Action research - what is it?

At various times on this blog I've referred to 'action research', a term not used very often in the UK but quite well known in the north America and Australia. My view is that given that we don't live in Utopia, we still have to come up now with ways of working which are better than top-down, diktats.

Here's the wikipedia entry on 'Action Research'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_research

You can make this matter as theoretical or as practical, as short or as long as you like. I've just supervised 5 excellent students who developed projects of their own across a term in primary and secondary schools in classroom and after-school or library contexts. Next spring, I will be supervising another ten whilst being a co-convenor of the poetry 'action research' project we run at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education 'Poetry Write Now'.

The previous blog shows teachers in the midst of a piece of Action Research of their own devising.

A teacher-led project - Story-writing

[I was sent this earlier today]

From Little Hazels……                                            Story Writing in Glyncollen

“The washing machine goes around and around. It is full of soap and water. The washing machine takes all Daddy’s clothes and takes the spots off them. The washing machine is naughty and hides everything at the back. It hides spots, tissues and wipes, all at the back. We need to buy a new one I think!”

I love this story! It was written by a three year old boy, dictated and scribed.  It is one example of the myriad of amazing stories the children in my school have produced this year as a result of a story-telling project.  Let me tell you my story.

I’ve been the Head Teacher of a primary school with 248 children for just over a year.  In September, as part of a drive to improve the quality of writing and oracy in the school, I introduced a story-telling project.  I am not one for laying down the law with teachers, especially when it comes to experimenting. I want them to have the courage to take a risk and see results for themselves.  I know what I believe about literacy and having completed research into narrative understanding and children’s writing with my own classes, I invited my long-time friend Sue to introduce a story-telling project to the staff. Sue had original been my Masters tutor and had inspired me to want to inspire. That’s why I took the bold step out of the classroom and into Headship. Making the difference is what counts.

In one two-hour training session, Sue introduced the theory that narrative understanding is the  primary meaning making tool and that we must capitalise on this with our children.  Secondly, following Kieran Egan’s work, she explained that children from 3-7 are highly imaginative and that we must encourage and give opportunities for them to use their imaginations through role-play, drama and story-telling.  Sue also introduced the work of Vivian Paley, the award-winning, retired kindergarten teacher. Vivian encouraged her children to tell their stories and made sure an adult was available to scribe them. The children’s stories then became part of the class reading and drama as either the teacher or children read their stories to the class and other children acted them out.  Finally Sue asked teachers to ensure the children were immersed in stories – each day they should hear traditional fairy tales, picture books, oral stories and stories the children have written themselves. 

In the year two classroom, excited about the project, and free of the pressures of CDAP, the teacher embraced the ideas and couldn’t wait to start.  That week she told the children about the project and asked the children to help her set up a writing table in the class.  The children were told that if they wanted to tell a story they could go to the story table and someone would scribe it for them. 

Sian had my full support. Everyone tells stories and everyone has a story to tell. We just need someone to listen. Children are no different. They just need the opportunity, the time and the encouragement and will do it naturally.  If we truly want children to be authors, we must treat them as such, through motivation not force; through purposeful creativity not pointless tasks.

I was challenging the entrenched views that children can’t write unless we teach them the skills first; that these should be taught step-by-step in a sequence and that all the class should learn together in a series of tick-box lessons. They might tick our boxes but certainly not theirs. Years of SATs have been engrained on literacy mentality – So many teachers today might feel lost without the lists of things to cover. The concept of giving children an opportunity to write whenever and whatever they want, acquiring the skills they recognise they need, as and when they need them, is a big ask in a data driven world.

I reinforced Sue’s message to the staff – that in order to tell stories children need imagination, to see story telling as an opportunity to intrigue, excite, emote;  I want to feel the emotion in children as they tell their stories, not see them glazed over because they don’t get their capital letters and full stops right!

By asking the teachers to give the children an oral platform to tell their stories; to feed their imaginations by providing a literature rich environment in which to work I knew I was taking a risk – we weren’t entirely sure where it was going to go. They asked questions: at what point, if any, did we ask the children to put their stories on paper?  We decided to ‘stick with it, see where it goes’, wait and see if children ask if they can write them down.  Don’t force them to write before they are ready. We needn’t have worried.

