John Bald/language and literacy

Computer monitors and eyestrain.

Sensitivity to light causes problems ranging from mild discomfort to epilepsy. We are all sensitive to excessive light, and the flicker of fluorescent light is a hidden problem for many people - I recently saw it listed as an aggravating factor in autism in The Horse Boy. We spend a lot of time in front of computers, but I know of no research comparing the qualities of different types of monitor - I will update this as and when I hear of any.

I've just changed an ASUS MS236H monitor, that I'd had for around three years, and which I'd always found harsh, even on a low setting, for an HP Pavilion 22xi.  Both have the same screen size, but the HP is much more comfortable for me to use at all settings. It seems to have some kind of anti-glare element on the screen, but I can't tell what it might be. I'll ask HP. In the meantime, if you find looking at a screen uncomfortable, consider this one, and don't hesitate to get in touch with any results. I bought mine from John Lewis for £129, including a two-year guarantee. Other monitors are available - if you have a good one, please reply to this posting.

How Mixed Ability and Inclusion are Killing Language Learning in the UK

"If she had her way, all she'd do would be to set."   The comment from an LA inspector in the eighties had  a certain contempt about it that I didn't understand. I'd just been to the department in question. It was using mixed ability teaching, and the lower attaining children were in a state of extreme confusion, and learning nothing at all. What could be wrong with setting, so that the higher attainers could go a their own speed, and lower attainers be given the additional support they needed? Put another way, what could be worse than mixed-ability?

The experience continued on inspection and through reading reports such as Lord Dearing's.  Schools that fast-tracked high-attaining pupils - aka setting - had them achieving high, though not always high enough, grades at 14. If this could be done, then surely GCSE was too easy? Had it been dumbed down  in order to cater lower standards expected from mixed aiblity teaching? And had the nationally recommended teaching styles been designed as the best way to teach languages, or the only way to make mixed ability classes manageable?

And then we have inclusion, and the changes to Ofsted in 2005, which removed the specialist element from most inspections, so that inspectors observing language lessons did not know whether children were making the right long-term progress or not. They could, though, ask if all of the pupils in the class were making progress, and criticise the teaching - whether or not they gave a lesson grade - if one or two were not "engaged". These one or two may have been exceptionally able pupils coasting, though all but a couple of inspectors nationally would not know this because they do not know the language. They would more likely be pupils with behavioural difficulties who were not engaged through no fault of the teacher, and may well have been playing up in every lesson, all day long.

The only way mixed ability has of dealing with such pupils is to disapply them from languages, which defeats the point of inclusion. The only way to make a lesson accessible to the whole of a class is to omit the elements that higher attaining pupils can handle and that lower-attaining pupils can manage only with extensive additional practice and support. The outcome is undemanding work, and the classic description is "exposing" pupils to language, without insisting that they understand what they are doing. This is not immersion, but submersion. Simply exposing children to a language in a school lesson has never been shown to enable them to learn at all. Come Y9, and the lower attaining pupils drop out - again, defeating the point of inclusion - and the higher-attaining pupils proceed to GCSE without the skills they need to do so successfully. The knock-on effect to A level and beyond is a perfect catastrophe. Languages are dying on their feet, and mixed ability teaching is the root cause.

Both main poliltical parties have come out against mixed ability teaching, and neither has been able to do anything about it while local authorities have remained in control. The heart of the matter is in an article by Professor Geoff Whitty, (BERA, 2006) in which he argues that the goal of education should be equality, and that researchers should not be concerned with "what works."   Well, they haven't been, and we are left with funny kind of equality based on failure. They have not paid attention to what works, and have left us with what doesn't work. It is time to change.

PS. A further note on the influence of Eric Hawkins is here.

Learning Multiplication Tables Builds Number Sense.

My pupil is nine, and in Year 5. When he came to me at the beginning of December, he knew no multiplication tables at all - he could count in multiples of two and five, but when he tried to say a table, he got lost beyond 2x2. Asked to make any kind of calculation beyond counting, he repeated the question as if it were a great surprise, guessed wildly and laughed, an unfortunate trait that led his teachers to think he was being cheeky when in fact he was nervous - he knew that he would get things wrong.

