Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning

2. How Can We 'Do' Disciplinary Literacy: in Conversation with Mark Miller

• Bedrock Learning • Season 1 • Episode 2

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How would your educational journey have changed if your teachers focused on disciplinary literacy? That's the intriguing question we tackle with Mark Miller, director of Bradford Research Schools and an English teacher at heart. This episode is an invitation into the world of disciplinary literacy, shining a light on the intricate dance between subject content and literacy skills, and the profound impact they have on the learner's journey.

As we navigate through this enlightening conversation, we touch on the importance of explicit goals in teaching and how it can shape the cognitive load of students. We discuss how reading strategies can evolve into effortless routines, with teachers playing an instrumental role in this journey. Mark shares the value of small, focused changes, like enhancing vocabulary, in bolstering disciplinary literacy in schools.

Finally, we delve into the power of words in the context of science, and the role of literacy in subjects it often seems detached from. The Freya model of teaching vocabulary makes an appearance, along with a discussion about its benefits and limitations. Tune in to this rich conversation and arm yourself with valuable wisdom and ideas for your educational pursuits.

Mentioned in the episode:  EEF Improving Secondary Literacy guidance reports

You can hear more from Mark @markmillerteach and  Bradford Research School, @BradResearchSch. Find out more about upcoming events with Bradford research school, or find a research school near you. 

Andy:

Hi everyone. Welcome to Literacy Works, the Bedrock Learning podcast, where we bring really interesting people from various parts of the education sector to come and talk to us about issues that we think are really important, to be delivered straight to your device and for you to reflect on and maybe think about how it can be brought into your school and your classroom. And today's guest I'm delighted to say I've got an old friend today who's known for a very long time Mark Miller. Thank you for coming on, mark. It's nice that you've made some time. I know you're very busy and just want to start off. If you could just give us a bit of an introduction to what your role is and what you do, because I think in lots of ways you've got lots of people's dream jobs, so I'd like if you could explain a little bit about that to everyone. That would be great.

Mark:

Oh yeah, it's definitely a great job, quite lucky to be in this position. So I'm Mark Miller, director of Bradford Research Schools. We're part of the EES Research School Network and our role is encompasses a lot of things, but really it's to support schools and making better use of research evidence to inform the practice. I would recommend anyone seek out the local research school because there's a, you know, a range around the country. I also work within Dixon's Academies at the Center for Growth, so part of the central trust team focusing on what we call professional growth across our trust for our teachers, but also all support staff and associate staff as well. I guess relevant as well is that I'm an English teacher and I've been, I don't know, for a couple of decades now, which has had to settle out, but so Good to see that.

Andy:

Yeah, that is a lot, and so you've got you do work with the EES, then is that primarily where you're based? Is that what you do? You do lots of work with the EES, right?

Mark:

Well through the research school network so funded by the EES and lots of support from the EES, and we'll do a range of things. So a day could include writing and communicating and could also include lots of partnership work that we've done. So we've worked with lots of local authorities and Academy Trust and schools across the region. So, yeah, so I guess not so much on the day to day with the EEF, but EEF can inform us a lot of what we do, although not exclusively. But research is research, so it's not just interesting.

Andy:

I love whatever they stand for. I think it's great, I think making that kind of research really available to schools and what's going to impact, because you know, education is a fantastic thing but ultimately, learners have only got a very time, limited amount of time in schools and we need to respect that and make the best use of that time. So I think that's why you know institutions like the EEF and doing what you do is so important. So, before we get into the more serious stuff though I did warn you, I'd ask you this if you weren't doing something education related, what would you be doing?

Mark:

I do think this is the hardest, the hardest question you're probably going to ask, and then when I spend most time thinking about, I think obviously the the boring answer is you know, I'd love to have been a writer. Probably, you know, still can be, can be a writer.

Andy:

That's not boring.

Mark:

Yeah, but that's not. I guess I was looking back and when I was at school I a lot of my. They were higher, as we did in Scotland, so there a lot of those choices. I did maths, computing, business studies, that's the technological studies. So I think I was lining up to be an engineer or something. And then, because I've always loved reading, I just ended up sort of defaulting to English teaching, which I'm very glad I did. But yeah, maybe an engineer could be designing buildings or something.