It is almost a year now and wonderful things have happened.  In Sian’s class, during the first week of introducing the project only four children asked to dictate a story.  By week two when Sue came back to see how things were going she was presented with a book of stories the children had dictated that had been transcribed and punctuated by a variety of adult volunteers,  a book of stories some children had scribed themselves and a book they had spontaneously dictated at home.  The first thing we noticed was that all the stories had character, setting, plot, rift and resolution.  Sian hadn’t taught this – the children just knew it.  The second thing we noticed was the influence of the literature-rich environment – inter-textual referencing, playing with genres, using rhetorical devices for effect, repetition of character, twists and humour.

Responding to the stories was important.  Sian held her daily story-telling and sharing and children had the chance to either read or have their stories read.  Peer assessment was encouraged – what do we like about this story?  What would make it better?  What would you like more of?  What’s missing from this story?  Sian would share the written stories with each child; as they read back or heard their own stories they could see the purpose of punctuation for themselves. Children’s progress was monitored on an individual basis as they went along.

Other things happened as a result of the project. It became apparent that parents scribing for their children created a bond between them and gave them a ne awareness of their child’s ability and an insight into their world – significantly Dads from all backgrounds became really involved in the project.  Parents in homes where books are thin on the ground became absorbed as they saw the children able to write amazing stories.  We held a literacy experience evening when the parents came to see what was done and they saw how brilliant their children are – how creative.

Within a term the majority of the children had started to write for themselves and became even more absorbed in it.  Through reading their stories to each other they were able to learn about authorial techniques.  The best writers in the class are now writing a standards close to Level 4! Both oracy and reading have also been positively affected.

Now, when children, boys in particular, and those prone to mischief, when given the chance to choose an activity as a reward, will choose to cosy up in the book corner with a good book.  They are having so much time to read, be read to, to hear each other read, and they love to do it. Really proficient readers read with feeling, correct intonation, expression, excitement, pause for effect, and provide a marvellous peer role model for the class. 

The class as a whole is a very mixed bag; some are confident, some not so confident, some are receiving support for a variety of reasons, but they have become a learning focused class – and they are so absorbed in what they are doing there are far fewer behaviour issues.

It’s not just in Year 2 that change has occurred. Sue came back for another session focused on Key Stage two and we shifted our curriculum to a thematic approach incorporating drama, Mantle of the Expert and other approaches.  It’s really working here too – the children are enthused about writing and we have story books of evidence from nursery to Year 6 – but this would be the subject of a whole other blog!

We’re not a year down the line yet, and standards have risen for sure. But it’s more than that - it’s about instilling that love of lifelong learning. The children are writing because they want to write.  The teacher is the facilitator, not the font of all knowledge, nor the ticker of boxes. The children choose how, where, when and what to write – there are no constraints.  Now they go to year 3 with a love of story-telling and writing and a whole load of skills to boot.  It’s been a great year. 

Anna Bolt, Sue Lyle and Sian Davies

My thoughts on the Year 1 Phonics Screening Test

1. Using phonic methods in the teaching of reading is fine. 

2. We must be absolutely clear what these are, what they do and what they don't do.

3. Phonics are only and always only part of the system by which we make correspondences between sounds and letters (or combinations of letters). We also do this through recognising whole words (as with what the synthetic phonics materials call 'tricky words' and the like. We also do it through such processes as prediction, part recognition by phonic methods (eg initial letter or letters), part by sense and meaning and so on. Many words in English cannot be entirely decoded using synthetic phonic methods. One example: the two meanings and sounds of 'wound'. Producing both correct sounds will not of itself produce the right word. This can only be arrived at through context and meaning. 

4. Finding correspondences between letters and sounds is not 'reading'. It is, as the phonics advocates will say,  'decoding' and only 'decoding'. 

5. It is quite possible to learn how to decode any written language without knowing the meaning. Many of us have had that experience when learning languages other than our mother tongue. Opera singers are particularly good at this!