I've taught him using the approach to tables set out below and published by The School Run. The approach is very simple. I explain how tables work, and why we need them - the alternative is counting, which is slower and less reliable, as we can easily lose our place when counting to larger numbers.  We practise saying the 2x table carefully, concentrating on not losing his place. This takes more work than anything else - saying the table is an exercise in co-ordination, so that he does not count on from the wrong column. This issue is the key to multiplication tables, but it is not resolved by grinding. Instead, we isolate an error, explain it, go back a couple of places and practise in a focused way, as we would if we were learning music. 

Yesterday at 5pm, not the best time for a nine year old, my pupil said the tables from 2 to 5 with only an occasional hesitation, and did very well in answering questions about 3x, which he had struggled with last week. I've been thinking about the order in which pupils learn tables. They usually count in multiples, beginning with 2x and then 5x, in an attempt to build a sense of number, leading quickly to place value. I now think this is wrong on three counts. First, counting in multiples makes it harder to learn to say a table, which involves switching between columns. Second, makes it more difficult to learn to pick a particular item from a table, which is needed once we begin to use them for calculation. Third, the leap from 2x to 5x is too big - building up through 2,3 and 4x builds up a sense of gradually increasing numbers and intervals that makes 5x and later 10x, the key interval, easier to understand.

I don't often do this, but the success in tables to 5 resulted in the award of a small bar of milk chocolate. We then returned to larger tables. I'd tried nines before, using the declining final digit as a guide, and this time he got them right with just a few hesitations. Similarly 8x, the final digit going down by 2, and starting again after 5x. I was pleased with the way he'd picked up this pattern - he needs a name, so I'll call him Adrian, after an old friend. Adrian then managed 11x and 12x, with trouble only over 11x11 and 12x11. Skipping the tens for the moment, we moved to 7x, which he said he didn't know at all, but which he did know up to 3x7.  We practised it together, and Adrian picked it up quickly. He then announced that he knew 6x. He did up to 6x6, and we said and practised the rest.

So, he has the makings of a full set after two months' work. We'll practise and move to applying tables in calculation. He made only two or three wild guesses in the course of this session, and the nervous laugh was under control. He and his grandmother left with big smiles, and we'd also done some reading and made a start on French - he wrote Je m'appelle Adrian accurately after I'd explained why it was spelled as it is. Harry Potter had fallen out of favour after around 90 pages, but Adrian had shown himself that he could read it, which was the main thing.

Intelligent children with reading difficulties: two progress reports.

Bright seven year old, who could not read just over three weeks ago, as she tried to sound out each word one letter at a time, and so became confused and frustrated every time she met the word the.  The immediate progress once irregularity was explained has been noted below, as has her wish to read Alice in Wonderland, which we started on Monday, once we had finished Good Little Wolf. GLW is an excellent teaching book, as it introduces longer words, such as comfortable and unfamiliar, in the context of simple sentences, with plenty of excellent illustrations, and not too much text on a page. The only edition I had of Alice was in a paperback complete stories, about three inches thick.

Beginning at the beginning, I used a paired reading approach, with BSY joining in - I waited for her to read each word - and then going back and trying to read each new paragraph on her own, with me joining in again once she got stuck. (This is a variation on the original paired reading approach, but has some of its key principles - support is immediate an unobtrusive, and the child does as much as he or she can, with the security of knowing that they won't be allowed to fail.). This worked very well. I noted and picked out any words BSY struggled over, and she made rapid progress in identifying them and in phrasing her reading. A very satisfying page and a half later, we called it a day.

An adult who was observing noted BSY's determination to read the book, which was itself a huge jump from the previous one, and one I'd hesitated before using. Parent's verdict was "brilliant," and BSY left greatly satisfied. We'll go over the beginning again next lesson, and I've recommended the fantastic pop-up picture book as a Christmas present. BSY had made good progress with the two-times table, but the school had moved to counting fives in multiples. This remains in my view an error, as it makes the table harder to learn. We started on threes.

With the seven year-old boy in London, I plugged a small microscope into my laptop, and left it where he could see it while we did the 2 and 3 times tables. A lot of work needed to stop him from losing his place, but good progress, particularly when he'd worked out the questions I was likely to ask him and had his answers ready in advance, to beat me.  We looked at coins and his little finger through the microscope - What was that black speck on his little finger? Surely not dirt? - and then started to read the title of the accompanying book - Usborne Science and Experiments. The world of the Microscope, which he learned to read very quickly.

