’ve survived my first term as an NQT and the metaphorical onion has revealed its layers, the reality of teaching has become apparent and during the past four months I have experienced a rollercoaster of emotions. It has been exhilarating, exhausting and at times overwhelming.

Initially, I felt as though I was treading water, simply keeping afloat. For the first time in a long time I felt insecure and out of my depth, I continually questioned everything I was doing. It quickly became clear that teacher training does not fully prepare you for the challenges encountered during your first post as a fully-fledged teacher. It is an immense learning curve. I learnt more in those first few weeks than I had in my entire training year. Move over PGCE, welcome to the world of full-time teaching.

The deprived school in East London was a stark contrast to the primaries in Cornwall and Devon where I had completed my training. I was dealing with a high proportion of children with English as an Additional Language (EAL) and over half of my class were considered to have Special Educational Needs (SEN). The high volume of SEN and EAL pupils forced me to adapt my teaching and think outside the box. Thankfully, this is where pedagogy came into play and all those research papers I scrutinised during my PGCE began to form the basis of my teaching across this diverse range of pupils.

To make matters worse, I was also tackling extreme behaviour issues and became aware early on that embedding consistent behaviour strategies in the day-to-day routine was key to ensuring Sarah wouldn’t run out of the classroom when she was feeling frustrated or that Fred wouldn’t lash out at other children when he couldn’t keep his temper under control.

Combine all this with the announcement that two executive heads were parachuting in due to the secondary’s ‘catastrophic GCSE results’, the ensuing resignation of the primary head teacher, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a pretty tough start to an NQT year, but I’ve not let it put me off… yet.

My first term was a blur of planning, marking, getting to grips with behaviour management strategies, learning about my pupils, getting to know colleagues and spending more time than expected within the four walls of the classroom. My partner forgot what I looked like and when I did surface at home late into the evening I spent a lot of time drinking coffee, marking, planning, completing paperwork and preparing resources, not to mention compiling evidence towards to the teaching standards for my NQT file and striving to meet weekly targets set by my NQT mentor.

As a full time primary teacher, I expected to teach 80 percent of my 30-hour timetabled week, with only 10 percent of time allocated to completing NQT tasks, observations, reflections and training, and a further 10 percent allocated to the two remaining, yet fundamental, aspects of the role: marking and planning. An incredible burden is placed on this 10 percent and, no matter how hard I tried, I found it impossible to keep up – leaving all outstanding tasks to be completed in my own time.

Those who know me well would describe me as incredibly organised and highly efficient, qualities I pride myself on. Yet I found myself struggling to get everything done – there simply wasn’t enough time in the day. I led a miserable existence for those first seven weeks. I was working 14-16 hour days on a regular basis, which was completely unsustainable of course. Inevitably, I became ill and despite the fear of falling even further behind I took a sick day. Physically and mentally exhausted, I began to question whether I had made the right decision by pursuing a career in teaching. I hate to admit it, but for the first time I had serious doubts about my future within this new profession.

Thankfully after half term something clicked. I realised that I was trying to be a perfectionist – working too hard, ticking every box, exceeding expectations and trying to make every lesson amazing. I took some time to reflect on my teaching and acknowledged that, in education, resilience is a daily necessity. I wanted to be the perfect teacher, but teaching is a lifetime’s craft. I will never perfect it, nor will I ever complete my ‘to do’ list. Once I accepted this, I began to master the art of resilience. Although I still work on Sundays and am yet to fully establish the elusive work-life balance, I’m working on it. I’ve begun to know when to stop, when to let go and when to switch off, I’ve started to look after myself and feel less guilty about meeting friends, pursuing hobbies or having an evening off.

My teaching philosophies and principles are steeped in the work of the Cambridge Primary Review and the Cambridge Primary Review Trust and I have always endeavored to demonstrate these in my day-to-day practice, but when you’re bogged down by bureaucracy it’s easy to forget about the great intentions and aspirations you had at the start of the year.

My first term of teaching has provided so many challenges that I’ve inadvertently discovered so much more about myself. I have become less self-critical, more forgiving of my own mistakes. Whereas I was once left feeling battered and bruised by observation pressures, scrutiny and the persistent need to develop subject knowledge across the curriculum, I now focus on the positives; recognising my own successes, reflecting on mistakes, identifying areas for improvement and developing a reassuring support network. My colleagues and fellow NQTs have been an invaluable source of support through the highs and lows, both in school and online.

Recently, when re-reading the CPR final report, I had my own light-bulb moment (the kind that I love seeing in the children so much). I remembered precisely why I became a teacher in the first place: to make a difference. The key aims and priorities outlined by CPR and CPRT reminded me that being a teacher isn’t simply about teaching the curriculum; it really is about so much more.

