Tes Podagogy

“Roughly two children in every classroom will have significant language needs,” explains Courtenay Norbury, professor of developmental language disorders at UCL. “[But] a teacher may not always recognise it as a language problem first, it may be spotted as a difficulty with learning, or with peers, with reading or behaviour. But very often it is a language difficulty.”Norbury is on a mission to find better ways of diagnosing language problems and more comprehensive interventions for teachers and specialists to support these children. In this week’s Tes Podagogy podcast, she explains that the first step was to give these language issues a name.

“Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is now used as the term when children are not developing language as you would expect them to be - they will use shorter utterances, they may struggle to understand what you have said or asked them to do, they have difficulties with communicating with people. They say less and what they say is less complex. They tend to not understand context.”

Currently, children with DLD tend to be seen as “lower ability” or wilfully naughty. Neither, she says, is true.

“The assumption is often that they are naughty, but it is actually that they do not understand what you have asked them to do,” she explains. “Behaviour is communication - if you can’t express your need, or they have misunderstood you, then children try and express that in another way. It is perceived as naughty behaviour but the child may simply not have the language skills to negotiate what they want.

“[But] if you were to speak to a young person with DLD, they will say the hardest thing is that people think they are ‘stupid’, and they are not, they just cannot explain themselves easily.”

Interventions for children with DLD tend to be “variable”, Norbury says. And the evidence suggests there is no cure for DLD, rather that it is persistent throughout school.

“Language disorder is persistent, you can make a lot of progress in primary school but it is likely these children will still go into secondary school with a gap to their peers and in secondary the challenges will become greater because the language you need to access the curriculum becomes more complex,” she explains.

As for what might work to help, the research is ongoing, but teaching of specific skills seems to be the most effective strategy - which is why Norbury is wary of the rush to see vocabulary teaching as some sort of catch-all treatmen.

“Vocabulary is hugely important, it is the building block of language, but while we can teach children vocabulary, there is no real evidence this cascades down into reading comprehension,” she explains. “For example, you can teach children the word they need to understand an inference, but unless you teach them how to inference specifically, it may not come naturally to them.

“What we are learning is that kids are very good at learning the things you teach them, but that does not necessarily transfer to these other things we would like them to, and that is particularly true of children with language disorders. You should not assume that just by teaching high quality vocabulary, which is very important, that that will have transfer.”

In the podcast, Norbury goes onto discuss the pros and cons of diagnosis labels, the fact the causes of DLD remain largely a mystery and also the fact that a screening programme to spot DLD early may prove counter-productive in that it diverts cash away from much-needed interventions for older children with DLD, who tend to be more likely to experience SEMH challenges.

“I can easily see why teachers would feel a little negative about group work,” says professor Christine Howe. “They must surely think it’s hard to do well, so why should I bother?”Howe is a developmental psychologist and professor emeritus in the faculty of education at the University of Cambridge. She has spent the past twenty years researching how children develop conceptual knowledge, peer relations and communicative competence through working together in groups, and in the latest Tes Podagody podcast, she explains that teachers should not be intimidated by group work. By meeting certain criteria, she says, it’s possible for anyone to make a success of it.

“The crucial thing is that everybody is actively engaged, there are a range of different opinions and these opinions are shared and negotiated,” says Howe.

“It doesn’t matter that much whether the way in which [students] resolve their differences is productive in terms of moving their understanding on then and there...What we’ve found in our research is that the very process of negotiating ideas, giving reasons for differences of opinion and so on will stimulate the students to think about what they’re saying and, perhaps many weeks later, it will twig.”

Howe also discusses some of the biggest misconceptions that exist around group work, how research in the field has developed over the years and what teachers can do to make their group tasks more effective.

“If you look at what most good teachers do, they are using direct instruction, but if you say to them they are using direct instruction they look at you as if, and this is a Dutch phrase, water is on fire, and they say ‘No I am a progressive’,” says professor Paul Kirschner, University Distinguished Professor at the Open University of the Netherlands. “They have a blind spot, they tend to see the straw man of direct instruction.”

Kirchner is one of the world’s leading researchers into instructional design and on this week’s episode of Tes Podagogy he explains that direct instruction is widely misinterpreted in schools. He believes most teachers see it as “drill and skill, authoritarian, isolated fact accumulation, one sized fits all” when it is nothing of the sort.