6. Reading is what we do when we make a correspondence between whole passages of written language (words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, articles, chapters,whole books etc) and meaning.

7. Doing synthetic phonics can only ever be a contributory factor in the process of how we 'learn to read' in this full sense of the meaning of 'read'. 

8. Whatever the role of SP in learning to read for meaning  in schools, it must never be the sole one, or indeed the main one.

9. We need to address every day of a child's life in school the matter of 'reading for meaning' in the full sense of this phrase. How do we enable children to make meanings from words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, articles, chapters and whole books? 

10. We also need to address urgently the matter of what aspects of the curriculum hinder 'reading for meaning'? 

11. It is clear to me that the phonics test at the end of Year 1 is precisely one of those aspects of school work and life which will do just that. It is causing anxiety amongst teachers, pupils and parents. Any anxiety around the complex matter of learning to read will be counter-productive for many children. There is already anxiety enough around the matter, when in reality it should be a matter of fun and pleasure derived from discovery and the meaning of the texts. 

12. The test is already being called a 'reading' test both by the popular press but also in DfE materials. This is disastrous. It leads teachers, parents and children into thinking that they are either successes or failures at 'reading'. They are not. They are successes or failures at 'decoding'. This is a very different matter. What's more, not all children arrive at decoding through learning phonics. My generation is evidence of that. Those of us who learned to read did that through a mix of phonic techniques (not synthetic phonics), whole word recognition, repetition of high frequency words and reading for meaning. 

13. The test is reinforcing the notion that one-size-fits-all in learning to read. This is illogical and counter-factual. It is clear that many children learn to read using different methods but are already being squeezed into this purely phonics method (first, fast and only). We even hear that 'multi-cue' is 'dangerous'. Ancedotal evidence is emerging telling us that children who are already reading books are being 'sent back' to do phonics because it's being deemed that they have to 'catch up' on decoding. There is no evidence that would suggest that good readers need to go back and do phonics to teach them to read.

14. A further problem with the test is that it encourages the notion that reading is a matter of being able to read single words. In fact, reading for meaning, asks of us to make sense of what has been called 'wording' ie words strung together in meaningful chunks. Spending great effort and time on sounding out words detracts from the urgent matter of children 'getting' the written code or 'unlocking' it, as we might say. Many children hear very little of the written code. They live in a largely oral world, they don't hear the kind of speech performance of, say, radio scripts, recordings of stories, or pre-scripted oral performance (political speeches and the like). The written code (the particular 'dialect' which strings words together in the way that is very different from the way we do it in everyday speech) has to be learned, as well as 'decoding', as well as learning what this or that single word is. We have to learn this in order to read for meaning. Preparing for this test will get in the way of the enormous amount of work teachers need to do, to familiarise children with this written code  which they do through reading stories outloud, getting the children to learn poems and songs, putting up a good deal of fresh interesting and accessible writing material around the walls, giving children plenty of books to take home for parents and friends to read to the children, giving children time in the school and local libraries, enabling the children to browse and choose books that attract and interest them. 

(If you want to get a good idea of how different the written and spoken 'codes' are, just find a passage in any book or newspaper and try saying it out loud as if it's in the middle of a conversation.)

15. In built into the year 1 phonics test is failure. I think this is disastrous when it comes to teaching to read. We must, must, must shed failure and the fear of failure from the process. Instead, we will be elevating and prioritising failure in terms of its importance because schools are obliged to tell the parents and carers of children who score less than 32 out of 40 that the child in question has failed. Many parents will see this as a failure in 'reading' and be anxious. This anxiety will be a hindrance for children learning how to read for meaning. Anxiety is counter-productive. 

16. The marking of the tests is highly problematic. If one views the DfE guide on marking, it is clear that there are ambiguities and grey areas in how children sound out and then arrive at what a word 'says'. The pronunciation of phonemes is nowhere near as clearcut as is being made out here, nor is it in everyday speech, nor is it in children whose languages made different phonemic distinctions. Just as examples, the l,r distinction is different for some Asian languages, likewise b,v and in Spanish s,sh and th. 