Andy:

And, thankfully for everyone, you did go into teaching, because here we are now, so yeah, with all the guests on the podcast as people. I'm not sure if people will know this, but we often have kind of a brief chat before the recording to sort of think about the directions of travel we want to take, and it was really. I loved the chat that we had because I think it was very different to other guests. And what I'd really like to start by asking you is in terms of disciplinary literacy, what does that term mean to you? Because I think in lots of spaces at the moment it's in vogue and it's a fashionable term to throw around and schools do it or don't do it or have a varying relationship with it. What does it mean to you if you get in front of a group of staff and you're training them? How would you break that down for them, that term?

Mark:

I think I mean, obviously there's a simple definition which you'll get to, but I'll give you the longer explanation and I think probably for me it's about starting from what it's, what it's not or kind of more traditional ways of seeing literacy in subjects.

Mark:

So I think traditionally we kind of would think about the content knowledge, you know, the, the knowledge of discipline, as being a separate thing to the, the sort of generic literacy approaches like spelling, reading, that we might teach separately or might kind of exist in English classrooms more, and so one way of seeing disciplinary literacy might be that we just add those two things together, so we add the subject and we give people's literacy skills and because of those two things combining then they can be successful.

Mark:

But I think that that's somewhat limited because I don't think it is just adding those two things together. I think it's something new, a new element in itself. So this way that the content and the literacy interact in this, in the subject discipline, that sort of uniqueness, and it's that idea that the, the language and the thinking in the subject discipline are inextricably linked to, kind of intertwined, and I kind of say that, you know, the language enables the thinking, the complex thinking in our subjects. The language also communicates the complex thinking in our subjects, and then it's understanding that the thinking and the language, those two things together, look a little different, and sometimes massively different in every, every subject, discipline and I like that.

Andy:

I like that because initially I was really keen to kind of when I was initially trained on this, you know kind of had a cpd session on disciplinary literacy, I would I sort of ran straight up and thought, right, where can I get a list of disciplinary terms from my subject? And I wanted to sort of box it off and say, well, I've done that now, but actually it's more nuanced, of course, and that isn't it. It's about the interplay between those two things, I think, between the content and and, and the literacy and the thinking. I like that a lot, and we spoke a little bit before about how it's not necessarily just about because you can run the risk, can't you, of it being just reduced to modelling and then writing like the experts. There's actually a stage before that, isn't there? What's your point of departure in terms of how would you encourage teachers to get their learners reading and thinking like an expert?

Mark:

I think definitely that thinking part, and it's kind of twofold when we think about the thinking. I suppose one is the thinking that the teachers we need to do about really getting to grips with the complexity of the thought processes behind, whether it's reading, whether it's writing, any element there, and then for our pupils we need to bring that to life. So there's these different stages. So, and even when we talk about modelling, a big part of what we're modelling isn't actually the product, is it? It's those ways of thinking. So I think, in terms of what we should be doing as teachers and kind of thinking about it, there is a good paper I think Shanahan's going to come up Timothy.

Mark:

Shanahan's going to come up quite a lot as a really good source for some of the good thinking and some research around this. And one thing that I like is where they got a bunch of experts and they did a combination of interviews and think alouds and they just kind of talk through what they were thinking, and so there were certain kind of things that were generic that might be applicable in a range of sources.

Andy:

So they got experts to when we say think aloud. They got experts to kind of articulate out loud their processes as they were tackling these texts in real time right.

Mark:

Yeah, and the texts that would be typical in their field, so the things they would encounter as an expert, rather than just the same text and things. And there is a generic list that they put together that's got sourcing, contextualisation, corroboration, text structure, graphic elements, critique, rereading and interest, and these were things that they saw across. Everyone did a version of those things. So in a sense there was generic ways of approaching them. But then it's really interesting just the way that people kind of approach the text and you know, like, so when you looked at like who wrote the text, the historian was looking at the author and what they brought to the text, the mathematician kind of the author didn't matter as long as what they had written was correct.

