Tes Podagogy

“We need to make our learning authentic, we need to be able to see how it is applicable to real life, and in curriculum all around the world we are failing to do that,” argues Cecilia K Y Chan, head of professional development and an associate professor in the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at the University of Hong Kong.

Chan is the guest on this week’s Tes Podagogy podcast and she discusses curriculum choices at length: what we are teaching now, why we make those choices and what impact those choices have on the happiness and future prospects of the current crop of school-age children.

“Being autistic is not necessarily disabling,” explains Dr Luke Beardon. “Instead, it is a disadvantage. And is that disadvantage a result of being autistic, or is it a result of being in a certain environment?”Dr Beardon is certain it is the latter.

He is a senior lecturer working within The Autism Centre at Sheffield Hallam University and on this week’s Tes Podagogy podcast he explains why he believes autistic children have an unnecessarily challenging time in school.

“Being a teacher and having that level of expectation to engage with the autistic community without really good solid levels of support is massively unfair on the teacher, the child and the family,” he explains. “But there is no doubt we are failing these kids.”

He discusses how we combat this. He offers three golden rules to support autistic students and offers a huge amount of advice to teachers on everything from pastoral care to academic support to behaviour. 

“Children do make choices to misbehave,” states professor Essi Viding, “but the tools they bring to make the choices are different. Someone who has very stable developmental history is making a particular choice with a completely different toolkit than a child who has a unpredictable developmental history.”

Viding is professor of Developmental Psychopathology at UCL and, together with professor Eamon McCrory, professor of Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology at UCL, she studies the impact of trauma on a child’s behaviour at the Developmental Risk and Resilience Unit at UCL. Speaking on this week’s Tes Podagogy podcast, they explain how trauma impacts development, how this affects behaviour and what teachers can - and should - do about it.

There is plenty that we can all do to support young people’s mental health, says clinical psychologist Dr Emma Mahoney on World Mental Health Day.

In this Tes Podagogy podcast, Mahoney talks about the statistics around young people’s mental health, the causes of mental health problems, and what schools can do to help tackle the problem.

Dominic Wyse has a challenge for you: “How often does a child in England get to genuinely do a piece of writing that begins with a blank page and is entirely their own ideas because they think those ideas are important?”The professor of Early Childhood and Primary Education at the University College London (UCL), Institute of Education (IOE), already thinks he knows your answer.

“I know from my own research and experience, it is incredibly rare,” he states. 

And he says that because this is not happening, pupils are not really learning what it is like to “be a writer”.

Speaking on the Tes Podagogy podcast, professor Wyse explores several different aspects of teaching the writing process. He explains that it has to begin at the earliest ages of school and that, often, this is hampered by teachers not recognising when the youngest pupils believe they are writing.

“They are naturally curious about writing, and they play with the tools of writing given the opportunity. But in some research a PhD student of mine did recently, they found that adults did not pick up on the fact the children were writing when the children were very clear that they were writing. That is an important pedagogical lesson for us.”

He argues that teachers also need a broader appreciation of what writing is, and of its societal context. That means including examples of writing in different media or getting children to compose in different media, be it text messages, snapchats, formal reports, handwritten diaries - the list should be extensive.

“We have to teach writing as it really is, not base it too much on tests or a romantic notion of what it was,” he says.

That said, he is a firm advocate of a mixed approach to writing: part formal, part informal, so that the conventions are taught but creativity and engagement can also be cultivated.

“A general writing area in an early years setting is vital so children can, in any way they feel comfortable (at tables; on the floor on cushions) be making marks and have children interacting with children about those marks," he explains. "But also there is absolutely a place for more teacher-directed activities where teachers can stimulate with things they would like students to learn. Those things should be based on what the teacher has witnessed in those informal writing periods - that’s how they spot where the challenges are.”

In the podcast, he talks through the different stages of teaching writing and the latest research on how best to do it.

Fred Oswald seems to audibly cringe when the words “21st Century Skills” are mentioned. But that’s not to say the professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychologyin the  Department of Psychology at Rice University does not think such skills exist. Rather, he believes this set of “non-cognitive” skills – including resilience, pro social skills, conscientiousness - have always been required in society, but the demand for them has now increased.  

“What makes them 21st century skills? Technology and internationalisation – these disrupting forces, how are they going to shift the relative weight on these skills,” he asks.  “With automation, if the technical aspect can be automated, does that leave the worker to have to concentrate on the non-cognitive skills, the social skills? I would not say these are new skills, but they are [now] just receiving more emphasis [from employers].”

Speaking on this week’s Tes Podagogy podcast, he explains that organisations will try and influence education so as to produce workers with these skills.

“Businesses have an interest to find talent that will give them a competitive edge, so [if] they can [persuade schoolsto] develop that talent to their own advantage they will do it,” he explains.

