The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

by

Reading for pleasure: just window dressing?

Since reading for pleasure was mandated in the national curriculum, its profile has risen exponentially. This is assuredly good news, and many schools are seeking ways to demonstrate their commitment to this agenda. But as the pressure to raise reading scores persists, there is surely a danger that schools will only find the time to pay lip service to reading for pleasure, constructing it as little more than an act of institutional window dressing in our highly performative culture.

The requirement that children should be ‘taught to find pleasure in reading’ appears to have prompted many schools to refurbish/reclaim their libraries and buy new books. Some have even purchased double decker buses, tents, tree houses and caravans to deck out as school libraries, as well as garden sheds, boats, baths and sofas to enrich classroom reading areas. These physical spaces overtly indicate to parents, governors, Ofsted inspectors and the children that the school values reading, but is this institutional demonstration enough?

In other ways too, with the best of intentions, schools can be sucked into performing reading for pleasure. Institution-wide competitions exist aplenty, including for example: extravagant dressing-up competitions on World Book Day, and competitions to read books for the school. There are also class awards (for example Reader of the Week), and inter-class competitions such as the number of books reviewed each month. In one school I know the children’s home-reading records are turned into class percentages each week and the winning class, announced in assembly, is rewarded with extra break time. Such competitions act as extrinsic motivators – encouraging children to read for recognition, for reward, for their parents, their teachers and/or the school, but not perhaps for themselves. Yet we know that reading for pleasure is more closely associated with intrinsic motivation and some research suggests extrinsic motivation has a detrimental effect on children’s comprehension.

Physically attractive reading environments can be enticing to children and are part of the reading for pleasure pedagogy described by the UKLA Teachers as Readers study, alongside reading aloud, own reading time, and informal book talk. However their ability to influence the dispositions and engagement of young readers cannot be guaranteed. Much will depend on the quality and diversity of the texts available, the degree of choice and agency offered, and the time set aside for informal talk and interaction. Many classrooms, responding to children’s 21st century reading preferences and practices, now have comics, magazines, newspapers and digital books readily available. Some schools also annually order the children’s literature shortlisted for the UKLA Children’s Book Awards or the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Awards to ensure new books are encountered by staff and children. Such texts can unquestionably make a difference, as can the nature of the physical space, but if the reading environment is not inherently social, reciprocal and interactive, then the cost and labour involved in showcasing the school’s commitment to reading surely has to be questioned.

How reading spaces are used, who owns them, who made them and who has access to them, (when and how frequently), are all questions worth asking and monitoring over time. The kinds of opportunities these spaces afford for conversations and book recommendations are also worth documenting. It is all too easy to assume reading environments represent an institutional ‘good’ and are being fully used, but the intense pressure of the standards agenda tends to reduce the time teachers feel they can set aside for children’s volitional reading practices.

In recent research undertaken in areas of social and economic disadvantage, in schools renowned locally for their work on reading for pleasure, the OU team found that the class reading areas and the sometimes fabulous school libraries were, in all but one of the four schools, simply used as text repositories. While children did borrow books from their class reading areas, predominantly they were used for ‘time out’ and as additional work spaces. No text related talk was heard in them. No browsing or relaxed reading was observed within them. Furthermore, the displays in these areas tended to represent reading as a technical skill; showcasing comprehension strategies and reading domains, and displaying proficiency ladders denoting the children’s ‘abilities’ as readers.

In other classrooms and schools, reading displays may be interactive, profiling particular texts, authors, genres, questions, artefacts and children’s work, all of which can serve to trigger text talk.  Displays that feature personal, home and community aspects of reading (e.g. through photos of ‘who reads at home, where and what we read at home’) can also enrich reading areas and libraries. These carry significant messages about actual readers, not reading, and position children, teachers, teaching assistants and parents as members of the community of readers.