“What is direct/explicit instruction? You have to set the stage for learning, you have to make sure learners have the pre-requisite knowledge to learn, which can also include creating a learning context for them. You have to make sure there is a clear explanation of what is expected of the them and what you want them to do - to give them the procedural knowledge to carry out what they are doing. You have to model the process, show them how it is done, and try to explain what you did and why you did it. You have to provide guided practice time. That gradually gives way to independent practice. Finally, you should assess it, formally, informally, and formatively throughout,” he explains.

He believes these tenets are applicable across a broad range of pedagogical tools and techniques, including many more commonly seen as progressive. For example, he gives a detailed explanation as to why group work can be extremely effective if the tenets of direct instruction are in place. He also says discovery learning can be direct instruction if following the principle points.

Indeed, he warns against just trying to teach one way only, labelling this ineffective and akin to being a fish and chip restaurant.

“They only have one way of cooking, which is frying,” he explains. “A good chef does not limit themselves to just one technique, tool or ingredient and neither should a teacher. The teacher should be making use of everything they have to achieve effective, efficient and enjoyable learning.”

In the episode, he also ruminates upon why direct instruction has got such a bad name. Partly, he blames the likes of Sir Ken Robinson and progresso Sugata Mitra for pushing a narrative of a pedagogy fit for the 21st Century.

“21st Century skills is the biggest piece of snake oil that I have ever come across,” he says.

“EAL is a problematic category,” states Victoria Murphy, professor of applied linguistics at the University of Oxford.Murphy is a long-time researcher into English as an additional language (EAL) and on this week’s Tes Podagogy podcast she explains that use of the term brings multiple problems.

“The way it is defined is so general, it really just highlights children who have another language in the home,” she explains. “It does not speak to whether and to what extent the child is exposed to English since birth or any other context, and it doesn’t say anything about their proficiency in English, and importantly it does not say anything about their knowledge of their home language or proficiency in that language.

“It is a group that is massively diverse. So any time we talk about EAL in general terms, we are really being a bit reckless.”

She goes on to say that another issue she has with the term is that it is seen as a negative attribute.

“It is used as a deficit term - we assume there is a problem. It really doesn’t have to be a problem,” she argues.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Murphy talks about the problem with interpreting the performance data of EAL children too simplistically, the issues with ‘immersion’ programmes and the lack of support for schools in helping EAL children in the classroom.

“I don’t think there is enough financial support for children with linguistic challenges and I don’t think teachers have historically had enough support in supporting EAL students,” she says

There is recent research that suggests that teachers generally feel unprepared to support students with EAL.”

Murphy also offers some insights to the research going on around the best pedagogy for EAL students, including translanguaging.

“Translanguaging is a little bit of a tricky construct - essentially it means drawing from the child’s other languages within the English classroom, so they can use those other languages as support while they are carrying out work,” she explains. “This approach recognises that the child comes to school with knowledge of another language, that it is a huge resource not just for that child but for the other children in that class if teachers were equipped to use that pedagogical strategy. The teacher would not need to know that home language, it is about a multi-lingual pedagogy.

“I hope to see more studies that will look at when this should be used or if it should be used, the research is in its infancy.”

Professor Neil Mercer takes a moment to consider the question, and then launches into an answer that should please any teacher who has been told to talk more or less in the classroom.“The research does not tell you what the balance between teacher and student talk should be, in any clear way,” says the emeritus professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and director of Oracy Cambridge. “Crude proportions are not important or useful.”

Mercer has dedicated his career to looking at the power of teacher and student talk in schools and he discusses the research on both in this week’s podcast. He is certain teachers need to be both excellent talkers and spend time talking in lessons.

“I always say to primary teachers: you are the only second chance for some children to have the rich language experience. If they are not getting it in school, they are not getting it,” he explains.

However, this does not mean that a teacher should spend all lesson talking.

“We know enough [from the research] to say you should strive for a balance between authoritative presentation and genuine dialogue,” he says. “And that the proportion of instructive talk and dialogue should be determined by what you want to achieve, not by your personality. A teacher may be more suited to one of those approaches, but they need both and it needs to fit the objective at that time.”

When the teacher does talk, it needs to incorporate all the essential skills of good presentation (which Mercer says anyone can learn to do well) and it needs to be considered and well thought through in its content.

When the teacher is not talking, activities need to promote spoken language skills in students, and these are not, he stresses, just those skills that seem to be promoted through oracy interventions.