I strive for this kind of principled approach not only to the curriculum, but also the whole experience that I offer children in my care. At times I have been a therapist, a mediator, a comedian, a disciplinarian, a motivator, a guardian and a source of comfort. I use the CPRT aims as aspirational tools to remind me what’s important – over and above government priorities. The CPR final report  provides the evidence to remind us that we can (and must!) trust ourselves as professionals to provide for pupils’ development and learning. Great teaching doesn’t have to be complicated, it’s about getting the simple things right.

Despite all its trials and tribulations, teaching truly is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling careers there are and at the beginning of the year I promised myself I would remember this. It’s not always easy to cultivate a positive outlook, especially in the depths of a dark and gloomy January, but it really does make a difference and I feel so much better for it. It reflects in my teaching too. If I’m tired the kids won’t get the best from me. I need to look after myself. We all do. So, once I’ve finished this blog you’ll find me on my sofa relaxing and enjoying the last few moments of the Christmas break, before the New Year – and the new term – begins.

Having completed her PGCE, Sadie Phillips is teaching at a primary school in London. Read her previous CPRT blog and follow her at @SadiePhillips.

by Robin Alexander

Teaching to the text: England and Singapore

Hearken, if you will, unto DfE Minister Nick Gibb:

I would like to see all schools, both primary and secondary, using high quality textbooks in all subjects, bringing us closer to the norm in high performing countries … In this country, textbooks simply do not match up to the best in the world, resulting in poorly designed resources, damaging and undermining good teaching … Ministers need to make the case for more textbooks in schools, particularly primary schools.

At the conference of the Publishers Association (PA) and the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA) at which Minister Gibb thus nailed his colours to a rather colourless mast, he did rather more than ‘make the case’ and modestly depart. (Minister Liz Truss had delivered the same message to the same audience a year earlier, to little effect). In the discussion that followed his speech Gibb said that publishers should produce the textbooks that teachers need, not what they want, and that if they don’t do so then DfE may have to introduce state approval or kitemarking of textbooks, as in some other countries.

There’s a lot to unpack and unpick here: the assumption that among PISA top performers it’s textbooks that make the difference (the familiar confusion of association with causality); that what appears to hold for secondary students tested by PISA must therefore hold for their primary school peers; that what works for maths works for all other subjects; that what teachers want for their pupils is not what those pupils need (teachers may wish to count to ten before responding); that PISA is all that matters; and that government has both the right and the competence to act as arbiters of textbook quality and impose its judgements on every teacher and child in the land.

There are also the familiar contradictions. In the same speech, the Minister characterised his government’s ‘new approach to educational policy’ since 2010 as ‘designed to foster the autonomy of the teaching profession and sweep away the prescriptive and ideological national strategies’. The national strategies were indeed prescriptive, but replacing one kind of prescription by another seems a decidedly odd way to foster professional autonomy.  In any case, weren’t textbooks, albeit in ring binder form, central to Labour’s national strategies?

Ah, but the difference is that Labour’s policies were ‘ideological’ while the current government’s are dispassionate and objective.  But to this helpful separation of the good guys from the bad (for without ministerial guidance how would we possibly tell the difference?) the Minister adds a further semantic tease.  For while Labour’s textbooks/ring binders were ideological, the neglect of textbooks in English schools relative to their heavy use in Singapore (the system the Minister wants us to copy) was ideological too.  Thus Gibb complains of ‘ideological hostility to the use of textbooks, particularly in primary schools.’

Ideological textbook prescription, ideological opposition to textbooks … Can he have it both ways? Yes indeed, for as used by ministers, ‘ideological’ means merely (of a phenomenon) what the minister doesn’t like, and (of a person) someone who has the audacity to disagree with him. Remember Minister Gibb’s erstwhile DfE colleague Michael Gove? In accordance with established legislative procedure he invited comment on drafts of the new national curriculum, only to  lambast those whose comments were less than fulsomely supportive as ‘enemies of promise … Marxists hell-bent on destroying our schools.’ Clearly, such folk misread the DfE invitation. They should have known that ‘comment’ meant, as no doubt it does in North Korea, ‘applaud’. Who then is the Marxist – the respondent to DfE consultations, Kim Jong-un or Comrade Gove?