To be effective, reading environments need to be much more than physically appealing. Critically they need to be socially inviting, foregrounding the role of dialogue, and offering a myriad of opportunities to talk about texts, to hear books read aloud, to develop class ‘texts in common’ and to read alone and with others. As the Cambridge Primary Review final report highlighted six years ago, ‘talking must be part of reading and writing rather than an optional extra’ (p. 269). Indeed reading, like learning, is a social and collaborative act of participation, as well as an individual one, a point which Goswami also underscores in the CPRT research review into Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning.

In order to avoid reading for pleasure becoming little more than a colourful visual laid across the landscape of schools, we must ensure the social environment receives more attention, but not through more high profile competitions. Talking about texts, their possible meanings and interpretations, and informal conversations about reading and oneself as a reader deserve to be placed at the very heart of the reading curriculum. Such talk brings the landscape to life and helps to build communities of engaged readers.

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

by

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.

by

Requiring reading for pleasure

Having worked with a few schools recently on reading for pleasure, I’m beginning to wonder whether its inclusion in the national curriculum is a mixed blessing.  As one teacher explained it, ‘We’ve got to do it now haven’t we? Make them read for pleasure – make them love literature’.  Another observed she’d re-established SQUIRT (Sustained, Quiet, Uninterrupted, Individualised Reading Time) in her classroom and renamed it SQUIRP (Sustained, Quiet, Uninterrupted, Individualised Reading for Pleasure). But we cannot require children to read with or for pleasure, nor can we oblige them to engage positively in words and worlds. We can, however, invite and entice children to find enjoyment in reading, share our own pleasures (and dissatisfactions) as readers, and work to build communities of engaged readers.

In any case reading time doesn’t necessarily need to be a silent or solitary activity. What of sharing a Simpsons Comic with a friend, pouring over the visuals in the National Geographic Kids or debating a rugby review in First News? What of reading poetry in the online Poetry Archive and wanting to voice it aloud and drum the beat? Reading, like learning, is socially mediated, as Usha Goswami reminded us in the recent CPRT report on Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning, it is a social and collaborative act of participation, as well as an individual one. In order to nurture children’s enjoyment teachers need to build communities of engaged readers who can and do choose to read, and create rich and inventive reading environments – both physically and socially – like those at Fulbridge Academy (CPRT Alliance School) for instance.

In the glaring absence of attention to digital texts in the national curriculum, there is a real danger that the profession will equate reading for pleasure with reading fiction, thus reifying this albeit highly potent form. If the profession becomes book-bound, this is likely to hold back the development of children’s wider reading repertoires and may reduce the potential for pleasurable engagement in reading. As the EU Expert Panel on Literacy states:

There should not be a hierarchical ranking of reading material. Books, comic books, newspapers, magazines and online reading materials are equally valid and important entry points to reading for children and adults alike. …Books and other printed texts are important. But in recognition of the digital opportunities, people should be encouraged to read what they enjoy reading, in whatever format is most pleasurable and convenient for them.

Is the profession failing to recognise and build upon the every day reading practices and preferences of the young? Driven by their personal interests and popular culture children read a wide range of texts, in print and on-line, at home and in school, but they may not recognise this as reading. School reading books, assigned to readers in various ways through colour-coding and/or graded and levelled schemes, represent only a small part of their reading diet. Perhaps through undertaking 24-Hour Reads (where children and teachers record everything they read over 24 hours and make posters/ scrap books/diary entries to demonstrate this), practitioners may begin to credit this diversity and widen the range of material that is welcomed in their classrooms. This idea was one of many developed by the creative practitioners in UKLA’s Teachers as Readers project. Through their involvement in such activities, the teachers began to reconceptualise reading in the 21st century and question what counts as reading in school. In this study 43 teachers from five local authorities engaged in considerable reflection on their own as well as children’s reading practices and preferences, and some developed as ‘Reading Teachers: teachers who read and readers who teach’. These teachers made more of a difference to children’s attitudes and enjoyment in reading.

