Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning

4. Rethinking Literacy: In Conversation with Haili Hughes

• Bedrock Learning • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Ever wondered why literacy isn't just an English teacher's job? Well, we found the perfect guest to answer that - Haili Hughes.

A true educational powerhouse, Haili has extensive experience in education, from teaching English for 16 years to now being a Director of Education at Iris Connect, a prolific author of many educational books, and a Mentor Lead at Sunderland university, overseeing the mentoring of thousands of teachers.

In this episode, we discuss the significance of disciplinary literacy and what it means for schools, as well as the nuance and significance of other types of literacy and higher level thinking around curriculum planning that schools could consider in the future.

We also grapple with the undervalued and often neglected topic of grammar in education. Sharing from our personal encounters with grammatical training, or the lack thereof, we underscore its significance across various disciplines. We advocate for the amplification of student voices across disciplines through effective grammar teaching and discuss the importance of early adopters in championing this cause.

The conversation doesn't stop there, though. We also address the significance of literacy research in the teaching profession. From bridging the gap between theory and practice to the role of knowledge organizers, we touch on all aspects critical to effective teaching.

As our engaging talk with Haili comes to a close, we enthusiastically anticipate her new book and promise to keep you updated about its launch. This episode is packed with insights that promise to redefine your understanding of literacy in education.

Come, let's rethink literacy!

Follow Haili on X: @HughesHaili
Check out Haili's blogs, books and other projects here.
Follow IRIS Connect on X: @IRIS_Connect

Andy:

Hi everyone. Thank you for listening to the Literacy Works podcast with Bedrock Learning. I'm Andy Sammons, I'm the Deputy Head of Teaching and Learning at Bedrock and today we have can't be described in any other word than a powerhouse in education at the moment Haili Hughes, who's kindly agreed to join us today. So, if for anything else, thank you for coming on. It's amazing what a name to have got on our podcast. Thank you very much for coming on, Haili. Yeah, so first of all, there won't be many that don't, but just for those who don't, or there's anyone out there who's been living under the rock for the last year or so. What do you do? What's your role now? Because obviously you've been a teacher in your career but what's current for you at the moment?

Haili:

Well, I just have to say what a flaming introduction. First of all, I think I'm going to insist that my children and husband call me a powerhouse from now on in the instead of my love?

Andy:

Absolutely, don't they already?

Haili:

Yeah, well, not quite. So yes, thank you for having me, Andy, I'm really thrilled to be here. So yeah, I was a teacher for 16 years, an English teacher like yourself. I think that's how we probably first met.

Andy:

I teach me. I think it was yes. I think it probably was Early days.

Haili:

Yes, so I did that for 16 years, loved it, absolutely loved it, and then just basically moved sort of quite naturally really into teacher development and mentoring. And yes, so now I work at the University of Sunderland. I've been there for just over two years so I'm the teacher development mentor lead there. I'm a principal lecturer. As a non-academic I had no idea what that meant a principal lecturer, but it means kind of sort of between a senior lecturer and a professor, so sort of in the middle there I have kind of a whole SLT university essentially. So I look after about 1200 mentors from all over the world who have trainees at Sunderland. And in addition to that I'm very proud to be director of education at a company called Iris Connect, which I'm sure many of your listeners will be familiar with because we work with about 4000 schools in the UK and we are a video based professional development platform for teachers. We do lots of coaching, sort of researching to practice, and are just all about helping teachers get better.

Andy:

Yeah, when I think one of my early schools used Iris and the big word that was used there in the early days was transparency. It's all about let's not put people in a fishbowl. Let's actually just share what's good and let's share development let's have it in open mind. That's the key, I think, really. And you've also done lots of really interesting stuff about kind of higher level, reaching the higher levels, haven't you? With people, with literature? You've also got the YouTube channel, haven't you? Is that something that you've been working on?

Haili:

Yeah, so I'm clinging on desperately to still be an English teacher Me too. Yeah, through writing books, delivering workshops in school, usually with I hate the phrase more able pupils, although I use academic theory with every set, every year group. So, yeah, I'm still clinging on to that. I run a YouTube channel called GCSE Literature Boost, a Twitter page where I essentially read academic research on literature papers and I distill it into really kind of bite sized chunks for very busy English teachers. So use with their students. I've got a book coming out about it very soon on a Christmas Carol.