Mark:

And as an English teacher, the author, depending on who you ask, is either really really important or, you know, does not matter whatsoever. So that was quite interesting to read because it helps articulate that. But I think we can all do a version of that ourselves. When we look at whether it's a textbook, we kind of we can sit down and we can read that and we can try and just be really really conscious of what we're doing, where we're looking, what we're thinking, and then you know, with reading, we sort of you mentioned modeling writing and things, but we never read. No, we don't always model reading and we certainly don't model reading of different, you know, approaches.

Andy:

I was in the school recently and I was delivering some CPD on a very similar topic and I got to the point where I think it was actually after my conversation with you, I went to deliver a training, like that day and I said, quite, quite brazen, you got to think about this. It's. You know, I'm 37. Now it's been over 20 years since I stood in Richmond market, changed shoppers habits and then had to do an exam on, you know, urbanization and thinking like a geographer. It's been over 20 years since I did that.

Andy:

The reason why I went into English because I was more comfortable with those natural thought processes around that subject Layer on 20, 30 years with some teachers, you know whatever of expertise when we read a text in our subject, it we are. There's all sorts of layered experiences that we're that we've benefited as an expert over years from, and I think one thing we've got to be really careful of is, if nothing else is not to not to assume too much, and it's. And the thinking between subjects is so nuanced, isn't it? You talk about historians, mathematicians, scientists, and then you think about a pupil having particularly a word from, possibly a word, poor people, with a big literacy gap going between five, six subjects a day with very different modes of being, and I said to teach the teachers in the room you're almost literally academically built of different stuff. Different subjects are built of difference, that there is overlap, as you said, but there's this huge difference, isn't there, between the subjects.

Mark:

Yeah, massively, and and and and. Of course some of those generic approaches can work. You know there are reading strategies that will work with some some proficiency in, across all those different subjects. But we, the context matters a lot, both in terms of how those generic things are applied. But but even this, the meaning of a generic reading strategy, changes. There's an interest in things called the situation model, but it's this idea that when we, when we sit down and read a text and when I say we, I guess we're talking about experts we bring those things that everyone brings, like background knowledge. So if you don't have that, you're going to struggle, or reading proficiencies. But we also kind of ground ourselves in the text and maybe even subconsciously, what we do is we decide our goals when we read that text, based on what we're seeing and I think, and then we choose the strategies to meet those goals and, dependent on the text and the context, those will change. But we need to know how, what we're achieving with a certain text. Yeah, the strategies.

Andy:

I think that's really interesting. So I was again in a CPD session to lead up to this. I did some screenshots of different exam papers from different subjects and in one of the business studies one it was a case study on Greg's and it was all about vegan sausage rolls and and actually do you know something, it gave me nightmares like going back to this idea of having to look at a business case study and then being able to comment analytically on it. It's shocking for me. I hated it. It was so difficult and it was largely I blame my teacher, but it was, you know, I never, kind of ever, got it broken down for me, you know, like a text model or something to be able to isolate the facts in order to be able to comment with real, with real accuracy on the Greg's whatever it was model that I was being asked to comment on, whereas give me a passage of the opening of mice and men, I can unpick the nuance.

Andy:

I just loved it. I was completely you know, and I think you're right that you do. And I think sometimes, when you talk about forming those goals, it's not difficult to say that students naturally form relationships with different subjects and different text subjects because they find forming those goals easier, naturally, in some subjects than others. Would you agree with that?

Mark:

Yeah. And I guess as to English teachers with the easier than it first to make sense of that. Where you know the text, we're studying it for a very clear goal. Yeah, it's almost like, but in other subjects, yeah, I think I mean again, I think we've got to be clear as well that you know lots of teachers are experts in this and you know they bring on teachers and other subjects. They will. They will talk about how they, how they manage the text within their, their subject.

Andy:

When I did my math GCSE, I remember very deliberately and some of those other more factually based subjects. In that sense, you get a question on proportions or fractions or whatever, and you're reading anything oh yeah, this is actually, this is this is the question. But it's really testing my ability to do this and it's interesting that there's almost two separate things, whereas with English you can just in lots of ways, immerse yourself completely in the text and then. But then literature, even within English, is slightly different again, because an essay is a very distinct skill compared to, say, an English language piece of analysis. So I guess, to kind of bring this round a bit, what we are looking at is we're looking at trying to make explicit to our learners the goals that they should have when they sit down in the discipline. Is that right?