Rum cove, politics.  And with the 2015 general election only a few weeks away there’ll be a lot more of this kind of thing before we’re done. So let’s momentarily escape and consider the substantive issue. Gibb’s PA/BESA speech made its case for textbooks by drawing on a paper by Tim Oates that looked at over 200 textbooks in five PISA high-performing jurisdictions, including Singapore, and compared them with England. Textbook use in England, at least in the crucial sense of textbook dependency and compliance, is indeed much lower: in the 2011 TIMSS survey, 70 per cent of Singapore teachers said they used textbooks as the basis for maths teaching compared with only 10 per cent in England; though here textbooks weren’t, as Gibb claimed, viewed with ‘ideological hostility’ but were used by 64 per cent of teachers ‘as a supplement’, which suggests that resources here are used flexibly rather than unquestioningly. Which also sounds reassuringly like teachers exercising the very professional autonomy that Gibb claims his government has fostered.

Oates shows how the best textbooks are well grounded in learning theory as well as subject content, and how they offer range, coherence and clarity in structuring that content for teaching. In other words, they can be, without question, a valuable resource. Further, he reminds us that high stakes tests have narrowed the curriculum (a post-1997 trend chronicled in the Cambridge Primary Review final report  and again, for the period since 2010, in Wynne Harlen’s recent CPRT research review). Interestingly, he suggests that well-structured and ‘expansive’ textbooks ‘could be an antidote to such narrowing’.  He adds that ‘in key jurisdictions, high performing teachers are well-disposed and enthusiastic about textbooks.’

All of this underlines Oates’s concern that opposition to textbooks in England confuses the question of textbook quality with unease about central prescription. But that unease, in view of Gibb’s remarks and the still-vivid memory of Labour’s national strategies and their policing by Ofsted, is hardly surprising; for the Minister is clearly saying that government, not the teaching profession, is the arbiter of textbook quality. Which is exactly the line that Labour took when it imposed its national strategies, extending that presumption of omniscience beyond lesson content to teaching methods, pupil grouping and the allocation of time. There’s a corrosive legacy of blatantly politicized intervention in teaching to which both Labour and Conservative need to own up if they wish their  proposals to be viewed with other than the deepest suspicion.

Back to Oates.  Although he notes that textbook use needs to be embedded in a coherent pedagogy and is just one of a number of ‘control factors’ whereby governments may try to ensure that the curriculum as taught ‘delivers’ the curriculum as prescribed, he does not address the ethical  and political questions raised by this notion and its somewhat chilling vocabulary; for teaching is a moral matter, not merely a technical one. Nor, apparently, has he persuaded ministers to recognise that pedagogy is a system of interdependent elements rather than an aggregation of discrete factors that can be cherry-picked to fuel a media headline or score a political point in the way that ministers are currently doing with textbooks and their predecessors did with whole class teaching.

This alternative perspective is fundamental to my own work on pedagogy going back more than 30 years. It is no less fundamental to what is by far the largest, most detailed and most authoritative research study to date of educational practice in Singapore, a system which both Gibb and Oates wish England to emulate. The Core 2 Research Programme was led by David Hogan, who until recently was Principal Research Scientist at Singapore’s National Institute of Education and for nine years has intensively researched Singaporean schooling. He is currently working with his colleagues Dennis Kwek and Peter Renshaw on CPRT’s new research review on effective teaching.  The Core 2 research is conspicuously absent from both Oates’s paper and ministers’ consciousness.

Core 2 entailed systematic observation, video-recording, interviews and outcome measures in a large and nationally representative stratified sample of Primary 5 (pupils aged 10-11) and Secondary 3 classrooms (14-15) where the unambiguous focus is examination preparation and success. Through multi-level statistical modelling the research team assessed the relationship between various classroom practices, including the use of textbooks, and student achievement in mathematics and English.

The Core 2 findings on the impact of textbooks, though in certain respects positive, are not as straightforward as our Minister would like. Hogan and his colleagues confirm that in Singapore teacher reliance on textbooks is indeed high in mathematics, though not in English. The effects of textbooks are statistically significant in models of the relationship between traditional instruction, direct instruction and student achievement. Overall, however, textbooks do not have a statistically significant impact in either maths or English; and while they do have a statistically significant indirect impact in maths, this is not the case in English.

This subject variation supports scepticism about the Minister’s blanket commitment to a textbook for every subject. But more important is Hogan’s insistence that it’s essential to look well beyond bivariate relationships of the kind that ministers prefer in order to grasp how textbook use and impact are part of the much larger and more complex business of pedagogy, which in turn is embedded in and shaped by culture, history, values and beliefs relating to teaching, learning, knowledge and the goals of education (issues that I investigated in some detail in my own five-nation Culture and Pedagogy).

Thus, in a recent email exchange, David Hogan told me that

In Singapore textbooks are an integral part of an assessment-driven instructional system that effectively integrates elements of traditional and direct instruction … It [does not focus] on learning for deep understanding through carefully designed and calibrated tasks intended to develop a broad range of skills, understandings and dispositions. Rather, it is a highly efficient and effective pedagogical system driven by a limited and highly instrumental and functionalist set of institutional rules.