Andy:

Amazing. I mean, that's always the one I lean on when I talk in these things about English teaching. I just think that's such a beautiful text and we will get onto that a bit later. So yeah, the podcast is primarily, obviously it's called Literacy Works and I want to kind of look at literacy through your lens really. So you work with mentors and subject trainers and things like that. Where does that sit at the moment in terms of? I like to think as a sector, we've moved away from literacy just being no one's problem. Really, someone gets given a TLR and off your pop, no one's interested. I like to think we're moving away from that. But what does that look like for teacher training at the minute? What does that look like for colleagues coming into the profession? Do you think? Is it good? Do we need to work on more? What do you think?

Haili:

I mean, I think we're always, by its nature of the beast, going to have to always get better at literacy. To be honest, I think we're a lot further along than I certainly was when I was training to be an English teacher all those years ago. And I think you're quite right. The really great organisations like the National Literacy Trust, brilliant teachers and researchers like Alex Quigley, I think, have kind of pushed the envelope now, so that literacy is everybody's problem, it's not just an English teacher, because you know as well as I do that 10, 15 years ago literacy was the sole domain of the English department, school-wide.

Haili:

So if there was ever any CPD or anything and let's face it, there was very rarely any CPD on literacy. It was the English department's job, that was it. And I think with the advent of that term disciplinary literacy we now see other departments taking ownership of that. And you know, a big part of that for me is like increasing that academic reading in every single subject as well. And looking at sort of the key vocabulary, I think it was actually Alex Quigley who followed a student round. I remember him writing a blog about this.

Haili:

Yes, I remember this Followed a student round and noticed, like all the domain, specific vocabulary that the student was able to kind of get to grips with. But then when they left that room of that lesson it was almost like that was the end of that, that kind of vocabulary.

Haili:

Yeah they weren't able to kind of take it to the next lesson. And, really interesting, I was working with a group of ECTs last week and I had a science ECT in there and an English ECT, and the science ECT was saying that they have eight mark questions in their exam, which for them is quite a big piece of writing. I did laugh and say you know, ours is 40. But there you go. But the point of this is that she was kind of saying, and she actually realised that her students are doing nothing but moaning about having to write that eight mark question, and one of the students said well, this is science, not English. So she actually took it upon herself to go into the English lesson and watch this same class and see how that teacher was able to draw, really you know, long advanced developed writing out of that student. So she was then able to go into science and say I've seen you do it in English and I know you can do it.

Haili:

So I think in terms of teach training to kind of answer the question really I think more probably needs to be done. There is a lot more focus on literacy than there's ever been, I would say, in teach training, and I can only speak for my own setting in HE, because in skits obviously it's quite different again, but there they can always stand to be more for sure, and I think it's about practical strategies. Like we all know that literacy needs to get better, but actually how do we do that in a subject specific way? That's the thing, because I feel like some of the frameworks are very generic and we need that subject specific import. That's so important.

Andy:

Yeah, and I think that that's what the next thing I was going to start to pull on really is around those specific. What does that look like on a specific subject, specific level? What does that actually look like in a classroom? I spoke to Mark Miller about this in terms of operationalising it, and I've been reading quite a lot of the writing revolution recently and that's a fantastic book about, and one thing it really kind of promotes is the idea that grammar and grammar instruction Needs to be underpinned by really solid knowledge as well, and you can't have one without the other. So that's why, yeah, capital letters and full stops, that's important everywhere, but actually it needs to move beyond that. So do you think that's a specific part of Of teacher training? You know, is that something specific or what?

Haili:

No Is the short answer, and he should be, and I'll tell you why. I think I Train to teach and did an English degree. I did a literature degree, like most English teachers, to be honest. Yeah, almost every department I've ever worked in all visited has been majoratively literature specialist.

Andy:

I did, I did. I've got an interesting anecdote on that. When you, when you I let you finish, but I've got an interesting anecdote.

Haili:

No, you tell me yours first, because I think it'll lead into it.

Andy:

Well, I say it's interesting. No pressure now anyway, but so basically I it wasn't until sort of my fifth or sixth year of teaching that I really understood the importance of, in a literature essay, of that very specific language around powerful introductory statements. So you know, x writing in this area uses this text as a vehicle to, to verb the adjective, to expose the toxic, whatever it is. I think it's really important you know that kind of language. Then you've got topic sentences, if linking sentences, evaluative sentences, conclusions that open up with an evaluative statement and finish with a con, with a conclusion in some ways, x Ultimately, why?