Mark:

Yeah, I think that's that's a good way of putting it. And just when thinking about maths questions as well, that yeah, I think obviously there is a goal. I you know people's need to answer the question, but actually it's that idea. You know, in mathematics where one of the things that's really hard is, like you say, choosing this, choosing the best strategy to answer the, the math question, and that is, you know, in the word of problems. That is your goal of the reading. Start off, with what type of question is this? And I've seen really great practice.

Mark:

I saw recently she had some examples from Don Valley Academy, so down to school. They're now a research school, another plug for research, and they just showed how they explicitly modeled how you unpick a maths question. And there's something there about when for maths as a subject, for example, say this thing. But this idea that often we'll practice something, we know which questions we're answering, because that's what we're practicing in that, in that lesson. So obviously interleaving these problem types can really help with that, but explicitly teaching these slightly out of that practice context. So if you look at a worded question after you've just practiced all the skills for that, then that reading goal is kind of taken care of, because they don't have to think which problem it is. So you know explicit modelling of how to work out. You know what the questions, you know that those, those count as text types as much as you know Macbeth or anything.

Andy:

There's a cognitive load reflection going on here. Isn't there as well? Isn't there and how? Cognitive load and we might understand that links with different question types. I mean here's an example again. I'll go back to my safety zone of English. I often teach people's the importance of writing a hypothesis statement before they do an essay, but actually it's about the thinking about. The hypothesis statement is really important because it tidies their thinking up about how they're going to then have a coherent reflection on the text overall. Whereas when it comes to maths, for example, that cognitive load might be about, for example, automating the process around how to tackle that question, what the method is. So when you're getting your hands dirty with a question and I'm picking what, what all the words say and all that sort of stuff, actually there's less strain going on because you're you find doing the sum itself, that the mathematics itself, more automatic. So it's I think there's a piece here in terms of reading and helping pupils to minimise their cognitive load when it comes to question types and things like that.

Mark:

Yeah, and then it kind of I mean that's whenever we talk about reading, reading strategies. It's a little bit like that, isn't it? It's an automatic routine and you know we all have these. You know, when we pick up any you know anything that I'd do the life to read, and we sort of automatically choose these strategies. It's just yeah, again, when we get into the subject. I think you're right this idea about if we don't have these strategies, then we're always trying to work it out as we go along. So the more ways of thinking and ways of doing in our subjects that we have, the more we can focus on the those difficult parts, the really hard parts, which is the content and the thinking.

Andy:

I think some of it comes down to just really almost not for everyone but for some learners actually to an extent for all learners but to differing degrees really kind of straightforward instructions about, for example, again looking at an essay. I always said to my pupils read the question and folk and circle the keyword, then have a think about what your idea is about that keyword and then go to the extract, for example, and find how that extract links to the rest of the text. And even for some it's just a case of doing those three things. For others it's a case of well, let's we're on picking these three steps because we're doing it in this way, we're doing it like the expert. So I guess part of the trick for teachers that sort of artisanal, that sort of expert in the room that is, you make the thinking really clear, whether it's a case of following in steps or whether it's a case of sharing the rationale for those steps, but it's about helping pupils become expert readers, whatever that means for them in your subject.

Mark:

Yeah, yeah, and that process comes from codifying what experts are doing, which is harder for us because we're the experts, we don't often do those steps. And then it's about explicitly teaching these approaches. But also, I guess and modelling is a big part of that, but it's also that bit about explicitly teaching almost that moment where we choose a strategy, that moment where we and that's a bit we have to articulate, and I think it's easier to do that with writing, I think, than and more common to do with writing than reading. And I think you know we because, as you know, we've gone on about English quite a lot but I guess what we're doing as two experts is we could really try to unpick that and build off our own ideas around that I think I might say in this conversation, mark, we'll say one and a half experts.

