Alex Quigley's Blog, page 14

Closing the Writing Gap – New Resources

It is crucial that busy teachers are supported with timely and accessible resources to support their work. As a result, to go alongside my new book, ‘Closing the Writing Gap’, I have produced a small number of tools that I hope will help translate the insights from the book into action.

The free resources include:

7 Steps to Close the Writing Gap. This simple infographic offers a basic summary of the key steps to improve writing that feature throughout the book.

Prioritisation activity. This is a simple summary of comment writing priorities that feature in all school types. The resource can be used as a prompt for discuss and purposeful prioritisation.

Top 10 grammar moves. This infographic summarises the key grammar moves that feature in academic writing.

Teaching sentence variation. This resource concisely summarises the four key types of sentence level moves that pupils can practise to develop their writing style.

Modelling writing approaches. This resource summarises different approaches to modelling writing, including potential benefits and limitations.

You can freely download all of these tools on my updated Resources Page – HERE.

If you want to read the book, you can pick up a copy now:

Amazon UK: HERE.

Routledge: HERE. (Use CWG20 for a 20% discount)

The post Closing the Writing Gap – New Resources first appeared on The Confident Teacher.

Introducing… Closing the Writing Gap

Writing a book about teaching writing is a daunting prospect. Sharing the reality that I spent years in the classroom struggling to support weaker writers only adds to the trepidation. What if my teacher knowledge gap wasn’t the norm? What if my attempts to translate practical strategies fell flat?

I was delighted and relieved then to receive really positive commendations from a brilliant array or teachers, leaders, and research experts. You can read their quotes below:

“‘Our lives can be filled and fulfilled by writing,’ says Alex Quigley. In this important new book: ‘That story begins with our birth certificate and ends with our epitaph …’. I can’t think of a text which better articulates the importance of writing, and then goes on to articulate how to put ambition into practice. It is a book of wise principles and practical implementation. In it, Quigley establishes himself even further as my go-to source of insights into the all-important subject of whole-school literacy.”

Geoff Barton, General Secretary, Association of School and College Leaders, and former English teacher

“This book provides an easy-to-read and entertaining synthesis of research on writing, beginning with a compelling overview of how writing developed. It has written text at its heart and offers readers a succinct insight into textual research and its practical application to the writing class- room. The book is a rich source of directions for further reading and examples of strategies for teaching writing which will support teachers to reflect on what happens in their writing classrooms and to make enabling changes.”

Professor Debra Myhill, Director of the Centre for Research in Writing, University of Exeter, UK

“Alex Quigley has written another brilliant book for classroom teachers and school leaders. This book gets right to the heart of closing the writing gap; it is thought provoking for the reflective teacher whilst also offering helpful guidance and advice for every teacher. Alex is an exceptional writer himself, communicating his expertise and experiences with clarity and precision.”

Kate Jones, History teacher, education consultant, author, and blogger @KateJones_Teach

“As this important and necessary book makes clear, many teachers struggle with the teaching of writing. Teachers recognise the huge significance of writing, but they find it difficult to translate their own writing expertise for the benefit of their students. In Closing the Writing Gap Alex Quigley provides evidence-informed, highly practical strategies to bridge this pedagogical chasm. Both erudite and accessible, it covers the vital ingredients of effective writing teaching – from the building blocks of the grammar to the art of rhetoric and the pragmatics of the drafting and editing process. Closing the Writing Gap is an essential addition to the bookshelves of all teachers.”

Mark Roberts, English teacher and author of The Boy Question

“Closing the Writing Gap is the perfect antidote to the problems surrounding writing in the classroom today. Alex Quigley’s razor-sharp focus pinpoints the clear ways teachers can address and improve writing in the classroom. The book’s real strength, for me, is its practical approach to writing, offering strategies and methods that all teachers could, and should, use in the classroom. Alex walks you through the various aspects of writing and provides a brilliant insight into how practitioners can support and improve writing in their classroom today. The book to read if you want to improve disciplinary literacy in a school.”

Chris Curtis, Head of English and author of How to Teach English

I hope the commendations ring true for teachers who pick up this book. It is a book for teachers and school leaders, those who train or work with teachers, or who are simply interested in how writing can be taught well.

If you want to read the book, you can pick up a copy now:

Amazon UK: HERE.

Routledge: HERE. (Use CWG20 for a 20% discount)

The post Introducing… Closing the Writing Gap first appeared on The Confident Teacher.

Leading Literacy… And Purposeful Professional Development

This short blog series is targeted at literacy leaders – either Literacy Coordinators, Reading Leads, or Curriculum Deputies – with a key role in leading literacy to ensure that pupils access the curriculum and succeed in meeting the academic demands of school. 