In nurturing young readers and learners, volition and agency are crucial. Adult readers exercise their rights daily: the right to choose what to read and when, where and why, the right not to write a review after finishing each book and the right not to be quizzed on the content/characters/theme or plot. Many will also exercise the right not to finish a book, but do we offer such rights to younger readers? Daniel Pennac’s Rights of a Reader (wonderfully illustrated by Quentin Blake), are worth exploring with children in this regard since intrinsic motivation is key – reading for its own sake rather than reading for rewards such as recognition, grades and competition. As schools across the country pick up the mantle of inviting and enticing children to read for pleasure, teachers may need to loosen the reading reins and hand more control over to them. Are only those deemed ‘free readers’ able to make choices? What are the consequences of having your ‘school reading book’ imposed upon you? Reading for pleasure has to be child-owned and directed, oriented towards reading for oneself, not for teachers or parents, the school or the system.

Much depends however on our long terms aims. Do we want to develop readers for life (the maximum entitlement) or are we satisfied with the ‘expected standard’ (the minimum)? And why has children’s pleasure become a statutory requirement now? It has never before been authorised in England. In the prescriptive remit of the original National Literacy Strategy back in 1998, whilst there were more than 55 verbs to describe reading: ‘enjoy’ was not one of them. The reason for the current attention on this issue lies of course, at least in part, in PISA and PIRLS results and established international evidence that reading for pleasure – independent choice led reading – is a strong predictor of reading attainment. These large-scale surveys also assert that the relationship between reading achievement and positive attitudes to reading is bi-directional: the will influences the skill and vice versa. Hardly surprising at one level, but it seems to have been enough, alongside concerted campaigning by literacy organisations, (and perhaps some awareness of research evidence), to influence government.

I am uncomfortable however with harnessing children’s reading for pleasure, even implicitly to the standards agenda.  If standards fail to rise and children’s engagement in reading (as measured in PISA and PIRLS) refuses to shift, will the profession be offered technocratic ‘guidance’ in this regard; lists of required practices which will apparently deliver the golden goose, but may also serve to limit children’s lived experience of reading. The imposed emphasis on policy-endorsed phonic schemes in the early years and the accompanying Year 1 Phonics Check suggests the profession needs to mindful of the challenging imperative to ‘teach’ reading for pleasure. Creating an effective balance between teaching reading, and fostering readers’ pleasurable engagement through building communities of readers characterised by reciprocity and interaction, is genuinely challenging. The assessment of the former tends to sideline the latter.  Again our aims need to guide us. Indeed in re-reading the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s 12 aims for primary education, I was struck by how many resonate with the reading for pleasure agenda. Aims one and two focus on ‘wellbeing’ and ‘engagement’ as both preconditions and outcomes of successful education,  aim four profiles children’s ‘autonomy and sense of self’ and aims five and ten, which focus on ‘respect and reciprocity’ and fostering ‘skill development’ respectively,are also feasible through developing communities of engaged readers. But it is the 11th aim ‘exciting the imagination’ that underscores why reading for pleasure must be seen as a worthwhile activity in its own terms.

To excite children’s imagination in order that they can advance beyond present understanding, extend the boundaries of their lives, contemplate worlds possible as well as actual, understand cause and consequence, develop the capacity for empathy, and reflect on and regulate their behaviour; to explore and test language, ideas and arguments in every activity and form of thought … We assert the need to emphasise the intrinsic value of exciting children’s imagination. To experience the delights – and pains – of imagining, and of entering into the imaginative worlds of others, is to become a more rounded and capable person.

Reading literature, in particular, can distinctively excite and develop the imagination and whilst children’s textual choices and interests are important, reading (and hearing, inhabiting and discussing) literature must retain a central role. It can support children’s personal, social, moral and cultural education, and can, as CPRT asserts, strengthen, challenge or alter the ways in which they see the world and engage with it. So as schools respond to the requirement to develop reading for pleasure, they would be well served by revisiting these aims in order to avoid implementing practice that leans towards ‘demanding’ or ‘requiring’  demonstrations of apparently positive attitudes or compliant dispositions on the part of young readers.

