John Bald/language and literacy

RTI (and an alternative), political correctness and behaviour.

Referred to Professor Jack Fletcher's work by Karina McLachlain, I find yet another conflict in language - I find the American habit of constructing long phrases and then reducing them to acronyms very irritating -and then this:

Instead, there was a branching off of children whose primary problem was behavioral (now called Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD]) and children whose primary problem was achievement. 

So ADHD is simply policitally correct poor behaviour. I'd always thought so.

Professor Fletcher knows, however that there is a risk of people being assessed as having a learning disability when in fact they have not been properly taught. The US assessments try to tackle this by requiring documentation of the teaching the child has received, followed by assessments. The rub here lies in how much detail is given of this teaching. 

RTI stands for "response to intervention", and is very similar to the wave approach adopted by the last government to SEN. In plain English, if you're falling behind in class (first tier or wave), you get extra help in a group (second tier or wave) and then if that doesn't work, you get individual help (third tier or wave). I'd like to see some experimental work that compared a short injection of focused individual support - and I don't mean the formulaic approach of Reading Recovery, that wastes so much time at the beginning, and then uses an out of date framework to impose its approach on teachers. 

Specific Language Impairment, Professor Dorothy Bishop. RALLI

Speciflc language impairment, says Professor Bishop, is a common disability that is too little understood, and so rarely detected. A link to her campaign to improve matters is here, and I recommend it highly. 

Maths Made to Measure - top drawer HMI.

HMI's latest report on maths brings together the key points made, or sometimes hinted at, in their work over the past five years. The pattern emerging from their evidence is one of isolated examples of excellence in a sea of inconsistency in teaching, caused by staffing problems, poor national guidance and, above all, failure to match teaching to what children of all abilities most need to learn. 

Polite as ever, the criticisms are devastating. The national numeracy strategy has focused teachers attention on the topics required for each year, but not on the underlying concepts that are the foundation of progress in mathematics. Interim calculation methods rather than the more efficient traditional algorithms have a life of their own, leaving some children in secondary schools using multiple addition because they don't know  tables.  Some teachers simply don't know the subject well enough, and pupils not in top sets may well not see a qualified maths teacher at all. Schemes of work are taken off the shelf and not matched to the needs of pupils, even at GCSE and A level. Multiple resits are used to ensure C grades at examinations, and not enough pupils are reaching A and A*.

Read it and weep? No. In the words of the prayer book, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest. This report is the most important contribution to mathematics education I have seen since I started teaching in 1973, and should be used to rebuild the subject. Jane Jones and her specialist mathematics colleagues in Her Majesty's Inspectorate have done the nation an important service.

Guardian - Autism

Very interesting article in Guardian on a parent's experience of autism and dealing with the local authority, in particular on the conflict between assessment legally obliged to be based on the child's needs, and limited budgets. Soon after the Warnock idea of a statement was introduced - and the idea was that everyone with sen should have a statement - the director of education for Cumbria was removed for taking the law to mean what it said and running up a huge debt for the authority.

Autism and more particularly other conditions on the "spectrum" is particularly difficult as it is not fully understood in the way that other conditions are. This leads to misdiagnosis and consequent misunderstanding of cases which are correctly identified. Professor Sue Buckley and her colleagues at Portsmouth University have developed a model of sustained investigation in the context of Down Syndrome that should be repeated for autism. There are examples of good work - the Guardian picks out Applied Behaviour Analysis - that should be more widely known so that they can be included in mainstream school programmes without additional cost to parents.

Going backwards - Michael Rosen and Reading between the Lines.

"Reading Between the Lines " R4 was a good attempt at a balanced view of issues in reading teaching by the BBC, but Michael Rosen stretched credibility past breaking point with an analogy, not to driving a car, but to reversing it. When we're reversing, we can't see where we're going without either relying on mirrors or giving ourselves a sore neck. We do not read backwards, but move our eyes in the same direction as the developing meaning of the text.

Reversing might have been the first idea that occured to Mr Rosen - if so, he should have thought twice. Driving forwards and using all controls would have been a better analogy. But hey - Mr Rosen is a celebrity, so can say what he likes, whether it means anything or not. Where's that bear?

One of my key teaching ideas came from a similar source. I was not an easy driving pupil, and passed my test third time. The instructor before last said, "We believe everything the mirror tells us, but we don't believe the mirror tells us everything". I used this with pupils until I found they could not quite believe everything the letters told them, and changed it to "We use what the letters tell us, but we don't believe the letters tell us everything."  This fits the facts, and is very helpful.

Understanding the two times table.