Andy:

and I think those very subject specific ways of thinking, being and doing are so important to answer question about what it means to be human, the exploration of the human soul, which is ultimately what English teachers trying to respond to and I had to jump on that when you said they're about. It's not part of things because actually it wasn't for me.

Haili:

Similar. I had zero grammar training like at all. I did my GCSEs in the late 90s in a period where you know that really wasn't, to be honest, part of the Sort of syllabus at all. It was very literature heavy when I did my my GCSEs and then I then did English literature, a level English literature degree. It was a split degree with media as well, because I wanted to be a journalist and I did go on to do that for a few years and and grammar just wasn't part of my kind of training at all. And then I did a PGCE and you know we were watching videos like Phil Beadle was making on teachers TV about creativity and you know Poetry and stuff which was brilliant at the time. And then I sort of went into schools and it really wasn't a big part of the spec that.

Haili:

I was teaching either, but I would say in 2015, when that step was made for the new reforms for GCSE and they were much more focused on kind of the nuts and bolts of grammar and I started getting obviously the key stage two changes as well and I started to get kids through and I'll never forget it. He's actually quite a famous rugby player now, jack Simfield. God love him. Son of Kevin field legends.

Andy:

We watch him at. We watch him at heading Lee, yeah, yeah there you go.

Haili:

Yeah, so I taught Jack, I did. Yeah, I taught loads of rugby players saddle with these like a hive of famous Rumi players, it's amazing they grow and big on these more.

Haili:

That's what it is. So. So, yeah, I was teaching Jackson field incredibly intelligent boy, absolutely amazing, yeah, so sporty and clever. And I remember him saying to me about this sentence misses that the predica? And I was like, and because I was very much as a teacher, always of the school of if you don't know, be honest and let's learn together. So I said I'm not sure, jack, what's the predica? So we had to explain it to me and that was then that I had like a bit of a slap in the face, to be honest, and was a bit like oh my god, my kids know more than me about grammar. So I've got to go away and do this. And I think there are people fighting this good fight. If you think of the sort of Brilliant book that's come out of Jenny Webbs and Marcello G of an Ellis about grammar teaching. It's so technical. I remember trying to start reading it once on a train at 11 pm Coming back from London and I had to put it down because I was just like all my head hurts.

Haili:

But it's so technical but so brilliant and it makes so much sense. And I, you know, there's this dichotomy on Twitter of like, oh, if you teach grammar, you're against creativity. No guys, come on. You know I'm the most creative person going, you know, but at the end of the day, we need that knowledge as a foundation for creativity. So I think more needs to be done. I think you know, in that subject specific way especially, and that's why we need really great Literacy leads from across the full spectrum of subjects, and I was really lucky in my old school that we had a really amazing literacy champion in science Called Emma Tiffany, and she basically used to do reciprocal reading. She led whole school CPD on it and it was great to see a science teacher up there and we had mathematicians doing the same, because you always get from math teachers. Oh well, you know it doesn't work in our subject, but it's about finding those early adopters in schools who were able to champion it.

Andy:

And I think one of the things that I found and again I'm it's an obvious thing because I'm an English teacher but I think what I found when I started to teach pupils how to have that voice and to find that voice From a literature essay, it what, as you you alluded before, you teach literary theory not just to top-end pupils, you'll teach it to the full spectrum. I think what you're doing and I said this when I spoke to a school the other week it's about giving pupils a voice in your discipline. You know, kind of ingratiating them into the gang and they might only do it until year 9, then drop it and that's, that's fine, it's, but it's about giving them as many different flavors, as many different opportunities and exposures and ways of being, because you know it's been I was chatting to a teacher it's been 20 odd years since I stood in Richmond market square and Interviewed people about the co-op, on how that changed their shopping habits for a geographer.

Andy:

I haven't done that for 20 odd years and actually job. We teachers have those experiences laid on top of being to university, I think like a geographer. But let's give as many pupils as much as possible the chance to be part of that gang. And I think you're right. It's about finding those earlier, earlier doctors. It's about finding those people who are gonna say, yeah, this isn't just about, oh, I'm gonna walk around the science department and highlight people's lack of full stops. It's about no, no, how can I in my subject, help young people to speak and thinking like a scientist, even a maths teacher, for example, who might be thinking it's not relevant for me?