Picture the scene: it is the first school day of the new year and staff are shuffling in their seats. In the absence of their pupils, teachers eagerly await the opportunity to get back to their classroom or office to plan their upcoming week. 

Amidst the chatter, the literacy lead stands up, shaking off the new-school-year nerves. They have an entire fifteen minutes to re-inspire and re-instigate important approaches to whole school reading.

What are their chances of success? 

Professional development and developing literacy

Schools have lots of competing priorities for improvement. Teaching approaches, assessment, and curriculum development, all understandably receive most of the current bandwidth of precious professional development time. 

Literacy can sometimes proves to be the topic ‘we do already’, lacking the novelty value to grab attention. It is unsurprising then that literacy, if perceived as a bolt-on to ‘covering the curriculum’, gains the professional development slots that are decidedly after the Lord Mayor’s Show. 

Any leader of literacy therefore needs to ensure that they convince colleagues that literacy is not an add-on, but is in the fact the access point to the taught curriculum. If the case can be well made that literacy should be the focus of school improvement, then a proposal to develop literacy is almost guaranteed to require some high-quality professional development for teachers. 

The recent EEF guidance report on ‘Effective Professional Development’ offers a helpful starting point to consider the ‘how’ for a well-structured and sustained approach to literacy professional development. 

There are so many potential places to start when it comes to literacy priorities. You could pick from a plethora of purposeful starting points: developing pupils’ vocabulary; enhancing pupils’ reading fluency; cohering a reading rich curriculum; improving pupils’ extended writing; teaching pupils how to write in a formal academic style; introducing ‘disciplinary literacy’; a renewed focus on implementing phonics; supporting high need pupils who struggle with reading; and much more. [See this blog for helpful sources and resources for literacy priorities]

First, it is vital when leading literacy to shrink the challenge. You can identify one priority, before considering a suitable sequence. For instance, if you wanted to improve reading across the span of a school year in secondary school, you might want to sequence it to ‘understanding reading challenges’ > ‘reading fluency’ > ‘reading and background knowledge’ > ‘reading strategies’ etc.

The guidance is helpful in that it helps literacy leaders to think hard about the ‘mechanisms’ (that is to say, the core building blocks of professional development). It presents an accessible ‘balanced design’ that offers a scaffold for structuring PD:

Effective Professional Development: The Mechanisms of PD Poster

Let’s explore each of the four areas of the ‘balanced design’ model with a focus on literacy and reading development.

A balanced design for literacy PD

A: Build knowledge (reduce cognitive load; revisit prior learning)

A helpful way to reduce cognitive load when it comes to understanding reading comprehension and reading barriers is to begin with an understandable model, such as the Simple View of Reading. A further example is to select multiple examples of curriculum texts, to reflect closely upon their respective difficulty, barriers and support factors. 

When it comes to revisit prior learning, we can too easily ignore that teachers need helpful reminders of previous PD sessions. We use cumulative quizzes for teaching pupils, but these approaches can be just as useful for professional adults. 

Revisiting prior learning is of course much easier if the sequence for the PD sessions of the year have been considered beforehand. Though difficult, it is likely the last session of the year needs to be clearly outlined before the first session is undertaken. In short, teacher PD across a year should be as considered and connected as a skilful curriculum plan. 

B: Motivate staff (set & agree goals; use credible sources; affirmation & reinforcement)

We can be motivated to address literacy in their classroom, with the best intentions, but then school happens, and we defer to our habits. Decisions that attend reading can impact on fifty different teaching practices, so it can also blur and without clear goals we change very little. 

It is not enough to have a really interesting PD session. Like any human, we need affirmation, nudges, reminders, and supports if we are to sustain a new habit or two. For instance, we may film pupils discussing what reading approaches have proven effective for them and how their increased fluency has made the curriculum more accessible. 

C: Develop teaching techniques (perform techniques; practical support e.g. coaching; feedback; rehearsal opportunities)

I have been guilty in the past of doing training on a complex concept, but not spending enough time sharing and encouraging practise of apt teaching techniques that solve real classroom problems (that are sensitive to subject and even phase differences). Theory and interesting insights into models like ‘cognitive load’ will not be enough. Teachers need concrete practical approaches, along with some time to practice and rehearse them out of the white heat of the classroom.

When it comes to reading, there are countless ways to mediate tricky curriculum reading. As such you may narrow it down a PD focus to four strategies for developing reading fluency (see this excellent blog by Sarah Green on reading fluency). Rehearsing them in the training session itself is likely necessary. Helpfully, teachers and TAs can grapple with reading fluency if we practise with some unfamiliar foreign language or similar.

D: Embed Practice (prompts & cues; prompting action planning; self-monitoring; prompts for context-specific repetition) 

Perhaps the hardest trick of all when it comes to literacy professional development – or on any topic or subject – is to sustain the habits and practices that were shared in training. 