It may appear that there is not much to understand, or that understanding doesn't matter, provided you know it. The first statement is true, and this is an advantage. We can (when we are young) climb stairs one at a time or two at a time. We tend to do the latter to save time. Counting in twos is faster than counting in ones - ten steps get us to 20 instead of 20. That is the most important thing to understand, and it applies to other tables - they enable us to get around faster, and, once we have learned them, to go straight to the top of the stairs. Zoom me up, Scottie! We can also jump straight back down again without breaking our neck, or stop anywhere inbetween, like a lift.

These things are not hard to understand, and are obvious once we've thought of them. Explaining things does not have to be conplicated, but it makes work meaningful rather than mindless. 

 

 

Interlude: Patrick Hemmerle at Wolfson College, 19th May 2012

Cambridge is blessed with some of the finest classical piano music in Europe in the person of Patrick Hemmerle, first prize winner at the Paris Conservatoire in 2002, and now, in his early thirties, showing a maturity of interpretation, delicacy and power that bring out the full meaning of pianoforte.

This concert consisted of Frank Martin's Eight Preludes (1947-8), Chopin's 24 precludes, and as encores, Gluck's Melodia (arr Scambati) and the final movement of Beethoven's Tempest sonata. Every element, from Martin's seismic base chords to the most delicate lyricism in the Chopin and Gluck, to the pace of the Beethoven, was brought out impeccable technique and timing, combined with studied passion. Other pianists are more famous than Patrick (for the present) but it is simply not possible to play this music better.

Liking or not liking the pieces is almost irrelevant - I'm not sure Martin, in what Mr Hemmerle described as his "Protestant austerity",  would have wanted his music to be liked. Even the Chopin, for all its ecstatic moments, reflects the dark side of life, including Chopin's own life, in a way that is not always enjoyable, and may not be intended to be so. As performance, however, Mr Hemmerle's is high art, and this was reflected, for once, in  high denomination notes in the retiring collection.  Chapeaux bas, mesdames et messieurs...

"A brilliant tip..."

...said the mother of a genuinely brilliant six year old - six years three months, to be precise, and already reading Alice in Wonderland, though having trouble with tables. Splitting up the twos into groups of five at a time, and coming back to reinforce hesitations after an interval knocked out the twos and then we worked on threes. Met the parents again ten days later - "Had those tables stuck?"  Yes.

And my pupil who had severely injured himself is now doing well, reading on his own, and tackling words like exhausted with no problem. Exhausted - have to know not to pronouce the h, unlike exhale, and to put the stress on the second syllable, unlike excellent. Also the slightly difficult au pattern. Nice to see him putting all three together. 

Another country - note from Japan

A Guardian commentator, Geisha 18, has posted this:

I taught for 3 years in Japan and it is true that discipline is strong and teachers are held in high regard. However, this has much to do with cultural norms, a system of rigorous examination for selective high schools and social shame about failure that no longer exist in our society. Japanese students rote-learn from a limited number of nationally approved textbooks and on any given day students of the same age will be on the same page of the same textbook. Intellectual enquiry and exploration are not encouraged - exam answers are right or wrong. I have never forgotten seeing an exam question for for 15 year olds which asked "what were the causes of the Sino-Japanese war?" and had a space of five lines for the reasons! When I was 15 that would have been an essay answer! 
In order to get into a good high school, Japanese children have to attend expensive cram schools, often until 10 or 11pm. Then they do their homework, and have to be in school as early as 7 am for compulsory sports club practice.
Instead of looking to Japan, why not look back to the time when Britain had a strong education system and reintroduce an element of selection? 
Incidentally, Japanese teachers work throughout the school holidays, when the teachers run compulsory sports clubs, and have no union. My colleagues would take less than two weeks holiday a year.

Interesting reflection on authoritarianism, which readers may have noticed is my pet hate - our system is riddled with it, and its basis is that the boss is right, whether or not the boss is wrong. Our main problem, though, is not selection, but the cult of mixed ability teaching.

Noël Janis-Norton

is a behavioural specialist whom I met when she was running seminars in Camden Town a long time ago. Noël has now written a stack of books  and had a slot on Woman's Hour today, 15th May 2012. Definitely worth getting to know, though of course nothing off the shelf will necessarily fit the needs of your own child. Tgraph review.

The Woman's Hour interview was a bit of a disappointment, and showed a very American approach. There are five strategies to obtain control in Janis's book, and she mentioned only one - descriptive praise - when it really was not the best or only solution to a question she'd been asked (about how to deal with boys shouting). Somewhat ungenerous, but I suppose we all have a living to earn. It's probably worth buying the book to find out the answer.