There is also the question of dialect and accent. Nominally, the film in question allows for this eg the 'free' pronunciation of 'three' which some London speakers show. However, with social mobility the 'substrate' of accent, dialect and mother tongue is not always apparent and children can easily get confused and 'wrong' over this. My own son has become so confused over 'th' and 'f' that he has started saying and reading 'three' for 'free'. Vowel sounds are often even more problematic with the rigidity of the test. Because the children can only be wholly right or wholly wrong, this distorts how we learn which is more often than not through a process of being partly right and partly wrong.

17. The encounter with the tests is already proving to be distressing. However, even more distressing are the endless hours of mock-testing, or lessons which approximate to the testing, being forced on teachers wanting (quite rightly and understandably) to do well by the children and the school. 

18. The creation of the nonsense words is of itself neither better or worse than all this. In a general broad-based system of teaching to read, nonsense words are a great, fun way happening to show how decoding works. However, the function of nonsense is to encourage the human mind to make leaps into the possible, and the imaginary - not to perform a rigid, compulsory test. A vibrant cultural tradition is being enlisted in order to deprive it of the one thing that makes it so powerful - namely its humour and fun. 

19. By making the tests universal, compulsory and public, the government is putting undue and unfair pressure on teachers, schools, children and families. Of course teachers need to sit down with children and find out what they can and can't do. This can be done in the way it has always been done, with intimate one-on-one conversations and reading using standardised words and passages. These most certainly do not need to be part of some elaborate public accounting scheme. Again, those of us of a certain age, have a strong memory of teachers asking us to read to them, and teachers filling in a register of our scores to keep a check on our progress. This was in the 1940s and 50s and was more than adequate for the job.

20. Many children coming from families with high-level literacy and many books and printed material are mostly in a situation where this phonics test will be not much more than an irritant or a bore. Their reading for meaning is enriched daily by input from home reading materials. This enables them to 'get' the point of reading, to 'get' the written code (it's in their ears). However, those children who are after all the ones who are most subject to the concerns about illiteracy are the very ones who are not being given what I'm calling the 'point of reading' and not being given a chance to hear and 'get' the written code. It's vital that all children, without exception get these opportunities. For many children, school will be the first and only chance for them to do this. We must not on any account jeopardise or endanger this.

(Presented to the National Union of Teachers as part of their considerations re the Phonics Screening Test)

Roy Hodgson's speech - get off his back

I am genuinely amazed that there are people who seem to think that there is something wrong or irritating about Roy Hodgson's speech. Some people seem to think that there is only one 'correct' or 'right' way to make the sound we signify with the letter 'r'. In fact, both across the UK and Ireland and across Europe there are several possible alternatives and variations within all of them.

One sound you can make is by closing the back of your throat and making a kind of quick but light 'growling' sound. Most French and German speakers use this but traditionally people from Northumberland and Durham did too.

Another is by 'rolling' the tongue against the roof of your mouth. Variants of that can be found in Scotland and Italy or in the French Pyrenees.

Another is by placing your front teeth on your bottom lip or by pursing your lips to make a kind of 'w' sound, though many users of this do not pronounce the 'w' in words in the same way as they pronounce the 'r'. This 'w'  way of pronouncing 'r' was common amongst some Londoners. We recorded a market trader in Hackney for BBC Radio 4's 'Word of Mouth' whose speech was like that but a famous 'posh' speaker who had this feature was Roy Jenkins.

The fourth is the Received Pronunciation and 'estuary' pronunciation (like mine) where the tongue is not 'rolled' against the roof of the mouth but rather squeezed against it. However, though this is 'standard' it is by no means always the same. People from the Caribbean or the West Country or Ireland produce variants. And very significantly there is a division between those who 'sound' the 'r' in words like 'word' or 'card' and those who don't. Across the USA for example, you can hear wide variants of how marked the 'r' is in a word like 'America' itself. This depends on the position of the tongue when squeezed against the roof of the mouth and for how long or how strongly.

My view on these four main ways of sounding 'r' is that one of them is no more correct than another. All that we have done is determine that one of them belongs in the prestige dialect of educated and upper or middle class English people. We then say that it is 'correct' because, for example, that's how the queen pronounces it. This isn't logical. It's just an expression of an attitude to class, disguised as a comment about speech.