Too few PD structures offer supporting prompts to embed manageable and meaningful reflection when it comes to literacy practices. Maybe it is reciprocal teacher observations of parts of lessons, or the sharing of short videos of practice. Too little time is of course a barrier, which is why any PD programme needs to bake in these mechanisms and privilege them as much as any preparation for a new year PD session with all staff present. 

P24, Effective Professional Development Guidance Report

Read the series:

Part 1: ‘Leading Literacy… And Perennial Problems’

Part 2: Leading Literacy…And Influencing Teachers
Part 3: Leading Literacy…And Purposeful Professional Development
Part 4: Leading Literacy…And Communicating Complexity
Part 5: Leading Literact…And Evaluating Impact

The post Leading Literacy… And Purposeful Professional Development first appeared on The Confident Teacher.

Leading Literacy… And Influencing Teachers

This short series is targeted at literacy leaders – either Literacy Coordinators, Reading Leads, or Curriculum Deputies – with a key role in leading literacy to ensure that pupils access the curriculum and succeed in meeting the academic demands of school. 

Every school policy should be seen through the eyes of a recently qualified teacher on a full timetable, with a tricky class or classes. 

When you begin with this assumption, it immediately makes you consider the difficulty level of embedding any shiny innovations, changed curricula, or new teaching techniques. Even a seemingly minor new teaching strategy must be integrated into a complex array of existing habits, classes, timetabling, and classroom peculiarities. 

Then we consider literacy. Its scale and scope are near limitless: reading, writing, talk routines, spelling, grammar, editing, text choices, text choices, curriculum planning, and pupils’ literacy barriers etc. The list goes on. 

With these challenges attending developing teaching techniques and teacher habits, it makes sense for literacy leaders to carefully about implementing a small number of meaningful but manageable literacy developments. 

COM-B – A helpful model to consider teacher behaviour change 

It is helpful to try and distil down a likely literacy challenge/development, such as ‘improve the reading of informational texts and curriculum access’.

First, what specific teacher behaviours are we are looking to support? For instance, it may be we want teachers to appraise the difficulty level of all informational texts they’re using. In addition to that, it may be we are after teachers pre-teaching ‘keystone vocabulary’, or planning retrieval quizzes on the basis of selected tricky informational texts. 

We then may consider what active pupil behaviours we are intending to support, so that pupils read informational texts more successfully. It may be that we teach them older pupils specific note-taking strategies, such as Cornell Note-making, to help them chunk down, navigate and record challenging informational texts. 

Once you have refined the specifics you can then use the COM-B model to reflect further on the behaviour change we are after. The COM-B behaviour model, is part of a ‘behaviour change wheel’ devised by Susan Michie and colleagues. At the heart of the approach is a useful consideration of the drivers of human behaviour – teachers or otherwise:

You can apply the model to the relevant literacy approach you are looking to support:

Capability: This describes both the physical and psychological capability to undertake a behaviour. For instance, do teachers have the energy and stamina, along with the deep knowledge and skills to replan lessons and focus in on changing the reading approach to tricky informational texts. When it comes to informational texts, there is likely a subject knowledge challenge to collate a range of apt texts and to be able to break them down and scaffold them appropriately. 

Opportunity: This describes both the physical opportunities (time for SOL planning and physical resources – such as new textbooks) and social opportunities (do my department or phase team colleagues want to make similar changes and want to collaborate?). Perhaps the chief reality here is giving over the time to make a change and having a team of colleagues working with you. Without these supports, opportunities are always limited. Remember the busy RQT on a full timetable? 

Motivation: This describes a reflective motivation (whereat teachers plan and reflect upon their work, thereby influencing our attitudes and behaviours), along with our automatic motivations (such as the habits that drive our daily practice). Of course, if you have both ‘capability’ and ‘opportunity’, then motivation is more likely. With informational texts, our curriculum planning may steer our teaching approaches, along with our habitual approaches to successfully scaffolding difficult texts in our subject or phase. In truth, teachers just may not recognise there is an issue, and so are just not motivated to change.

COM-B and Literacy Priorities

Using this model to reflect on any proposed literacy priorities can prove useful. For example, if there are challenges with regard to teacher knowledge or technique, then CPD is the solution. And yet, if motivation is low, or there is too little time or opportunity, then CPD is likely to prove necessary but insufficient. 

You can try it quickly. You want to improve the teaching of the editing process for pupils’ writing at all key stages across a wide range of teachers and TAs? Well, what teacher problem is this solving (motivation)? How much subject knowledge and confidence do teachers have in explicitly teaching sentence variation or spelling patterns (capability)? Where in the school day are these approaches being embedded and how do teachers find the time to give meaningful feedback to pupils (opportunity)? 

Now, consider the approach to behaviours that drive improved spelling, editing, and writing accuracy from a pupil perspective. Capability, opportunity and motivation still apply. 