Crucially, he added:

In my view it would be a mistake to permit textbooks to drive classroom pedagogy in English primary schools: given the current English assessment regime … it would further enhance the transformation of primary school classrooms into pedagogical facsimiles of secondary school classrooms. This might well improve the performance of English students in TIMSS and PISA, but it will compromise the quality of education they get.

And again, in a recent piece entitled ‘Why is Singapore’s school system so successful, and is it a model for the West?’ David Hogan warned:

Singapore’s experience and its current efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning do have important, if ironic, implications for systems that hope to emulate its success. This is especially true of those jurisdictions – I have in mind England and Australia especially – where conservative governments have embarked on ideologically driven crusades to demand more direct instruction of (Western) canonical knowledge, demanding more testing and high stakes assessments of students, and imposing more intensive top-down performance regimes on teachers.

In my view, this is profoundly and deeply mistaken. It is also more than a little ironic given the reform direction Singapore has mapped out for itself over the past decade. The essential challenge facing Western jurisdictions is not so much to mimic East Asian instructional regimes, but to develop a more balanced pedagogy that focuses not just on knowledge transmission and exam performance, but on teaching that requires students to engage in subject-specific knowledge building. Knowledge building pedagogies recognise the value of established knowledge, but also insist that students need to be able to do knowledge work as well as learn about established knowledge. Above all, this means students should acquire the ability to recognise, generate, represent, communicate, deliberate, interrogate, validate and apply knowledge claims in light of established norms in key subject domains.

In the long run, this will do far more for individual and national well-being, including supporting development of a vibrant and successful knowledge economy, than a regressive quest for top billing in international assessments.

The distinction arising from the Core 2 research between the pedagogies of performativity (curriculum coverage, knowledge transmission, test preparation and success) and knowledge building (defined in the quote above) is both crucial to our understanding of what goes on in Singaporean schools and highly relevant to the debate about England’s national curriculum and the role of textbooks in its implementation. For Hogan judges that Singapore’s undoubted prowess at performativity has been at the expense of the knowledge-building which is no less essential to social and economic progress and which he believes is one of the strengths of English education. As it happens, he has used these two versions of pedagogy to compare schools in Singapore and London, and on knowledge-building the London schools do well.

There’s clearly a discussion to be had about the narrower question of textbooks and other published resources in primary schools, and I hope this blog will encourage that. As a matter of fact, it’s a discussion in which many of us have been involved, via the Expert Subjects Advisory Group (ESAG) and CPRT’s own collaboration with the subject associations and Pearson, since long before Tim Oates presented his thoughts and Nick Gibb dropped his bombshell. Indeed, it was DfE itself that set up ESAG to help teachers locate and evaluate resources for implementing the new national curriculum in line with the new, post-Labour professional freedoms. Perhaps our Minister has forgotten that.

But the more fundamental debate, which is marginalised by ministers’ obsession with international test performance, is about the proper nature and purposes of 21st century education. To adapt the Minister’s comment at the PA/BESA conference: a test-driven curriculum and a textbook-driven pedagogy may be what Nick Gibb wants, but are they what our children need?

Postscript

Since this blog coincides with the death of Lee Kuan Yew, the man who presided over Singapore’s remarkable economic and social transformation into the international powerhouse that it is today, it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves of two salient differences mentioned by neither Oates nor Gibb: scale and politics. Singapore is a city state with 5.14 million inhabitants and just 182 primary schools (the corresponding figures for England are 53 million and 16,818). When manageable scale is combined with an authoritarian political regime, government has at its fingertips potent levers for rapid  and wholesale systemic reform.  As a comparativist I believe that it is essential to learn from others, and this blog reminds us that there is certainly much we can learn from Singapore. But, as David Hogan and the Core 2 research show, wrenching one factor in another system’s success from its cultural, political, historical, demographic and pedagogical roots is neither valid nor viable.

The Guardian obituary for Lee credits him with creating ‘a strong, pervasive role for the state and little patience for dissent.’ Given the current government’s track record on appointing advisers and handling evidence perhaps that’s the lesson from elsewhere that ministers would really prefer us to accept.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Given Nick Gibb’s disarmingly simple claims about textbooks and the much more complex evidence from Singapore it would be extremely helpful to this debate if primary schools rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted would tell us what part textbooks have played in their schools’ success.

We would also like to hear what teachers think – all teachers, not just those from schools deemed outstanding – about the Minister’s campaign for textbooks in all subjects in the primary phase, and his hint about DfE kitemarking. And of course about the kind of pedagogy that serves the larger purposes of primary education.

 

Contact

Cambridge Primary Review Trust - Email: administrator@cprtrust.org.uk