“There is tendency to think or oracy as speech making or taking part in debates, but we actually mean the full range of spoken language skills, which would include working in a team, helping someone else learn something, listening sensitively to someone so you can help them and so on,” he explains. “Children will differ in these skills, some may be excellent making speeches but not skilled in a group situation, they may not listen to anyone else at all. While another student may be the opposite.”

In the podcast, he talks at length about the research around teacher and student talk and about strategies teachers need to implement to improve both their own spoken language skills and those of their students. He also discusses whether a test for oracy is now needed.

Rose Luckin, professor of Learner Centred Design at the UCL Institute of Education, is worried about the machines. Or more specifically, artificially intelligent machines seeping into education and the lack of response, thus far, from teachers as to what that might mean for their jobs.“The computer can do the academic knowledge delivery in a very individualised way for each learner,” she explains on this week’s Tes Podagogy. “For academic knowledge, in well-designed subject areas, the evidence shows that these systems can be as effective – if they are well designed – as a human teacher, but not a human teacher acting 121.”

The implications of this have not been fully realised, she believes.

“If what you prize in your education system is academic knowledge and we can build systems that can teach it and learn it faster than we can, you put yourself in a tricky situation,” she says. “You can understand why someone in charge of the purse strings might think: why do I need these humans?

“That is an apocalyptic scenario, certainly dystopian, and I don’t think that is what we should do. But I think we need to recognise that if we don’t change our perceptions about what we should be valuing in our education system we do run the risk of handing over too much to artificially intelligent systems.”

In a wide-ranging podcast interview, professor Luckin explains how we build a system that guards against the slow creep of technology-led teaching into the classroom. She believes it is about better understanding intelligence and the difference between information and knowledge.

“If we said, ‘On Monday, when you go back to school, there will be no teaching assistants (TAs)’, I doubt very much schools would make it to the end of the week,” says Rob Webster, an academic at the UCL Institute of Education (IoE). “TAs are the mortar in the brickwork.”

Webster heads up the Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants initiative for the UCL Centre for Inclusive Education and is one of the country’s leading researchers into the role of TAs.

In this episode, he talks about how the role of TAs has been under appreciated and largely ignored by government.

“You would struggle to find a speech, or substantive bit of a speech, by an education minister that deals with support staff, or specifically teaching assistants,” he explains. “That is a curiosity when you consider the numbers: there are around 390,000 people working in schools as a teaching assistant or similar. It is a lot of people, and it is estimated it costs the system £5bn per year. So why would successive governments not have anything to say about them?”

He believes this “policy blackhole” from government about what a TA should be doing has given rise to bad practice in schools.

“As a teacher, it is easy to think that if I have someone to take those five or six children [with SEND] and they will give them the small group attention they need, then that must be a good thing, and I can concentrate on everyone else,” he says. “It is seen as a win win. But there are unintended consequences of that.

“You ask schools what TAs do, they tell you they support children with SEN, support learning, support the teacher. But what does good support look like? That gets very fuzzy. We need to pin down as a system what we think good support is. Without that, we will always get patchy practice, and a drift towards what looks like it is most helpful, but that is not.”

Do we know what good support looks like? Webster details the research that gives us a good idea on what works.

“When you have TAs delivering highly structured interventions, the outcomes are profoundly positive,” he says. “We know that when used properly, when they supplement teaching, delivering structured interventions, TAs are really effective.”

“It is dangerous to say there is one particular method that will work in any classroom in any school,” warns professor Daniel Muijs, head of research at Ofsted. The former University of Southampton academic explains that education research is incredibly “complex” and judging teacher or school effectiveness is therefore also difficult.

“The research suggests you need a holistic approach to assessing teacher effectiveness so you do not rely on any single measure,” he says. “You could never attribute the attainment of pupils purely to what the teacher does.”

Neither, he says, can you rely on added-value measures to judge individual teachers.

“We have to be careful with progress measures and judging individual teachers. The cohort size is quite small if you are looking at one classroom so your confidence intervals – your estimates – are not particularly reliable,” he says. “So I would not advocate judging teachers by value added measures alone.”

Judging schools is similarly complex, he feels, with a need to be open to multiple ways a school can work successfully in order to overcome any bias in the analysis.

“Teaching is partly a contextual activity, so it is about the interaction between the teacher, student and curriculum,” he explains. “[And] teaching is both a science and an art. There is an element of expertise to it that is not necessarily captured in research evidence. We need to be aware of the different models that exist and that work. We also need to experience different schools, the more schools you visit the more aware you come to be.”