We may come to new reflections as literacy leaders. A CPD session, or even a sequence of training, is unlikely to prove a silver bullet. 

Not only that – it may not be that teachers are resistant to adjusting their literacy practices at all – it may just prove that they are not wholly clear what specific behaviour changes are actually necessary in the classroom. For instance, teachers may understand an aim to read more extended texts, but they aren’t clear when or how best to enact extended reading within the limited scope of current curriculum time.

Let’s consider every literacy development, indeed all school improvement plans, through the lens of that harried, enthusiastic RQT facing a stacked timetable. COM-B could help to better support and steer successful change. If we are leading literacy, in whatever role, let’s ensure we seize every opportunity to influence and support teachers to make successful changes. 

Read the series:

Part 1: ‘Leading Literacy… And Perennial Problems’

Part 2: Leading Literacy…And Influencing Teachers
Part 3: Leading Literacy…And Purposeful Professional Development
Part 4: Leading Literacy…And Communicating Complexity
Part 5: Leading Literact…And Evaluating Impact

The post Leading Literacy… And Influencing Teachers first appeared on The Confident Teacher.

Leading Literacy… And Perennial Problems

This short series is targeted at literacy leaders – either Literacy Coordinators, Reading Leads, or Curriculum Deputies etc. – with a key role in leading literacy to ensure that pupils access the curriculum and succeed in meeting the academic demands of school.  

The old African proverb goes that it takes a village to raise a child. When it comes to the challenging task of developing skilled academic readers and writers, it also takes the proverbial village. 

Literacy leaders take on various guises in these vital collective efforts of the ‘village’, from ‘literacy coordinators’, to ‘reading leads’, curriculum deputies, Trust leaders, and more. They are expected to understand a wealth of issues, engage their colleagues, implement change, and evaluate impact. Often, it is a task that is Sisyphean in scale. 

Despite the shared understanding of the importance of literacy, these role face perennial problems and near-insurmountable challenges.

Five common barriers for literacy leaders 

Too much to know and do in too little time. It is the omnipresent issue for school leaders – a lack of time to implement the careful, sustained change that is necessary for improved practice in the classroom. The research evidence that attends literacy can too often seem so vast as to appear unmanageable.

Too little focus. So, what is the literacy priority of the school: what about improving reading? Writing? Spelling? Grammar? Academic talk? Vocabulary? The list goes on and each problem and solution interact with one another. The well-meaning guidance to do ‘make fewer but more strategic choices’ is harder than it sounds when it comes to leading literacy.

Too little status. It is a common occurrence for literacy roles to be perceived as junior leadership opportunities. This notion is flawed as too little status can mean that school leaders lack the levers to enact change, they can lack the budget, and ultimately the authority necessary for the role. Teachers follow people, not policies, so the literacy lead needs meaningful authority and trust.

Too disconnected from other priorities and practices. Busy teachers are assailed by priorities. When it comes down to it, understandably, classroom management and curriculum ‘coverage’ can supersede complex and nuanced changes to how you teach academic writing or how to develop pupils who are struggling with spelling. 

Too much reliance on a policy. You can enshrine a catalogue of purposeful approaches in a well organised literacy policy document, but then…well, school happens! Busy teachers can struggle to follow policies (or even read them!). For instance, what is a science teacher to make of supporting writing if they are relatively untrained? How confident is a year 5 teacher following the usual spelling policy when a dyslexic pupil is exhibiting complex individual needs? 

So, what is the solution for beleaguered literacy leads? Well, there is no magic wand here. This is difficult work, in compromised conditions, requiring ample effort and probably some luck too. 

Ultimately though, it is a task worth taking on. There is no school improvement priority that can out-do that of helping a child to learn to read and write, and to go on to read and write to learn. It may take the whole village, and brilliant literacy leads, but it is vital work worth doing.

Coming up…

This short series offers literacy leads of all stripes and stages to explore some useful ideas and strategies. Here are the proposed topics for upcoming blogs in the series:

Leading Literacy…And Influencing TeachersLeading Literacy…And Purposeful Professional DevelopmentLeading Literacy…And Communicating ComplexityLeading Literact…And Evaluating Impact The post Leading Literacy… And Perennial Problems first appeared on The Confident Teacher.

5 Micro-moves for Academic Talk

It is time to talk… about the importance of academic talk.

Since the beginning of the year, I have worked with lots of school leaders, with discussions quickly turning to the impact and experience of the pandemic, then onto reflections about future plans.  

A regular refrain is the limiting experience of lockdown on academic talk. Despite the brilliant efforts to communicate and teach remotely, I hear the repeated examples from teachers frustrated by talking in the black void and of missing the countless opportunities for conversations, clarifications, and careful interactions in the classroom.