Reading for pleasure and reader engagement cannot be mandated.

www.open.ac.uk/people/tmc242

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

 

by

Educating for creativity

On 5 March I attended the first of the Anna Craft memorial lectures which will be given annually in commemoration of the life and work of this influential educator and Co-Director of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

It was a bittersweet occasion, shared with Anna’s colleagues from multiple arts and cultural organisations, universities and schools and her family and friends. The 150 seats went within the first fortnight and a waiting list grew rapidly, testifying to the esteem in which Anna’s work is held; it remains an important force in the shaping of theory and practice in creativity and education.

Anna would have been honoured by the words of Sir Ken Robinson, who gave the first lecture, entitled ‘Educating for Creativity: From what is to what might be’; he described her contribution as ‘immense’. Filmed in Los Angeles, the lecture was shown simultaneously at the Open University’s centre in Camden (where I was) and at Exeter University (she was working in both universities at the time of her death at just 52 years old). The intention of the annual lecture series is to help sustain her legacy and to disseminate the best contemporary thinking about creativity and education, both in the UK and internationally.

Ken Robinson began by masterfully dismissing some of the myths of creativity: that it is ‘rare’, an attribute of ‘special’ people or that you are either creative or you are not, an absurd idea, since as Ken observed; ‘if you’re human it comes with the kit’. He also asserted that confusion remains over the concept itself. In his view, this is one of the key reasons that creativity in education is still not taken seriously by policy makers.

This was a timely reminder that as educators and researchers if we cannot agree our terms, we will not be able to teach for creativity nor document the impact of children’s creative learning. As Csikszentmihalyi notes, the education profession lacks a commonly accepted theoretically underpinned framework for creativity that can be developed in practice. Without common understanding new myths will develop, like the one currently circulating about the so called ‘creative curriculum’.  I keep hearing this described by teachers as if were an entity, a planned and prescribed monolithic given – delivered in the afternoons – as a form of respite from the morning rituals of literacy and numeracy. Last Saturday, at the London Festival of Education, (run by UCL, Institute of Education), one session was devoted to achieving literacy and numeracy targets creatively through using technology aligned to cross curricula themes. This ‘creative curriculum’ focused on individual set learning tasks and offered sets of planned deliverables.

Where, I ask myself, are the children in all this? Where are their voices, their views and their funds of knowledge? How do these shape the curriculum as planned and lived? In the recent CPRT review Children, their voices and their experiences of school: What does the evidence tell us? Carol Robinson highlights that in order to empower children to act as partners in their own learning, they need to be partners in decisions about teaching and learning. A curriculum which is forged creatively through dialogue, collaboration and interaction must surely involve children since, as Anna and Bob Jeffrey argue, creative practice is learner-inclusive and enables children to have some agency and control over their school learning life.

One school which seeks to involve children in co-designing the curriculum and fosters creative learning is St Leonards C of E in Devon, a CPRT Schools Alliance institution which is imaginatively led by Jo Evans. Teachers in Jo’s school, as in many others, even in accountability cultures such as ours, can and do choose to exercise their professional agency.

Many teachers, encouraged by working with partners from creative and cultural organisations, and determined to offer co-constructed creative curricula, proactively seek out ways to shape their school curricula responsively, drawing on the CPR’s conception of a broad and balanced curriculum. These professionals show considerable commitment and imagination, despite, or perhaps because of, the persistent performativity agenda.

For another example, see head teacher Iain Erskine’s account of the work at Fulbridge Academy in Peterborough, also a CPRT Schools Alliance member. Already a National School of Creativity, Fulbridge have adopted CPR’s eight curriculum domains (including that of arts and creativity) from nursery to Year 6; they teach, assess and plan with reference to these. The five staff who recently presented at a CPRT London regional network meeting, on Fulbridge’s approach to assessment without levels, certainly demonstrated that they take risks, have the power to innovate and problem solve – together.

Though it has to be acknowledged that these schools may be exceptions to the rule, since in recent years the relentless quest for higher standards has tended to obscure the personal and agentic dimensions of teaching and learning, and may have fostered a mindset characterised more by compliance and conformity than curiosity and creativity.