Mark:

Are we three quarters of experts each? Yeah, okay, all right, but I guess what I'm saying is you could put two master like two master teachers better to talk about this than we are and once you get those experts in the room, you do start to. It works really well, and I think that's I know your last is officially later, but that's one of the things we can do just get teachers talking about this, because once we start to do it, we do start to see these, bring these things to life a little bit, and often that's all we need. It's not a big whole school initiative, it's not a massive change. It's just a a little opportunity, a little thing built in just before we start. You know, before we, before we start any engage with any text, we take five minutes to situate ourselves as experts. Right? Is there anything we need to teach? You know this geography textbook that we're going to use today. Do we need to teach people that about how to navigate the way through a textbook?

Mark:

you know, to navigate sections when they answer the questions at the end, do they know that they'll be in chronological order? Do they know what the bits involved mean? Do they know how to you know deal with the text? All these different things and once, if we just spend five minutes doing that, I think it means that we will either explicitly teach some things or we'll just be ready when we come to ask people to you know to tackle the text.

Andy:

I just had a really interesting conversation with a colleague at Bedrock who's at the moment working on the reading test and the results and how we're going to share those with colleagues when people sit the test, and she just wanted my view on it as someone who's been ahead of the department looking at data, and you know what she did. It was quite uncomfortable actually. She just showed me a range of graphs that could show reading data and she literally put it on screen and said tell me what you see, what do you see? And it was really hard for me because I'm used to doing things in a very comfortable place in terms of data in my own office. But actually having someone come along and say what does this look like? What does this look like? And I thought it was a really, because she'd gone away and visualized some of the things I'd asked her to think about and maybe suggested to think about for the reading test. But then actually it was really nice that she came back to me and said this is what I was thinking. This is as the data expert. This is how it was presented. But then she wanted me to see my novice thinking of it when I looked at those graphs and it was really nice. I thought it was a really nice thing for her to do, and I think when you're trying to teach or find information out about where a learner is, I think sharing the thinking, sharing whatever that looks like in your domain, is a really nice thing to do, and actually it's above all else. I think it's more interesting for learners to come across a more distinct variety of thinking, and I feel really passionately about this.

Andy:

I think whether a pupil takes a subject to a year 11 or to a year 9 or whatever it is, I think it's our job in schools. It's the thing is to give them as many meaningful experiences of different disciplines as possible, because if we don't have meaningful experiences, they're not going to be, they're going to have much less opportunity to choose what they like in their lives, what times with them the most, what it is that they're meant to do with their lives. So I think that's a really important thing that you're pulling apart there. About the distinction between reading and writing, I found that really interesting, which is why I wanted to ask you about it today.

Andy:

So, drilling down even further, then, if you look at this on a classroom level and you've worked with teachers a lot over the last few years. What's your advice to you know, for a teacher listening to this? What would your advice be about how to go and actualise and actually make this happen in your classroom and it could be subject specific or it might not be subject specific. What advice would you give to colleagues?

Mark:

Well, I do think we touched upon some of it, which is, you know, literally just have this lens and you know, ask, you know those conversations around, you know what are the unique ways of thinking in my subject and how are those unique ways of thinking particularly communicated? We talked a lot about reading in particular, but we could also be talking about vocabulary, perhaps types. We could talk about even just sentence level stuff as well. So so I think, as always, implementation is key. So I wouldn't ever recommend we do a million, a million things. I think you know a really good place to start would just be look at the text in my subject, kind of identify them, read it like an expert practice through that, then think what's it like if you're not the expert, if you're a novice approaching this, and kind of bridge that gap by making, by teaching and making implicit, explicit. I think it's worth starting with places and also because we can do this in isolation as individual teachers, they'll also, I guess, be leaders of literacy, thinking about this as well, and I think that same message around starting small is really important, that the initiative you know that we've all seen in literacy in particular does seem to happen. So I think you know, vocabulary is another really simple place to start.

Mark:

I think like one thing I did just when I was thinking about this, I think for for a webinar, and I was looking at other subjects, just trying to push myself out of the English comfort zone, and I looked at music glossaries at key stage two and I just set myself a challenge of, okay, let's look for the patterns. So, as a really simple thing that you know, let's look for the patterns in the language in our subjects, and and again it really nerdy, but I just find it really interesting with the music. So just in one key stage two glossary, we got these sort of capitalized genres of music. So blues, jazz, neo, soul came across. So all of these are both definitions, if you like.