Of course, there is a time for authoritative teacher talk, there is a time for ‘golden silence’, and there is a time, and a need, for purposeful and well-structured academic talk. 

What are the micro-moves of effective academic talk?  

Though we can all recognise the value of academic talk as part of the fabric of teaching and learning, too often we can miscommunicate and misunderstand one another when it comes to talk. It can trigger assumptions and arguments with ease.

The varied terms we routinely use in education may not help the cause. Academic talk, speaking and listening, dialogic talk, oracy, turn-taking, and more… It is too easy to speak at crossed purposes and not develop a shared language or to properly codify the specific moves of effective academic talk. 

Not only that, notions of academic talk or oracy can be misinterpreted as just the acts of making speeches or taking part in debates. We miss the opportunity to distil the precise micro-moves of academic talk that can be undertaken every day in every classroom. Experienced teachers can undertake these moves regularly, and seemingly naturally, but it pays off to make those moves explicit and to develop a shared language and understanding. 

So, what are those micro moves that skilled teachers enact so effortlessly?

Revoicing. This micro move describes when the teacher repeats back a pupil response, verifying and often clarifying their insight. For instance, ‘So, you’re saying…’; ‘I think you are arguing…., is that right? Revoicing has the benefit of simple repetition. Pupils get the opportunity to hear an idea once more, distilled and made clear, offering the chance for greater understanding. It also offers a great opportunity to scaffold pupils’ language to use apt academic vocabulary. Read an excellent research article on revoicing HERE.

Restating peer reasoning. You can harness the power of repetition, and encourage pupils to listen more actively to one another, by habitually encouraging that pupils restate one another’s reasoning. For instance, ‘So, Jane thinks there are multiple causes that triggers the war… Adil, can you put Jane’s argument into your own words?’ A further move, to develop a rich dialogue is to clarify once more with Jane – thereby repeating, refining and extending the academic talk.

Expanding and recasting. A crucial teacher talk move is to expand upon a pupil response and carefully recast their utterance with apt academic vocabulary where necessary. For example, “Pupil: ‘He stretches the people like in his other paintings.’ Teacher: ‘Yes – the elongated bodies are a really crucial feature El Greco’s artistic style.’” We can be explicit about this sophisticated academic code switching, encouraging pupils to do it (sensitively) with one another too. 

‘Simple <> Sophisticated’. You can model and scaffold the selection of apt academic vocabulary in every utterance in the classroom. With the modelling strategy, ‘Simple >< Sophisticated’, teachers can quickly and repeatedly model apt word choices. For instance, if a pupil uses the word ‘sweat’, then the teacher may model the use of ‘perspire’. We can use such pairings repeatedly and discuss the choice and whether it does the job. Should pupil’s use ‘chop off’ in history, should we substitute it with ‘decapitate’? Sometimes simple will be best, but the sophisticated word choice is often necessary.

Wait time. Captured in the seminal 1972 research by Mary Budd Rowe, ‘wait time’ is that subtle but often overlooked habit of ensuring pupils have more time to think before they are expected to engage in academic talk. The impact from giving pupils nine-tenths of a second as compared to three to five seconds was marked decades ago, and we can assume it is no different this side of the pandemic. Longer wait time can encourage more extended pupil responses (assuming pupils have enough background knowledge to draw upon). 

We can easily assume that these subtle talk moves are all part of our repertoire. But so much research on classroom talk shows that developed academic talk is too often truncated – often unintentionally and tacitly. The delicate development of these micro-moves may be trickier and more subtle than is typically conceived, so we should pay them close attention. 

It may well be the right time to talk with colleagues about the restating and refining the routines of academic talk. 

Related reading: The brilliant Mary Myatt makes a compelling case for ‘Walking the Talk’ –  HERE . Professor Lauren Resnick and colleagues have summarised what they term as ‘Accountable talk’ which is a useful overview for all facets of effective academic talk –  HERE .Tom Sherrington explains in a 5 minutes of utter clarity from his kitchen (‘Kitchen Pedagogy’) his questioning routines: https://youtu.be/LAqde38TwE0. The post 5 Micro-moves for Academic Talk first appeared on The Confident Teacher.

6 Micro-moves for Academic Talk

It is time to talk… about the importance of academic talk.

Since the beginning of the year, I have worked with lots of school leaders, with discussions quickly turning to the impact and experience of the pandemic, then onto reflections about future plans.  

A regular refrain is the limiting experience of lockdown on academic talk. Despite the brilliant efforts to communicate and teach remotely, I hear the repeated examples from teachers frustrated by talking in the black void and of missing the countless opportunities for conversations, clarifications, and careful interactions in the classroom.

Of course, there is a time for authoritative teacher talk, there is a time for ‘golden silence’, and there is a time, and a need, for purposeful and well-structured academic talk. 