Andy:

What about those really long-winded questions? You know, you know, abra has six dogs, tiffany has 12, how many months are there in a year and days are there in the 12th month, or whatever it is? That's literacy as well. That being able to tackle those things is really important, isn't it? Are you saying that you think there should be more, almost by almost edicts? You know, forcefully, interteacher training. There needs to be something on. If not, then something very close to disciplinary literacy.

Haili:

Yeah, I think so and I think there is in every single course you will find, because we I think in ITT now we are all kind of led and guided by the Learn how To statements in the core content framework and we're inspected on that by Ofsted. So if there was no literacy in ITT courses, quite frankly would be sort of in a category. So we are doing it. But I think also that then needs to carry on in that golden thread into the first two years of teaching as well as an ECT. So that's on the schools as well.

Andy:

I think that's really important. What does that look like in a university setting for teacher training when it says how to statements? What does that look like? What does that feel like? So?

Haili:

for example, in this core content framework it's the same as the early career framework. The only thing that's different is the Learn how To statements, because it's based on this kind of step up. So, you know, as an ECT you'll be expected to be doing things yourself, rather than relying on that modelling and deconstruction that you get in the core content framework as a trainee. So, for example, it might say you know, learn how to. You know, improve students literacy by focusing on reading or decoding texts or something like that. So I mean, that's not the specific Learn how To, but it takes that kind of approach. So as a university, it's then up towards, or as a teacher training provider, it's then up towards to actually integrate that into our curriculum. So how do we help teachers be able to do that? So it's almost working backwards like you would from a schema work, you know from a GCSE spec.

Andy:

Yeah, I mean, and I think this, I think we're really getting to the heart of it now in terms of what that looks like, what that starts to look like for teachers who are experiencing coming into the profession for the first time. I think that's really important, and you know. The other thing I was to ask really, was we touched on our pre kind of pre-pod conversation around research literacy? Just can you just unpack for us what that is and what that looks like for the sector as well?

Haili:

Yeah, so I think there's a couple of things to kind of focus on here. I think you know, when I train to teach, I don't really feel like I was a research literate teacher at all. I just kind of was sent on my way and teaching for me was seen as like a very practical subject.

Andy:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Haili:

Yeah, don't get me wrong. Like you know, in my PGCE I have the same diet as anybody else a bit of Piaget with a bit of I got ski and a bit of Bruna and a bit of Skinner and behaviorism. We did all of that but we weren't really encouraged to bridge that kind of knowing doing gap, as Daisy Christon DeLew talks about.

Andy:

I like that yeah.

Haili:

Yeah, and that was what it was. You know, you learn a little bit about it at uni and then you went off to do your placement and you kind of forgot about it. I never once remember thinking, oh yeah, this links with Skinner's work on behaviorism. You know, I just didn't do that. And then I reckon for probably the first 10 years of my career, to be completely honest, I was too busy, immersed in kind of the life and the cognitively demanding environment of being a teacher, especially one in a special measures school, which is where I was to think really about being research engaged or research led.

Haili:

I mean, of course we can never be a wholly research based profession because it's not medicine, we're not. You know, sometimes people like and teaching to medicine and I get why they do that, but it's absolutely not the same. You know, I can give my daughter Calpol and know that it will bring her fever down. I can use a strategy with my year nine class on a Monday and think of cracked it and then on a Friday it falls flat on its face. So you know, teaching can never be that, but we can be research led best bets, as Dylan William calls it.

Haili:

So I think in you know, I think I started getting research engaged and this will be unpopular with some people, but because of research ed.

Haili:

So I started to go to research at national conferences in about 2015.

Haili:

And you know, loved and relished the idea of sitting in teachers CPD sessions who were talking about stuff that they were doing in their own schools and classrooms that were really working, that were based on research, and they were bridging that gap for me. And then I started to read more research myself. I did a masters in psychology and was given access to a university library, because I think that's one of the big problems as well Teachers don't have access to academic journals, they're all behind paywalls and I started to get more engaged myself. I think we're in danger now because I think since COVID, the pendulum swung to the other way, where I think there's so much academic research now that it's like a smorgasbord, it's like an all you can eat buffet and personally, if I see an all you can eat buffet, I see it as a challenge and I think I think that's what teachers are doing at the moment they're probably consuming research at a hugely crazy rate and actually not implementing much in a really, you know, with fidelity.