For primary educators tensions abound, not only because the policy of performativity appears contradictory to the apparent freedoms and professional agency offered in political rhetoric, but also because teachers’ own confidence as creative educators has been radically reduced by prescribed curricula and the endless barrage of change and challenge. This has had consequences. The recently published Warwick Commission report, Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth, identifies a worrying reduction in emphasis on, and capacity for, creative opportunities in schools, and asserts that the impoverishment of creative experience in the early years is linked to lack of engagement in adult life. More worryingly still it identifies a link between economic disadvantage and low levels of creative engagement. Primarily this is an issue of equity, which demands, as Ken Robinson did also, that we respond. To borrow Anna’s term, we need to ‘possibility think’ our way forwards here in order to move from ‘what is’ to ‘what might be’.

One route onwards is to surely revisit our purpose, and re-consider the aims and values underpinning the curriculum. The final Cambridge Primary Review report innovatively proposed ‘exciting the imagination’ as one of  the 12 core aims for primary education:

Exciting the imagination. To excite children’s imagination in order that they can advance beyond present understanding, extend the boundaries of their lives, contemplate worlds possible as well as actual, understand cause and consequence, develop the capacity for empathy, and reflect on and regulate their behaviour; to explore and test language, ideas and arguments in every activity and form of thought … We assert the need to emphasise the intrinsic value of exciting children’s imagination. To experience the delights – and pains – of imagining, and of entering into the imaginative worlds of others, is to become a more rounded and capable person.

In planning to achieve this, through collaborating with children and other adults, (e.g.  TAs, parents, and partners from the creative and cultural organisations), teachers will be demonstrating, as Anna Craft did, a deep commitment to fostering creativity in the young, and, if supported, they may also be involved, as Anna was, in researching the consequences of such playful practice on children’s creative learning. As educators, if we afford higher value to ‘what if’ and ‘as if’ thinking, work harder to include children in shaping the curriculum and recognise their own and their teachers need for agency, we will not only be taking Anna Craft’s legacy forward, we will also be cultivating creativity – that potent ‘engine of human growth’.

by

Time to stand up, speak out and ask our own questions

As the year rushes to a close and we add Yuletide shopping to our busy lives (alongside school carol concerts and plays perhaps), there are two significant policy initiatives which deserve our time and attention. Both have December deadlines. One might be forgiven for thinking the timing was well judged, that is if policy makers don’t want to hear from the profession…

The House of Commons Education Committee recently launched an online enquiry into the way the DfE uses evidence, with a deadline of December 12th (just before you order that turkey), and the deadline for the DfE consultation into the new performance descriptors is just six days later, on December 18th (just before you wrap those presents).

Both of these initiatives have been the subject of previous CPRT blogs, with Robin Alexander raising pertinent questions about the breadth of the enquiry on evidence and Warwick Mansell observing that the performance descriptors are simply another way of labelling learners, under a different name (this time with the contentious notion of being judged ‘below’ or ‘above’ national standards at aged seven). It is surely time to voice our views. We cannot afford to stand back.

Based on government responses to previous ‘consultations’, there is scant evidence that the perspectives of academics, researchers or teachers will be heard, attended to or indeed in any way influence the outcome. Commas change, but rarely content.

Nonetheless, in gathering with others to talk and listen, whether in school or consortia meetings, in externally organised PD or in university-based groups (such as the CPRT London Teachers Reading Group), we have the chance to revisit our principles and remind each other of the need to consider research evidence and explore its application when back in the classroom.

However, it is not enough to read and debate research – though it is essential. Nor is it enough to respond to such enquiries and consultations – though again this is important. Surely we must also engage as researchers ourselves?  As a profession we must avoid standing back and waiting for others to define the questions for us to answer (as is the case with the performance descriptors consultation, where delimited questions afford little scope for commenting upon wider issues of relevance).

Historically, teachers have been positioned as the objects of research, but in recent decades the involvement of the primary profession in research related practices has diversified, with many studies demonstrating the value of school-university research partnerships. Additionally, practitioners have undertaken their own classroom-based research, framed around self-identified questions, both individually and collectively, as part of teacher action-research networks.