What are the micro-moves of effective academic talk?  

Though we can all recognise the value of academic talk as part of the fabric of teaching and learning, too often we can miscommunicate and misunderstand one another when it comes to talk. It can trigger assumptions and arguments with ease.

The varied terms we routinely use in education may not help the cause. Academic talk, speaking and listening, dialogic talk, oracy, turn-taking, and more… It is too easy to speak at crossed purposes and not develop a shared language or to properly codify the specific moves of effective academic talk. 

Not only that, notions of academic talk or oracy can be misinterpreted as just the acts of making speeches or taking part in debates. We miss the opportunity to distil the precise micro-moves of academic talk that can be undertaken every day in every classroom. Experienced teachers can undertake these moves regularly, and seemingly naturally, but it pays off to make those moves explicit and to develop a shared language and understanding. 

So, what are those micro moves that skilled teachers enact so effortlessly?

Revoicing. This micro move describes when the teacher repeats back a pupil response, verifying and often clarifying their insight. For instance, ‘So, you’re saying…’; ‘I think you are arguing…., is that right? Revoicing has the benefit of simple repetition. Pupils get the opportunity to hear an idea once more, distilled and made clear, offering the chance for greater understanding. It also offers a great opportunity to scaffold pupils’ language to use apt academic vocabulary. Read an excellent research article on revoicing HERE.

Restating peer reasoning. You can harness the power of repetition, and encourage pupils to listen more actively to one another, by habitually encouraging that pupils restate one another’s reasoning. For instance, ‘So, Jane thinks there are multiple causes that triggers the war… Adil, can you put Jane’s argument into your own words?’ A further move, to develop a rich dialogue is to clarify once more with Jane – thereby repeating, refining and extending the academic talk.

Expanding and recasting. A crucial teacher talk move is to expand upon a pupil response and carefully recast their utterance with apt academic vocabulary where necessary. For example, “Pupil: ‘He stretches the people like in his other paintings.’ Teacher: ‘Yes – the elongated bodies are a really crucial feature El Greco’s artistic style.’” We can be explicit about this sophisticated academic code switching, encouraging pupils to do it (sensitively) with one another too. 

‘Simple <> Sophisticated’. You can model and scaffold the selection of apt academic vocabulary in every utterance in the classroom. With the modelling strategy, ‘Simple >< Sophisticated’, teachers can quickly and repeatedly model apt word choices. For instance, if a pupil uses the word ‘sweat’, then the teacher may model the use of ‘perspire’. We can use such pairings repeatedly and discuss the choice and whether it does the job. Should pupil’s use ‘chop off’ in history, should we substitute it with ‘decapitate’? Sometimes simple will be best, but the sophisticated word choice is often necessary.

Wait time. Captured in the seminal 1972 research by Mary Budd Rowe, ‘wait time’ is that subtle but often overlooked habit of ensuring pupils have more time to think before they are expected to engage in academic talk. The impact from giving pupils nine-tenths of a second as compared to three to five seconds was marked decades ago, and we can assume it is no different this side of the pandemic. Longer wait time can encourage more extended pupil responses (assuming pupils have enough background knowledge to draw upon). 

We can easily assume that these subtle talk moves are all part of our repertoire. But so much research on classroom talk shows that developed academic talk is too often truncated – often unintentionally and tacitly. The delicate development of these micro-moves may be trickier and more subtle than is typically conceived, so we should pay them close attention. 

It may well be the right time to talk with colleagues about the restating and refining the routines of academic talk. 

Related reading: The brilliant Mary Myatt makes a compelling case for ‘Walking the Talk’ –  HERE . Professor Lauren Resnick and colleagues have summarised what they term as ‘Accountable talk’ which is a useful overview for all facets of effective academic talk –  HERE .Tom Sherrington explains in a 5 minutes of utter clarity from his kitchen (‘Kitchen Pedagogy’) his questioning routines: https://youtu.be/LAqde38TwE0. The post 6 Micro-moves for Academic Talk first appeared on The Confident Teacher.

Simple Questions to Support Change

Making positive changes in schools is incredibly hard work. It typically involves lots of teachers who are naturally inclined to protect their hard-won habits. As such, it is crucial to draw upon their experience and expertise, whilst recognising their beliefs, challenges, and sensitively handling their natural hesitations. 

By asking simple questions about the acceptability, the appropriateness, and the feasibility of a proposed change, or new approach, it is probable that we increase the likelihood of its success. Happily, accessible questions have been developed by researchers seeking out insights into whether a change is likely to be implemented with success.

Take a look at following three measures (they can be used together or separately):

Acceptability of Intervention Measure (AIM) 

1)  [The proposed change] meets my approval. 

2)  [The proposed change] is appealing to me. 

3)  I like [The proposed change]. 