Andy:

Basically, yeah, I was chatting to a really good friend yesterday who and I was asking him how about his role, and he was saying well, one of my things is knowledge organizers and I said you know that that's a really interesting topic, isn't it? Because it seems so, it seems so simple, but actually in some ways they can do more harm than good. I think I know that might be controversial to some people, but I think you can. It doesn't anyone can Google Macbeth. Knowledge organizer PDF.

Haili:

Yes, you're not you know you're not.

Andy:

I just think it's so important to be able to sit down yourself or sit down with a colleague and think, no, what's the really powerful basic knowledge, what's the really powerful underpinning, theoretical knowledge and I don't know what we're using it for.

Haili:

What are we using it for? You know?

Andy:

go home and quiz on it. Well, how do they quiz? Go home and test, you know, look, say they don't, they don't do it, they don't. You need to be really explicit about it. And I mean, obviously, for those who people listen to the pod regularly. This isn't a, this isn't a product pitch, this podcast, but one thing we use.

Andy:

I've been interested to hear your thoughts on this. I'm asking Hylia for the first time and she's never not told I'm going to ask this. We have something called Bedrock Mapper which is basically a repository of over 33,000 pieces of subject terminology and knowledge across 30 different is mad. And what you can basically do is you can select your words and then pupils are pre tested on it. Then they'll give a pupil friendly definition, comprehension, student and mental exercises, image. It's all research. You know the underpin by the research of Mizzano, vocabulary teaching, and what teachers do is they can on their own or with colleagues, they can sit down and they can sequence the vocabulary that they think is important as a pre teacher, as a co teacher, as a revision exercise, and I think that's really important to have that knowledge that pupils can have made available to them at a time when the when the teacher chooses.

Haili:

Yeah.

Andy:

And I would rather have that than I would a quizzing platform, for example, that pupils you know go and do. Because actually I think there's no guarantee that if you, if you buy a quizzing platform in and you quiz on save one of Christmas Carol, who's to say that that's going to be the same knowledge as the knowledge that you're going to teach them on save one yes, safe ones. You know, I think if you, but if you were to say misanthropic, callous mouth use in, if you agree on those five to 10 terms, you're limiting the work for the pupils, you're limiting the work for yourselves because you know you're managing that. What are your thoughts on that as a concept? What do you think?

Haili:

Yeah, I mean I think that's a really good idea because I mean the whole kind of point is and it goes back to that idea almost about like lethal mutations in a way of research, absolutely, and I think we're really guilty of that in schools at the moment, and knowledge organizers are one of the things that I would put under things that have probably become lethal mutations, I mean. So having that kind of tool would be really, really useful. I mean, on knowledge organizers, I mean I was a member of an English department at that time and I'd stepped down from being a middle and senior leader and was working with the head of English at the time who, to be honest, wasn't very effective, in all honesty, and then she knew she wasn't, so she ended up stepping down herself anyway. And you know, we were all told, right, we all need knowledge organizers for every single scheme of work. So we all went off and downloaded them off tests and you know, and we're the things that were in that knowledge organizer map to our curriculums, probably not because we were all told we needed them.

Haili:

Today and again, what did we do with those knowledge organizers? Not much, to be honest. They were superficial quizzing, homework set so that we could be seen to be doing something with them. They were stuck on, you know, the front cover of the inside front cover of their exercise books to tick a box, you know, and it's not great. And dual coding, I would say, is another one of those. You know, my goodness, me, powerpoints are dual coded to within an inch of the life now, so much that actually the whole point of them being invented was that split attention effect and they're actually causing cognitive overload. There's that much of many of them now. So, yeah, I mean I think research literacy is a is a massive, massive issue.