In all the silly stuff that's talked about 'lazy' speech or 'impediments' or any kind of terminology to describe some kind of failure or incorrectness in the way people speak, people never refer to the fact that RP or estuary speech does not show people sounding out the 'r' that most US, Irish, Caribbean and West Country and Lancashire and Scots people sound. Apparently a speaker like me is not 'lazy' or 'failing' or 'impeded' in my speech for not sounding out the 'r' in 'card' or 'short'.

In other words, many of the comments that people make about other people's speech are really comments about the status of one's own speech or the perceived status of what sounds educated.

Roy Hodgson is as we know a highly educated man. Listening to his speech, (not very closely) I get the impression he uses at least two, possibly three ways of sounding 'r'. And good luck to him. To my ear he is completely clear. He expresses himself easily and fluently. I can't think of any occasion I've not understood what he is saying or not 'caught' a word that he is saying.

I have no idea whatsoever whether he is a great, good, medium or crap football manager. In  any of those scenarios, his pronunciation of what we signify with 'r' is neither here nor there. Making prejudiced comments about it, just makes it harder for any user of the non-standard ways of sounding out 'r' feel self-conscious and inadequate. A great deal of comments about language are of this order. Hierarchies serve the people at the top of the hierarchy.

The never-ending queue (c/o tweeter Stephen Barnes)

Being poor is like being in a never-ending queue - but you're queueing to get nothing at the end of it.

How English SATs wreck reading.

The English SATs test routines and systems - ie teachers are forced to teach crass processes and systems of text analysis based on treating texts as if they are all sequences of facts ('retrieval') or presentations of logic ('inference'). This is NOT an attack on teachers forced to do this. I fully acknowledge that teachers are forced to do this in order to satisfy Ofsted, government and local ratings. (Ironically, Ofsted in 'Moving English Forward' has actually dared to attack schools for teaching to the SATs! What else are they supposed to do with you, Ofsted, breathing down their necks?!) 

Retrieval and inference may  be an adequate way of treating factual texts but it is hopelessly wrong way to treat fictional and figurative texts (ie fiction, poetry and drama). 

These kinds of texts mingle ideas with feelings and how we 'retrieve' or 'infer' is highly variable and not directly related to how or why  it affects us. Nor should it. Affecting readers is  why writers write or readers read. As we read in partnership with the author we create 'patterns' or 'structures' of feeling. As we are affected, again in partnership with the author we form ideas. This process cannot nor should not be reduced to 'retrieval' and 'inference'. It is a shameful adulteration of literary response, which is forced on to child readers by SATs, training for SATs and the whole apparatus of booklets, and mock-SATs coaching. It is an attack on reading itself.

Inequality postscript and clarification

I don't think I fully made the point about 'continuity' in the way that I wanted to. The way continuity works is that there is a difference between a person's life experience and how it is presented back to us in the news and with 'The News'. That's to say , people have a lifetime's experience of being poor, at the bottom of the pile, or even, say, not completely poor but under constant pressure to work longer hours, under threat of unemployment etc.

What is being presented to us all at the moment and in the moment  is a 'solution' ie austerity. But what we had before and what we will  have afterwards when austerity has 'solved' the problem (perhaps) won't be fundamentally different from what we have now.  The inequality will remain, the low pay, the long hours, the insecurity. So 'the moment' is all dressed up to look user-friendly by being a 'solution' and the 'continuity', the lifetime's experience is hidden from us or at the very least silenced. It's a kind of jam-tomorrow followed by a jam-tomorrow followed by a jam-tomorrow, all offered in the hope that we won't notice that it never comes.

Meanwhile the rich and the super-rich stay rich  and indeed increase their wealth year on year. Their lifetimes are continuously stupendously rich. This too is obscured and hidden  away from us - even by calling it 'inequality' as if that is  a snapshot or an inevitable outcome on the road to our jam-tomorrow. But the reason why it isn't jam today is precisely because the rich are getting the jam by preventing the rest of us from getting it.