Mark:

They mean yeah thing, but they mean way more than the definitions. They've got all sorts of cultural aspects, they've got origins, they've got the way that those genres change or join others, all these Latin terms, so improvised, tempo, ostinato and again, all really really interesting to unpack. And they tell you, not just to you know, they give us so much, not just about the language of music, but you know why? Why Latin it words in music and and what? Where did these originate? Why are they autonomous? And then there was a couple of French words in there and I couldn't quite get an answer where they came from.

Mark:

But I guess if I was a music teacher and I was with other music teachers, that's a really rich conversation and again, what that's doing is it's not only looking at the language of the subject and it's not only building vocabulary, which is always great, but it's also the subject itself. So that, so it's trying to find those ways in, I think. What else I think is really rich, and there's some decent evidence around, is focusing on sentences, sentence combining, how you know, because one of the you know, essentially that's all writing is really it's combining units of thought, ideas into these sentences, and the way we create those sentences conveys, conveys meaning. So I think a really fruitful thing to do is just work out the, the thinking in your subject, and then work out ways to convey that in sentences and then practice. You know, I would definitely practice that by combining sentences and things like that. So there's a good there's, I think, thinking about more practical ways as well.

Mark:

There's a good list from the EF. This is in the improving literacy and secondary school guidance report. So they've got, I mean, that's really that's a really good way to see disciplinary literacy as well. You could probably rename that disciplinary literacy guidance report, I think. Yeah, so thoroughly recommend that. But they've got four questions. So I'll just ask, just say those. So it's, they say you know what is unique about your subject? Discipline in terms of reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Mark:

What's common with other subject disciplines? How do members of this subject discipline use language on a daily basis? So how do the experts, if you like, are there any typical literacy misconceptions held by students, for example, how to write an effective science report? And then the last one are there words and phrases used typically or uniquely in the subject discipline and that could prompt a lot of reflection? You know lots and lots of department meetings and reflections there and again, one of the biggest challenges I think here is that it's really hard to move from the generic to the specific.

Mark:

Yeah, and it's really hard to do this as a whole school because you have to start with the generic and then you just have to say right off you go and discover, and I guess in different subject networks will have their own resources you could probably tap into and things, but it is a thing that you have to push back on the teachers to think rather than say here's the 10 things you all have to do.

Andy:

And we're sort of moving now into the territory. The final question I want to ask you about, which is kind of how do you change thinking in schools? And here I kind of I really like Tom Sherrington's metaphor of the learning rainforest, the idea that you know every subject needs to be given the time and the space to come up with these narratives and these, these understandings of their subjects. Because actually I bet that after five years of leading English in my school, you can see, I bet, the narrative around the what that I crafted around my colleagues crafted around my the subject of English would be different to how maybe you would have done it over five years or how other colleagues would have done it. And that's fine because it's and what we have a piece of. We have a part of our platforms called Bedrock Mapper and there's over 37,000 words in there that colleagues can lean on and think about. But Mapper's really powerful, but it's only as impactful as the quality of conversation that underpins it. It has to be about having the space and the time for colleagues to be able to kind of talk about those things. So you're talking about, you know, roots of words in music I often, you know, and you know there's probably more successful English teachers than me that have done that, have done different things in their subjects.

Andy:

But I often talk about the idea that in creative writing, for example, that one of the words in the top mark, top band of the mark scheme, is compelling. Comm means with, pel means move, move with. That means you're trying to get your audience to move with you. You're not going to get an audience to move with you if you talk about blood sucking zombies chasing you through a forest, with killer clowns everywhere. It's not compelling, it's not, it's not exciting because you're never going to be able to do that sort of thing justice. If it's about a child lost in a marketplace looking at a photo of their parents, that's much more compelling and it's much more interesting, I think. And it's about crafting those kind of tiny narratives on the subject level that really bring your subject to life, isn't it? That's the idea about changing thinking in schools.

Mark:

Yeah, and these will arise, sometimes consciously, and sometimes you know you might just put that into an etymological dictionary or you might have known all those root words, those word parts, but yeah, so I think there is a little bit about that finding those little narratives and that's a really great example because it is about learning a word. It's also about hitting a mark scheme, but there's something about that loop breaking down that word that helps make their writing better. And also, by breaking down a word, you're, you're, you're showing them that we break down words, that we can learn a lot from breaking down words and they can take that into maybe science, and again how long we got on this recording.