Using conversation to build up understanding of meaning around the text was crucial in both cases. BSY found unfamiliar easier once I had explained the link with family, and similarly could read helium and hydrogen after we'd discussed their properties. Phonics alone could not explain why helium is pronounced differently from hedonist (or indeed hydrogen from hystamine), but unpacking the use of vowels in English, and the reasons why we can't always be sure whether a vowel is long or short, enabled her to try both versions and read the words. The young man found science much easier to understand and read once I'd unpacked the Latin scio, and was pleased to tell his dad abou the influence of Norman French on English. 

In order to teach more advanced reading, we need to do much more than just teach the reading. We need to open up the world for the child, in terms he or she can understand. 

Afterthought on the phonics of hydrogen and hystamine - the phonics tell us much of what we need to know, but not all of it. We need to know which of a limited range of possibilities applies in a given word.  Hydrdogen is like hydrangia, dehydrated and others. Hystamine is like hysterical, hystrionics etc. Once we make a small group, each word in the group reinforces the others.

Early to bed...

We all know that some children do not get enough sleep, though it's only obvious in extreme cases. The Guardian report of this study from University College, London, includes the following:

The study found that children whose bedtimes were irregular or who went to bed after 9pm were likely to come from more socially disadvantaged backgrounds. They were also more likely to have poor routines such as skipping breakfast, not being read to daily, having a television in their bedroom and spending longer in front of a TV than children with earlier bedtimes.

No surprises, but this reflects lifestyles rather than poverty.

Asperger's or a reading problem: the end of the beginning.

This story started five years ago, at the 100th birthday part of a distant relative. Looking back through the postings, I find we've called the young man Peter, and that he did not receive a primary education - his life was so disrupted by sensitivity to light and the frustrations this caused him that he started secondary school with targets below the standard expected of a seven year old, completely unable to read or do basic calculations, and a temper that was a danger to himself and everyone around him.

Beginning with a blue overlay, which provided relief from headaches and seems to have enabled his eyes to synchronise better - Peter no longer uses it - I taught him to read, and he reached a good standard for his age in a little over eighteen months. We worked on multiplication tables and basic calculation, and he now knows them all, from what could be termed a standing start.

There was, however, constant frustration with the quality of teaching Peter received at school. He was not expected to write, but to fill gaps, was given no opportunity to learn a language, and was given a teaching assistant who did all of his work for him. 

After a year, Peter's father moved him to a new school, where he would be allowed to learn Spanish. I duly taught him Spanish over the summer holidays, so he would not have to start from scratch. When he arrived at the school, he was placed, without explanation, in an Italian class instead, with a Spanish native speaker who did not know any Italian. He struggled on for two years - I bought him some Italian books, and Italian is not the hardest language to learn - then announced he wanted to learn French. There was no French GCSE class, in fact no language class in Years 10 and 11 at all, as all of the more able linguists were fast tracked to GCSE in Year 9, an indication that GCSE is far too easy. His request for languages in Years 10 and 11 was refused as no-one else wanted to take them. Illegal, but the law is meaningless if not enforced.  Peter's English teaching was based on the idea of communication, so his book was never marked except for an occasional encouraging comment.

My attempts to teach him from a distance of 110 miles, with no help or reinforcement from school were of limited value - he learned to read and to calculate. Anything he depended on from his school was not learned at all. The description of his "forensic science" course, below, is a scandal, and I've reported the practice to the examining board. Peter "passed" the course on the basis of his teacher's pre-prepared coursework. This is fraud, and I only refrain from naming the school in order to protect an innocent person's job.

Peter has just obtained a string of low passes at GCSE and Btech, including at least four certificates from these sham science courses, and has obtained a place at college to study engineering. Given the starting point, where he was likely to have been excluded from school in the first few weeks, and could not read at all, this is a triumphant result, and he now has his future before him. He obtained a C in GCSE English literature - where he knew the books in great detail - but only an E in English, where his two secondary schools completely failed to teach him to write properly, largely for want of trying. Overall, a result, bittersweet, but a result. Peter now has a chance, and his future is in his own hands.

 

 

How to pass OCR nationals science

A conversation about OCR Science – myself and a pupil, aged 15.

Did you write this yourself?

Yes, the teacher helped me a bit.

How did the teacher help you?

She showed me what to copy and paste.