4)  I welcome [The proposed change]. 

Intervention Appropriateness Measure (IAM) 

1)  [The proposed change] seems fitting. 

2)  [The proposed change] seems suitable. 

3)  [The proposed change] seems applicable. 

4)  [The proposed change] seems like a good match. 

Feasibility of Intervention Measure (FIM) 

1)  [The proposed change] seems implementable. 

2)  [The proposed change] seems possible. 

3)  [The proposed change] seems doable. 

4)  [The proposed change] seems easy to use. 

These three quick and simple questionnaires can be shared easily. Their language is accessible and they can be used to stimulate useful discussion, or the information can offer a prompt to adapt a proposed approach. 

It is an all-too-human trait to be confident in making a successful change. Such optimism helps us get out of bed in the morning. And yet, we should probably temper it with a dose of pragmatism. These questions can help draw out that pragmatism and offer us rich information to intelligently adapt our efforts. 

Related reading: Why disrupting education doesn’t work – Innovation is hard and ‘disrupting education’ is threatening to teachers. What do teachers really care about? – Teachers wan’t calmness and control – policy proposals need to be responsive to the needs of teachers. The post Simple Questions to Support Change first appeared on The Confident Teacher.

Why ‘disrupting education’ doesn’t work

There are trillions of choices teachers make when they teach. This dizzying complexity makes teaching rewarding, tiring, stressful, and sometimes even thrilling. 

Understandably, faced with the complexity of the classroom, teachers are necessarily creative, but they also seek out stability and tranquillity. For many teachers, hearing calls for ‘disrupting education’, or the mention of radical reform sounds disconcerting and threatening. 

It is often the case that the reimagining of education emerges from outside the classroom. Well-meaning thinkers see rapid technological changes happening, or children immersed in the latest game, and they imagine their easy and attractive implementation in the classroom. 

When you actually take the time to explore inside the classroom, and speak to teachers, the barriers to bold new ideas become clearer. In her brilliant book, ‘Inside Teaching’, Mary Kennedy (a US educationalist), she lifts the lid on real (US) teachers and their perceptions and feelings. She revealed teachers pursuing the avoidance of distractions, their aims for tranquillity, and even the dampening of pupil engagement when is threatens the necessary calmness of the classroom. 

There is an enduring meme of dull, dry teaching that is pervasive in our culture. But is it fair?

Rather than some caricature of soulless, dull, or even controlling teachers, Kennedy presents a more subtle notion of small ‘c’ conservative attitudes to teaching:

“These intentions are quite different from the authoritarian motives that critics often attribute to teachers’ routines. Teachers clearly view routines as important contributors to emotional and social tranquillity.”

Page 92, Inside Teaching

Shiny, new approaches that break beyond typical classroom structures and routines are often disruptive in real terms – at least at first – and so teachers naturally resist this risk to their hard-earned routines. 

Why shift seldom happens

Every few years, ambitious policy makers the world over enact significant curriculum shifts (‘Shift happens’, anyone?). We have seen the fuzzy notion of ‘21st Century Skills’ come and go. Classrooms get redesigned and new roles are assigned. New technology often proves a favourite motivator, and method, to transform the classroom from its traditional ‘teacher at the front’ focus. 

And yet, teachers are brilliant at quiet, closed-door resistance. In a recent study by Darren Hannah, Claire Sinnema & Viviane Robinson (2021), entitled ‘Understanding curricula as theories of action’, they characterise curriculum reform in Japan and the staunch rejection of new curricula designed to disrupt more traditional approaches. 

In 1999, policy makers initiated the ‘Yutori’ reforms – which aimed to usher in a ‘Relaxed education’ or ‘Zest for Life’ reforms. Traditional subjects were cut and approaches like ‘Integrated Studies’ were added to the curriculum. Teachers assimilated some of the practices into their existing habits, but Junior School teachers simply refused to enact the majority of these progressive new curriculum plans, given they clashed with their beliefs and hard-won annual gains. 

In Japan, the glossy new curriculum was quietly shelved. The real ‘change makers’ closed their classroom doors and carried on teaching. 

Vivianne Robinson has helpfully characterised why so many ‘disruptive’ changes fail. In her aptly named book, ‘Reduce Change to Increase Improvement’, she describes teachers’ ‘theory of action’: that is to say, their ingrained beliefs and practices that drive their behaviour and choices in the classroom. Too often, new teaching policy ideas bypass teachers’ real priorities. By not talking with teachers, they fail to understand the real barriers to new practices and change, along with the hard-won habits of teachers.

Her answer – and one I would share – is that we need to talk to teachers and better understand their beliefs and needs. I suspect they’ll seldom include a desire to radically disrupt their routines. This small ‘c’ conservative attitude is no Luddite rejection of new ideas; it is most typically founded on a care for their pupils and the privileging of calm stability in the crucible of the classroom.