Mark:

But you know just how it's when the age is talking about words. So in science we could probably do a similar thing, maybe mathematics as well, absolutely, and you've got. You know, things like the dark ages and the renaissance, and these are all slightly more metaphorical. You can't break those. You can't literally break down those things and get an answer.

Mark:

So there's, you know, even through vocabulary, and I think we should, we should encourage our, so this is a good example of um, sort of word, word consciousness, this idea. Just there's a playfulness with language and as a simple way that schools can do it is just, you know what are two or three words in the week that are interesting for you as a, as a, as a, you know, geography teacher interest of you and your art lessons that are worth just playing around with. And you know, I think these these are really rich opportunities and I think a lot of disciplinary literacy doesn't have to be. You know you mentioned kind of space and time and I think we do need to encourage that. But let's be honest, is, yeah, competing with a million other demands, so trying to find ways that we can change that just a little tweak in a mindset.

Andy:

That means that it's those opportunities and our lessons, I think those are, those are, those are really important and I love asking that question, not what can I do for literacy, but what literacy can do for me. It's probably a bit of a cliche now, but I love it because you look at maths, you know algebra means the reunion of broken parts. I'm really confident that if someone had said that to me when I was learning algebra at school, it would have. It wouldn't have done any harm. At least it would have helped me to understand what algebra was about, rather than freaking me out about oh my god, letters and numbers. That doesn't work, that's mad.

Andy:

Fracture, fraction break, and I just think those things about how literature can serve your needs in the classroom. We know I mean science as it, as a linguist I studied this at uni science and the sciences and all of those things that you know. We're littered with Greek and Latin words because those civilizations were so much more advanced than we were that we borrowed, we've influxed all those words into our language, so and you can start to predict. You know biology, you know biosphere, all those word routes that start to just enrich and enliven the conversation within the discourse of your subject. And I think you're right. It's not about. I mean, I think it's ideal if you can create space for it, but actually, if you can just tweak the direction and it's, it's not.

Mark:

It's no more than spending 20 seconds googling what's the root word of such and such and then just giving you an interesting way in with a concept yeah, definitely, and it's such a tiny, a tiny little thing and I think this, this idea that I just come back to something else said there about it's, that it's convinced like it's not. It's not harmful to do this, so you might. There's an argument there that you know, the definitions are, some words are merely just interesting, right, but they're not going to take that much time. And in doing that little interesting part, then you're you're showing that we can pick words. So that's definitely not not harmful at all. And I think I guess where the where we might see the harm in anything like this is whenever you have an, an approach that takes time, you you're taking away from something else and I think that idea around literacy. So we've mentioned, for, like, literacy initiatives and I think you know I'm a countless literacy training ones where you people get asked who's a teacher of literacy and the other. Yeah, you know those those kind of things that we see as a cliche, but part of that thing is it's.

Mark:

I guess we've got to convince people, or at least show people that it's not this big extra thing and actually, yes, it is probably. You know, writing is going to fall to the English teacher a lot of the time. We're going to teach writing. That's really important. We're going to explicitly teach reading, maybe a bit more, but actually if you can spend a bit more time in your subject, then it's enhancing the subject and it's not this big initiative that's been passed out, and I think you know truthfully as well. Let's not pretend we're inventing something brand new here, because you know there are great teachers in all the subjects that are doing this already. So a lot of the time it will be shining a light on what's already going on in some of those schools where you know these things will be taken.

Mark:

You know I've seen maths teachers modelling literacy. You know as well as any English teacher.

Andy:

Yeah, and I think that's a really important point. You can very easily go into a school and say, do you know what discipline or literacy means? And no one puts their hand up. But then you go and walk around that school that day and there'll be some really, really fantastic teachers in every school where you see it happening. And even for those teachers who might not have put their hand up in the morning but we're doing it it's about maybe even for them, for the expert, getting them to make clear you know in their own heads what they're doing and why it's successful.