In a wide ranging interview, professor Muijs discusses his plans for research projects while at Ofsted, the ethics of education research and also the lack of evidence-based approaches to behaviour management.  

“The evidence on the how stringent you need to be on behaviour is not that clear at the moment,” he says. “There is evidence for both a no excuses approach and approaches that are much more laissez faire.”

“Very few schools consider themselves to be promoting gender norms or particular ideas about sexuality, but they do promote lessons about boys and girls and heterosexuality all the time,” says Vanita Sundaram, professor in the department of education at the University of York. Sundaram explains that this begins at the earliest ages of schooling.

“We know from a very young age that gendered norms are learned and enacted in primary schools,” she says. “Boys are using objectifying language about girls to evaluate their appearance, girls are using that same language to evaluate themselves. Teachers use gendered language all the time in schools, too.  That arbitrary division of classroom spaces, school spaces, into binary categories of boys and girls. Those kind of things absolutely re-enforce the notion that there are two genders and each behaves in a particular way.”

Sundaram has researched what this leads to in the teenage years. Her research has focused on violence and ‘lad culture’ and how gender stereotypes and identities can mean young people excuse or justify violent acts against women.

“Students will start off by saying violence is not acceptable,” she says. “But as you begin to talk about different scenarios, in which coercive control, pressure or abuse might happen, they begin to justify why violence might take place and they do that with reference to gender expectations and scenarios.

“So for example, if we gave a scenario of a young man putting sexual pressure on his girlfriend at a party and she says no, but he continues to pressure her and calls her a gendered insult like ‘slut’, we find that when interpreting that, young people rely on stereotypes of how they think boys or girls should behave or what girls should put up with. They do this to justify, explain or sometimes even excuse violence. They will say things like ‘It is understandable because she rejected him sexually and boys don’t like that kind of thing’ or there is an expectation that girls will be sexually acquiescent so the violence would have been deserved.”

In the podcast, Sundaram discusses how schools can begin to dismantle these gender stereotypes and talks at length around a number of issues around gender, including the negative impact gender stereotypes have on boys and the calls for “more men” to be employed in primary schools.

“A lot of the debates around why we need more male teachers have drawn on very essentialist notions of gender,” she explains. “So men can promote particular types of masculinity in boys, or teach in a way that appeals more to boys, I think those ideas of gender are really unhelpful. There is research in which male teachers talk about schools being very feminine spaces, but pinpointing exactly what that is and why it is exclusionary to men is not so easy to establish.

“Men also lose in the game of gender stereotyping – the pressure to perform masculinity in certain ways is very limiting.”

“The message in secondary is that we don’t necessarily know what to recommend in terms of teaching reading as there is so little research in secondary when it comes to reading,” laments Dr Jessie Ricketts, head of the the Language and Reading Acquisition (LARA) research lab at Royal Holloway university. 

The LARA lab researches all aspects of reading, writing and language acquisition, but problems with reading at secondary is a current focus. 

In this week’s Tes Podagogy, Ricketts explains how it is unfair and unhelpful when literacy issues in secondary are blamed on primary schools.

“I think it is unfortunate that some teachers feel they need to do this blame game,” she says. “For any teacher in any classroom, unless they have a selected class, you are likely to have an almost impossible range of knowledge and skills. What you have to do is do the best with what you have got. I think it is a really tall order to expect every child to leave primary school with all of the knowledge and skills they need to enter secondary schools. Teachers are incredibly hard working and they care about what they do, and they are doing their best with the time and resources they have.”

She says part of the problem is that, as you move through school, the focus of literacy shifts: from everyday vocabulary acquisition and phonics in early years, to general comprehension, and then to academic and subject-specific language. She explains that problems may not necessarily emerge at the start, but rather at any one of these stages. And also, she adds, kids get very good at hiding problems.

What is clear, she says, is that secondary teachers need help: they tell her this constantly during her research.

“From talking to secondary teachers, I realised that secondary schools were faced with a group of children who did not have functional reading abilities and they did not know what to do about it because in their ITT and CPD they did not get much information on the science of reading, how children read or what you might do to improve reading skills,” she explains. “It is not really seen as the job of secondary.”

In the podcast, she talks at length about how literacy at secondary might be tackled and she also covers the role of oral vocabulary in early reading, the impact of reading on spoken language and the need to help students independently broaden their vocabulary.