Let’s then make a call for careful, gradual change that is shared with teachers and is sensitive to the complexities and stresses of the classroom. It won’t prove as catchy as ‘Shift Happens’. It is unlikely to generate a stack of slick YouTube videos. But it just might work. 

The post Why ‘disrupting education’ doesn’t work first appeared on The Confident Teacher.

Who should read aloud in class?

There are fewer more important acts in all of education than reading in the classroom. From what is read, to the specifics of when, why, and by whom, the how of reading in the classroom can prove a vital daily decision.

Given reading aloud in class is part of the fabric of teaching and learning, there is inevitably a legion of daily practices that attend the act of reading in the classroom. And so, we must ask, are we clear what reading practices we should do more of and what practices we should adapt or stop?

There is evidence to suggest that we should stop, or at the very least carefully adapt, the common act of ‘Popcorn reading’ or ‘round-robin reading’ (RRR). ‘Popcorn reading’, or RRR, describes the all-too-common act of selecting pupils at random to read aloud one after another. RRR sometimes makes for a more selected approach to the same practice. For instance, every pupil on the register reads that week etc. – but no significant practice or rehearsal is involved.

Invariably, reading without careful preparation and practice for novice pupils is prone to go awry. This is especially likely with demanding curriculum texts.

I used the RRR approach for years, just like I was taught, unthinkingly. I simply didn’t know there was useful evidence to substitute it for better strategies that focus on fluency. 

Put away the ‘Popcorn reading’

Part of the problem with Popcorn reading and RRR is the emotions that can often attend these approaches. For some pupils, it causes stress and takes up their mental bandwidth. They aren’t actually thinking about what they are reading – they are waiting to be asked to read. For some pupils, they are patently dysfluent, so they get embarrassed, which obviously impacts their confidence (including the impact on their sense of self-efficacy as a reader). 

An interesting small study from Spain compared the teacher reading aloud, silent reading, and ‘follower reading’. ‘Follower reading’ described the act of listening along to your peers. The study showed what many teachers would suspect: trying to follow and listening to a peer who is not a fluent reader can hamper your comprehension. 

Compared to the expert model of a teacher, listening to slow-going peers, picked without any preparation for reading a given passage, can prove an issue. Hearing and practising fluent reading matters, for pupils young and old. And so, teacher-led reading – with confident, clear expression, that offers important cues to support understanding – should trump the ad hoc selection of pupils’ reading. 

Pupils reading aloud in class is typically slower than a fluent, expert teacher. As such, pupils can get in the bad habit of following their peers along and even baking errors into their mental model of the text. For instance, in ‘Goodbye Round Robin’, Professor Tim Rasinski and Michael Opitz suggest that when pupils listen to their dysfluent peers they quietly read along (this is labelled ‘sub-vocalisation’) and thereby unhelpfully imitate slow, dysfluent reading. They can pick up bad habits and not grasp the text.

Another gain when teachers model expert reading of complex texts is that it allows for the increasingly demanding texts pupils need to progress through the academic curriculum.

Additionally, teachers knowing and reading a text with fluency and precision can be undertaken with timely strategies, such as ‘interactive reading aloud’ (IRA). That is to say, teachers don’t just read aloud – but they make timely comprehension prompts, such as clarifying an important word, or stopping and questioning at the key point in a given text. 

What should replace ‘popcorn reading’/RRR? 

The teacher reading aloud and expertly modelling fluency (pace, expression, volume etc.) is likely a better bet than selecting underpractised pupils to read. 

It is important to state that pupils do need to practise reading aloud if they are to develop and improve their own reading fluency. What evidence-informed strategies can help this aim? 

Professor Diane Lapp, from San Diego State University, in the categorically titled, ‘If you want students to read widely and well – Eliminate ‘Round-robin reading’, suggests the following approaches:

Repeated reading, which involves repeating a reading modelled first by the teacher or another proficient reader.Choral reading, which means reading together with others who are proficient readers.Echo reading, or the student echoing or repeating what the proficient reader has just read.Readers’ Theatre involves a dramatic reading of a text or script by the students.Neurological impress, which involves the student and teacher reading together while tracking words.

Let’s put away the popcorn, retract RRR, and put efforts into teacher-led reading and a purposeful focus on fluency-building practices. 

Related reading: Read and download my free tool comparing ‘Whole Class Reading Approaches’ –  HERE .Read the EEF ‘Improving Literacy at Key Stage 2’ guidance report and the focus on fluency, ‘Reader’s Theatre’, and more –  HERE .Professor Tim Shanahan explores a useful critique of RRR in ‘Round robin by any other name – Oral reading for older readers’ – .

Of course, you could always explore ‘Closing the Reading Gap‘ to find out much more!

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