Andy:

My own journey as a teacher, I mean I know this isn't the bill and I know what my outcomes for the learners that I taught massively better once I cleared up my own thinking about the structure of an essay, what analysis really meant and how to. You know analysis meaning to loosen or to untie. You know you can tell structure. You know putting things together, that type of thing. When I tied it up these concepts myself not through a literacy initiative, but because I was interested in these aspects of my subject my teaching improved massively, at least I think it is certainly felt like it and I think you're right. It's. You know. It's not necessarily about the label then coming in and everyone doing what you tell them to do. It's more about an appreciation of the nuance of each subject and teachers in their own classrooms and their own minds celebrating the brilliance of what they do.

Mark:

Yeah, exactly, exactly, and not, you know, just trying to make it align and compliment what's going on. And you know, I do you know there's been enough initiatives that kind of don't do that. I think what was another one looking at recently like the Freya model.

Andy:

So that's yeah, I was hoping we touch on this. Let's make this our last thing because I was hoping this is the good thing to finish on. I love this question. I think this is a really good line of thinking of yours. Oh no pressure Off, we go.

Mark:

Well, I've probably stolen any any good ideas on this case, but so yeah, so I think the frame of the really good example of the kind of thing that is sort of good but can be, can become just quite restrictive and a bad example of the literacy initiative, if you like. So just for listeners who don't know the Freya model, I think originally you can see, by Dorothy Freya or I would never found the original original where it became a grid, but it's this idea of got word in the center. You've got boxes for definition, characteristics, examples and non examples, and that's the one that you'll see most often, the one I've seen I think it is certainly one of the guidance reports I can't remember which one and I've seen that used quite a lot and often used really really well, and I think that's fine. But if we restrict it just to those four boxes, then we're saying these are the four ways you must think about words, and no reason the Freya model exists is to get that idea about a deep, deep, meaningful process, in other words.

Mark:

And so if our goal is to understand the concept and to be able to use it, you know we need, we need that, and so we should ask really is it. You know, do we want those four things? You know, should we change them? And I think we definitely can in different subjects. So again, it's like, let's say, in history you put a history concept or a word in there. Is it really definition, characteristics, examples of non examples? Sometimes it doesn't make sense because if you put industrial revolution.

Mark:

Yeah, I mean, you can maybe put some examples, but it is what it is. So what you might do is you might do connotations or you might do things that it led to consequences, let's say and and things that led up to an. Every historical concept has got those things.

Andy:

And what's that like, even in English? You know you're looking at non examples. You can change the language there to characters not like this, texts not like this. You know you don't have to lift the Freya model as you've seen it in when you put Freya model into Google image and use that. The whole point, as you say, it's about exploring something from different angles, right?

Mark:

Exactly. And so and this is where there's a danger if we, if we really get excited about disciplinary literacy, which I think we should, there's a danger here. What's the big thing you can do, for your model fits into that or any kind of artifact or concrete thing you can do, and it's just about saying, okay, we'll take it this far. Now, you know. So it might be the you as a school decide that we're going to roll with that because we, we want to develop rich vocabulary and we want to have a consistent method and I think that's his arguments for all of those things in schools.

Mark:

But then what we then want to say is, as the subject specialist, how would you change that? What, what, what would make it better, what would make it stick better and what would give it more utility? So it's not just about knowing the word, it's being able to use that in a range of contexts. So, and again the so I think we could say that for an like we picked on the Freya model, because I think it's quite, because it feels like a lot of schools are using it. But you could pick anything and then just say, right, well, what does this look like? And that's obviously not just you know.

Mark:

you can get into all sorts of things like you know questioning and classroom routines and explanations they're all going to have a disciplinary lens as much as literacy will, and so I think it's a good mindset to go. What does it look like?

Andy:

There's a danger of same with schools. Is that danger of, because you're doing everything at such massive scale? There's that danger of productionism, isn't there? There's that danger that everything becomes overly simplified so we can say we've done it and that's not inherently an evil thing, it's just something to be mindful of, isn't it? It's something to be to be careful about when it comes to this type of thing. That's about us. That's 45 minutes. That's really. That's perfect timing. Thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate it, and I know that there'll be lots of people listening to this who will be thanking you for your ideas and your wisdom here, Mark. So thank you so much.

Mark:

Thanks Andy.

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Andy Sammons

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