(Looking at a very professional powerpoint on weathering of rocks. She said "That’s a pass. If you put it into your own words, you’ll probably get a merit." I point to exfoliation on the powerpoint and ask him to read it. He can't. What does it mean?  "I haven't a clue.") 

(On a second science teacher) I just feel, like, there’s no point doing the work.  He gives us the link to click on, and that brings up the website we need to go on, and we copy and paste and add to pictures.

He does a Sir’s edit- what we’re meant to do, but in his words (he copies and pastes this too – that’s what he says he does, anyway). Then we have to delete all the words that he’s done, just leaving the headings, then copy and paste from the link on the website. Cut out the words we don’t understand, then put in words that we do understand. Some of the words I’ve never even heard of, and he says leave it, you’ll probably get a higher mark.  But you’d think the examiners would be more smart, to know that we’d copy and paste that, wouldn’t you?

But we have to delete the link before we save it.  Everyone does it.

Sometimes he puts on rapper music – Tinie Tempah – I don’t see the point in going to school, to be honest.

This is fraud - the work is not the pupils' work, but elaborately designed plagiarism. I would have reported it to OCR, but the Board's complaint procedure makes it clear that if I did so, the fraud would probably be covered up by the time it investigated it - complaints have to be addressed to the centre in the first instance, so the "work" could simply be deleted. I considered reporting it to the headteacher, but do not want to expose the pupil to victimisation.

The school's Ofsted report,  May 2011

Highly effective leadership for students with special educational needs ensures that staff receive detailed information on students’ specific needs and strategies to help support their good learning and progress.

So that's all right then. It has always been one of the main parts of a headteacher's job to make the school look good. Part of the hidden agenda of the 2005 changes to Ofsted was to make this part of Ofsted's function too. A four point scale rather than a seven point scale made it easier for a school to be rated good or outstanding, and giving Ofsted control over inspection in the private sector allowed it to be tougher on high-attaining private schools, making them move to the same criteria as state schools. Individual inspectors have looked for and told the truth when they could, but have been given less time to find it out, while being forced to pay more attention to dubious test and GCSE scores. In this case, the inspectors missed what was sitting under their noses, and it probably wasn't their fault, because they would not have had time to look - this is a big school, and they were there for two days only. We need a system that will allow them to inspect schools properly once again.  

 

Asberger's or a reading problem? Updated, 27th July 08

Peter, the twelve year old who had been diagnosed with Asberger's, among other complaints, has now completed his first year in secondary school. Following provision of overlays, and later tinted lenses through the NHS, his behaviour has improved beyond measure. He has shown no violence towards his family - formerly a major issue - or anyone else for over five months, and has shown great improvement in his language, work and co-operation with others. He is relaxed and mature. These aspects of his problem have been largely solved, and we are all confident they will not recur.

His annual review at school last week was much less encouraging. The very low targets set at the beginning of the year have mostly been reached, but new targets have not been set and were not discussed at the meeting. None of the other agencies involved in his care were invited, and there are no plans to build on his achievements by integrating him into mainstream classes. Discussion with his parents showed that the school was not meeting legal obligations to take account of the parents' and children's views, or to provide a broad and balanced curriculum. For ninety per cent of the week, the boy was being taught by teaching assistants, supposedly under the supervision of the SENCO, but in fact allowed to persist in errors - such as not rewarding good work - for months on end. All the SENCO had to say was that they "felt uncomfortable" with the parents' questions - by which they meant that the parents did not have a right to ask them.

A choice, then between legal action to force the school to do its work properly, and a move. As the capacity of the school to work properly in this area is in serious doubt, the parents decided to move their son to another school with a more flexible approach. A pity, but,as the child put it, "Why should mum and dad have to fight all the time just to try to get the school to teach me properly?"

New Ofsted said of the school:

The many students with particular learning or behavioural needs achieve exceptionally well and all gain national qualifications. Students who join the college after failing elsewhere often achieve very well.

New Ofsted should be ashamed of itself.

Update - 27th July.

 

 

  Peter is making good progress with Spanish. In two weeks, he has learned the days of the week, to count to 12, and colours. He enjoyed working on Beauty and the Best from Beelingua's excellent Little Tails series, and has stared on Cinderella. He understands masculine and feminine in Spanish, and yesterday did well on picking out masculine and feminine words. The idea that he was not capable of learning a language has been disproved in two weeks.