Whether schools should – or can – listen is, of course, highly debateable.

Oswald’s view is that a balance is needed. He believes schools should have an eye on what the jobs market requires, but that businesses need to be more realistic about their role, too.

“Some organisations need to lean more to training, rather than selection, they are depending too much on the school system,” he argues.

But can schools even teach the non-cognitive skills companies are asking for, if they did choose to do so? Oswald says the research cannot yet answer that question, but believes the work of professors Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck (who have both appeared on the Podagogy podcast) is beginning to show us what might be possible.

He also explains that some of the research he has undertaken with US assessment companies has also produced encouraging results of correlation between grade scores and these skills.

But for now, he thinks teachers just need to have these skills in mind when teaching, and to think about the balance between them and knowledge.

“We need to do more research to understand the balance between skills and knowledge in schools and how that translates to value for organisations,” he says. “A lot of effort and team work and leadership happens in classrooms but we do not necessarily recognise it as such [through assessment] . I think educators need to be more mindful of these skills in their classrooms.”

Oswald also discusses the impact of big data on assessment and the “partial reality” of the ‘skills gap’.

“Systematic phonics is the great equaliser,” states Anne Castles, distinguished professor in the department of cognitive science at Macquarie University. “If the child does not have rich language background, you can teach them phonics then they can go and read and supply themselves with that rich language, which is so key for their ability to access the curriculum later on.”Speaking on this week’s episode of Tes Podagogy, Castles argues the evidence this is the case is now compelling. 

“There have been thousands of studies that have looked at phonics in various ways, various forms and using various measures,” she reveals. “We are at a level of confidence now where we can say we have a pretty good understanding that if a phonics programme follows a set of principals then most likely it will be effective, because it would fit with the broader evidence base we have.”

Despite this evidence base, however, she admits to understanding why the topic of phonics remains controversial.

“It is certainly true that is has been more difficult to document evidence of the success of phonics in the long term, but we are starting to see that evidence come through,” she says. “However, we do need more of it.

“And a lot of teachers have used whole language methods for a long time and have experienced success. There are plenty of children who will learn to read regardless of the method being used. So it is very hard for teachers, as they have seen a method bring success, to be told there is a better method.”

She says there has also been a tendency on both sides of the argument to claim phonics should be the totality of reading instruction in the early years - or that this is what people wish to happen - and this has fanned the flames of the debate unnecessarily. It’s an issue she touched on in a co-written article for Tes earlier this year and one she revisits in the podcast.

“There should never be a suggestion that the only reading instruction children should be getting is phonics,” she says. “They should be read to, they should be enmeshed in a reading environment, they should be engaged in all sorts of reading instruction.”

Another claim she says is unhelpful is that, if well taught, every child will ‘get’ phonics. That is simply not the case, she says, but what phonics can do is help teachers spot those with reading disorders sooner. 

“i don’t believe it is true that all children will ‘get’ phonics if they are taught properly,” she explains. “There are some children who are instructional casualties - they have no reading disorder but have not been taught explicitly and have needed the instruction - but there will also be a group who will continue to struggle way past the first few years of schooling [despite good phonics teaching]. What phonics can do, is help us spot those children who do have reading difficulties. By having a phonics check in place, you can pick out the ones who do not seem to be responding well and get some intervention in place. “

In the podcast, she goes on to discuss the evidence base in ore detail, to talk about the commercialisation  and politicalisation of phonics and how that influences the debate, and also about the problems with identifying language problems at too early an age. 

“Most things in education, we have no idea whether they work,” admits professor Steve Higgins.The professor in the school of education at Durham University and co-creator of the EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit, speaking on this week’s Tes Podagogy podcast, explains that this is because research in education is extremely complicated.

“Schools are unpredictable places and you cannot control all the variables. But when you control all the variables for a study in the lab, you make it less applicable to the real and hectic world of classrooms.

“Lab studies are useful in exploring some of the theoretical components but when you move into a field trial in schools in the real world you want a much better idea of whether this is practical and whether it makes a difference and if so how much. From that you can learn whether you think it is worth trying the approach in other settings. This is expensive, and you could not test everything this way, but unless you do test things this way you run the risk of always assuming you know what is effective without really knowing how much difference it makes.”

He believes certain fields of research are falling victim to difficulties in transferring to the classroom.

“With memory, you want to control and understand the variables, so design a study to do that in the lab, but in a school you want to answer a slightly different question, which is what is the best way to remember a particular skill or content, so that children can use it to be successful in school, and that is a lot more complicated. Motivation studies are also tricky. You can isolate all the variables in the lab, but when those concepts reach schools you get the messiness of the real world and it becomes more complicated again.