In the South West of England, an arts and creativity focused CPRT action-research project is being run as part of our national research programme. Coordinated by Penny Hay at Bath Spa University and Emese Hall at Exeter University, it involves ten schools and reflects three of the CPRT’s eight priorities: children’s voice and rights; fostering a rich, relevant and broad curriculum and developing a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle.

Another such CPRT action-research project is developing at Roger Ascham Primary School in Walthamstow, co-ordinated by Robin Desoer from the school and Amelia Hempel Jorgensen and Gill Goodliff from the Open University. It is focused on learner identity, autonomy and self-regulation.  As a Trust we are seeking to evolve a model of school-led CPRT action research which addresses the overall research concern:  how is primary education in England providing education relevant to children’s lives and worlds and how is this improving their life chances?

Whilst Kemmis (2006) suggests that harnessing teacher action research to the school improvement agenda has diluted its critical transformative potential, both projects are seeking to ensure attention is paid to the wider social, cultural and discursive consequences of any new practices developed, and are working to enhance the teachers’ sense of their professional roles and identities. In the midst of the midwinter mayhem, with personal and professional deadlines looming and not enough time in the day, standing up, speaking out and making time to ask our own questions remain important.

Professor Teresa Cremin is a co-director of Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

by

Is there time for reading and research?

At CPRT’s London Teachers Reading Group recently, we debated one of the original CPR research reviews, Children and their Primary Schools: pupils’ voices (Robinson and Fielding, 2010). Shortly to be published in updated form (see below), this reviewed published research on what pupils and former pupils think of their experiences of primary schooling.

A mixture of teachers, academics and local authority colleagues, we brought different perspectives to bear on the challenge of listening to and respecting children’s voices. We discussed the potential of involving children as co-participant researchers and almost immediately the teachers amongst us were keen to take action. Some considered inviting their classes to take photographs and devise captions to present views on the school environment, or to make collages to represent their experiences of literacy in school or at home. The range of evidence the young people collect could then be used to prompt reflection and dialogue about their experiences and feelings and how to respond to these.

We also found ourselves reconsidering the current role of published research in primary education. Tim, who had been teaching for just two years, voiced the view that keeping up to date in this manner was a professional responsibility, and commented that he’d ‘found it fascinating and invigorating’ to read research reports during his PGCE, ‘not only for the essays as it were, but for teaching’.

Yet since then, in the busy maelstrom of school life, he had received scant encouragement to read and debate his understanding, nor to explore the relationship between theory and practice in his classroom. Although he recognised research can help us as educators to re-examine the implicit theories that undergird everyday practice, he felt pressured ‘to deliver, to assess and to raise standards’. He also reflected a sense of professional isolation, since there were few with whom he could debate his reading.

Many in the group felt the emphasis on the ‘what works’ agenda, which they perceived was almost exclusively focused on raising attainment, sidelines the importance of teachers (and children) being involved in research themselves.  There was also agreement that learning is highly contextualised and thus what ‘works’ in one context may not in others.

The conversation was rather generous and gentle on this first occasion but I am sure over time more robust and critically reflective discussions will emerge as we explore our different perspectives, gain critical distance and interrogate the assumptions, values and beliefs that underpin policy and practice.

What might the consequences be if right across the country such teachers’ reading groups developed? Professional space is surely needed to consider quality research evidence, to read new empirical studies and well-established texts, and to debate the methods used and insights claimed.

Teachers, whilst respecting children’s voices, need to be careful not to dismiss their own views, their own potential as researchers, and the value of connecting to the work of others.

The next meeting of CPRT’s London Teachers Reading Group is on November 13th when Carol Robinson’s report on her updated research review will be discussed. Please contact Greg Frame if you would like to attend. All are welcome.

Carol Robinson’s report is one of five mini-projects in which CPRT has commissioned researchers to revisit and re-assess published research relating to CPRT’s eight priorities. The original 28 CPR research surveys were published in 2007-8. They were then revised for publication in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys (2010).

For information about the Trust’s current research, click here.

 

Contact

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