Tables are hard. The reason for learning them is to help with larger calculations, where they allow much faster estimation than simply counting in multiples. But it's easier to count in multiples than to keep your place in the progression of a table, so schools often take a shortcut. Peter has worked hard on tables, and is now quite fluent in 2s, and making progress on 3s and 4s. Considering that his problems prevented him from receiving a primary education, this is good progress. We worked on the first paragraph of Douglas Bader's Fight for the Skies, which his dad had found for him at a boot sale. Douglas Bader is a good person for Peter to be interested in.

The consequences of not being able to read - and how to tackle them.

We have met the young man at the centre of this posting before. He is eleven, and transferred to secondary school this year. His behaviour at primary school was so poor that he engaged the full panoply of a local authority's support services, including psychiatric services, and was given a very poor prognosis of survival at secondary school. He is a big lad, and had been prone to violence. His target for English at the end of his first year (Year 7) was Level 2c - the bare minimum expected of seven-year-olds. He was effectively starting secondary school without having received a primary education.

The root of his problem was sensitivity to light, which had prevented him from learning to read, and given him a life of frustration and misery, which he had taken out through extreme misbehaviour, frequently reducing his class teacher to tears. A hospital had suggested light sensitivity as an issue. I followed this with an assessment using the Institute of Optometry screening kit, and, five months later, he received his tinted lenses on the NHS. I've been seeing him for a weekly lesson, with his father present. His reading has improved to the extent that we were able to teach him to read the dinosaurs chapter in The Dangerous Book for Boys, and Queen Elizabeth's speech to her troops at Tilbury. Both well above 2c - he reached 2b on the school's assessment by October. He has had no serious disciplinary problems at school other than an over-reaction to being teased by other pupils. At home, his behaviour is unrecognisable. We've used a series of targets for civil language, absence of violence, work and co-operation, and this week he scored perfect 10s on each for the first time  He has not shown violent behaviour for nine weeks.

His father's estimate on his reading is that it has "improved tenfold", but the consequences of hiis lack of primary education, particularly of his lack of reading, are immense. To begin with, he has little or no general knowledge, and knows very few words. Looking at a Battle of Britain video, he talked about "the man" for any general, or "the teams" for armed forces, using the vocabulary of his everyday life. He didn't know that the Spitfire was a fighter, and thought that the Germans had Lancaster bombers - they'd been in the papers the previous week and every bomber was a Lancaster as a result. At the same time, he picked out as an important point Dowding's - "the Man's" - decision not to send more fighters to France when it would have jeopardised the UK's defence.(I'd asked him to pick out three points from the video, and say why they were important. This was definitely one of them.)

The approach I'm using is to  build up his vocabulary through discussion, each time going back to something he knows, and refining it, making sure the thinking behind each new word comes from him, and using analogy. For example, his first thought on being asked what "the man" did was that he was PM. So, I asked him who he'd been advising not to send the fighters, and built up the idea that that man was PM. So, what did "the man" do? He was chief. Chief of what? This took us to a discussion of fighters and bombers. I explained that bombers were part of bomber command, and that there was a coastal command. What, then might fighters be part of? We agreed, fighter command. We agreed an alteration to his notes (using Word) and I gave him a printout to practise for for next week. We discussed the video again, and considered what might be two more important points. "Knowing when they were coming and where they were..." was his next one. So, progress.  But every piece in the jigsaw still has to be put in place. To be continued.

Asberger's - or a reading problem, 2

I've now been working for a term and a half with an eleven-year-old who had been assessed variously as having autism, asbergers, and various other conditions over a period of years, on account of his impossible behaviour. His parents' file of these assessments is four inches thick, and the result of his difficulties was that he effectively received no primary education at all.

His real problem was sensitivity to light. Following screening with the Institute of Optometry kit (£50), a grey overlay enabled him to focus on a page of print, and so learn to read. He now has blue tinted glasses, and has settled into secondary school with no major behavioural problems. Using the techniques in my book, Using Phonics to Teach Reading and Spelling (Sage), we have made big inroads into his reading difficulties, and he is reading The Dangerous Book for Boys. He has, for example, read and understood the technical terms for the geological dating of dinosaurs. We still have huge gaps - last week's big success was learning the 2x table - but the lad is now able to start his education, albeit at the age of 11.

To be continued...