“Even if you do have a really rigorous series of lab studies you still need to do translational research to understand which of those are actually useful for the classroom and not all of them will be”

He goes on to express concern about the kinds of schools engaging with trials and the impact that might have on the results of those trials.

“One of my worries is that we have a self=selecting group of schools who volunteer for trials and they are the schools who are looking to improve anyway and are looking for different ways to help the children in their care, and that may bias your results. Ideally you would want to randomly select schools, but that is not practical for all kinds of reasons. So we have to be cautious about generalising from the findings.”

In a wide ranging interview he also discusses randomised controlled trials, comparisons with medical research, teacher research and the role of research in education.

“If a teacher takes a moment to think about what they actually do in their own classroom, there is tonnes of experimentation. You try a lesson plan one way and you realise at the end of that class that it’s really not going as well as you would have liked and then maybe your new class files in and you tweak it a little bit,” says Angela Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Duckworth, best known for her work on the science of ‘grit’ – the combination of passion and perseverance for long-term goals that she says sets high achievers apart from the rest of the population – is currently conducting research more broadly into character education through her non-profit organisation Character Lab, with the aim of providing a robust, scientific basis for teaching the ‘soft’ skills that are viewed with scepticism by some.

To do this, she explains in this week’s episode of Tes Podagogy, she is relying on classroom teachers conducting experiments with their classes. This is a task that they are more than equipped for, she believes.

“I know that in the UK there is a really robust and reasonably recent, but really robust and admirable tradition of doing research in schools,” Duckworth says. “So, the idea of experimentation isn’t really new [for teachers]...I think that idea of really closing the loop and doing it systematically with measures and statistics is of course new.”

The Character Lab Research Network conducted its first large-scale experiment in January, with 14,000 high school students, who participated in a variety of different activities designed to increase positive character traits.

“It was a coin-flip which activity they would get. This enables us to see if any of the activities were helpful, which of the activities were more helpful than others,” Duckworth says.

'Innovation and experimentation'

The random nature of the experiment was the best way to ensure fair results, but it also required the teachers taking part to take a leap of faith and accept the uncertainty of the scientific method, she adds.

“Generally, teachers like to try to give the best thing to their students and just give it to all of them. When I was a classroom teacher I never did anything with half my kids that I didn’t do with the other half of the kids and so that is a bit of a paradigm shift for some teachers.”

So, what has Character Lab uncovered about character education so far? In the podcast, Duckworth shares her findings and explains why she is hopeful for taking this research further, working in collaboration with teachers and helping them to become "psychologically wise".

“Innovation and experimentation is what every teacher has to do. We’re just hoping to do it in a more cumulative way.

“So many things that teachers figure out work for them, they never really get to tell other teachers what it is that they did and why it might have worked, because teachers tend to not have that medium. But scientists, that’s kind of what they do: they have hypothesis, they test it, and whether it works or not, hopefully you write it up and you tell the world so that the insight can be shared,” says Duckworth.

Executive function is like an air traffic controller, directing the focus of our brain, says Lucy Cragg, associate professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of Nottingham. This is what makes effective executive function crucial to how we learn."Some people liken it to an air traffic control system or the conductor of an orchestra, where you are drawing on the resources of the brain and coordinating them towards the goal that you want to do," explains Cragg.

Executive function, also known as cognitive control is "the set of skills we use to control or adapt our behaviour".

“For example in the classroom, a teacher might give a child a task. The child has got to keep that task goal in mind, they’ve got to ignore any distractions that are going on, either internally or externally that might distract them from that goal and they’ve also got to be flexible and adapt their behaviour.” 

According to Cragg, executive function can be split into three subprocesses:

1. Working memory

This is the ability to "hold information in mind and do something with it in your head or hold it there in the face of distractions".

2. Inhibition

This is the ability to ignore all forms of distraction, whether that is ignoring information in the environment or "suppressing responses or actions that are not appropriate in that situation". 

3. Flexibility

This is the ability to adapt and shift between different mental processes in the face of unforeseen circumstances. This means, for example, understanding that you need to try a different approach to solving a maths problem if the first method you try isn't getting you anywhere. 

For children who struggle in the classroom, poor cognitive control is likely to be a key factor, says Cragg.

"In any child that is struggling in the classroom, there is likely to be some element of an executive function problem," she explains.

However, identifying interventions that can help students to improve their executive function has so far proved difficult.

“We know that these skills are really important in the classroom and for learning, but actually trying to pinpoint interventions that can work – there’s still a lot of work to be done." 

In the podcast, Cragg explains how further research can help and how increasing teachers' understanding around cognitive control could be the best way forwards for now.

"One approach is just generally increasing awareness and being aware of the executive function demands and working memory demands that there are in the classroom," she says. "So, when you are giving instructions and things to take those into account."