Andy:

Yeah, and I think exactly, and there's almost a place in schools maybe for the teaching and learning lead, literacy, leads SLT to kind of take, take point on that almost yes To think. Would you know what? What are we? How are we going to make sense of this for our school community? What does this look like for our young people? What does it look like for our teachers? What does it look like for our, you know, for our parents? And so there is a big piece around that isn't there around around education, research, which sort of leads me on to another really interesting thing you started speaking about before, which was about I think you've got a new book coming on this about around complex academic theory you mentioned. So what, what? How does that tie into this? Let's not be ashamed of this. Let's stay in English. Let's talk about Christmas Carol. Tell me about that for your subject, rather than just you know how to write essays. What's going to be special, what's different about your book and why have you chosen to write it?

Haili:

Yeah, so I mean it comes from really the facts that I think, as I've examined GCSE literature for a number of years for a QA and it comes down to what I would see as a as a worrying trend of literature responses that are written like an English language response, where it is literally focusing on only language. So you know, over quoting, constant over quoting. I know this because it says the word X could mean this.

Haili:

It could also mean this I mean it's so mechanical and I was never taught literature like that. For me, literature is about concepts, it's about big ideas, it's about, you know, authorial intent, about context and how that shapes our understanding about themes, about golden threads, about patterns, about character development If language is part of that great book, but if it's not, then I've seen some great nine responses which have got like no quotations or maybe two or three words in the whole thing, and this is where that came from. So a few years ago I was teaching an incredible top set of students so we're talking probably six or seven years ago now, and it was just at the change of the new spec and all of my school were doing Jekyll and Hyde and Macbeth and I decided I'd taught this class for two years prior to this and knew them really well. It's such a gift when you get a class for like four years and I knew this class really well.

Haili:

They were fiercely political. So I decided that I was going to take a risk and I was going to do Julius Caesar with them. I'd never taught it before. So it was great for me because I could go away and actually, you know, inject my subject knowledge, do loads of reading, and it's a time when Donald Trump had been elected and things as well, brexit had just happened. So it was really political, engaging time, loads of links with Julius Caesar.

Haili:

So I did that and I decided to take a massive risk and do great expectations because everybody else was doing a book that was like that big and I was doing a book that was like that big. So I made them read it over the summer and basically provided like weekly quizzes over the summer to make sure that they were reading it and all the parents were completely on board because they all wanted them to get like grade nines. So it came from that, really, and having to kind of read a lot of journals myself to get up to speed with sort of what the you know what the knowledge was in these texts, what the big ideas, what the themes were, and I thought, why am I not sharing some of this with my kids? Why am I limiting them? Why?

Haili:

am I capping them, Because for me, you know, critical theory brings literature to life, and that's not to say that we, what we should be seeing in literature responses is now from a Freudian perspective, from a feminist. That's not what I'm doing. I use these academic theories basically as a springboard to ideas so they can refute them. They can read something and go oh, that's a load of rubbish. And what I'm doing then, essentially, is what you know Robin Williams talks about in Dead Poets Society and Walt Whitman says I'm encouraging my kids to have a voice, you know, to yelp their voices over the rooftops, to contribute to life story, to have an opinion, and that's what it's all about for me, and also what's the harm as well in them having access to really well written academic criticism, to be able to emulate some of that style themselves and really sound like an English scholar.

Andy:

I think those things as well. What they do is they open up for teachers and colleagues their own understanding as well of a text. It opens up your own way of thinking, your own plan. You might not even mention an academic's name, but it's just giving you an alternative perspective on a text and things, and I think it's really important. And that again it kind of links back to your idea on research literacy and I just wonder whether this over languageification, if you like, of the literature exam has come from this.

Andy:

You know this fear of exam results, this fear of how you can hit. You know this is what happens, isn't it, when you get this regular sort of. You know everything is accessible in an introvert's life and there's a place for accountability, of course there is. But if you someone said somewhere, if you say the word X means then you're toning in on language. Some markers might reward it, I suppose. I don't know. But then we need to come away from that, don't we? We need to move towards giving the pupils a voice. But, as you say, it's a brave person to tell pupils they don't need to have quotes in their essays. It's a brave person that.

Haili:

It is, it is yeah. And I mean like that. I'm absolutely not saying to students oh yeah, don't use quotes. You know, don't shoot me, but what I am saying is that we shouldn't be overly reliant on quotations all the time in literature and what I'm saying is as well that actually it's, I think, the reason all of this kind of over language for language, for cacation, if that is even a word. Yeah.

Haili:

I mean trademark is, I think, because a lot of teachers there wasn't much, you know kind of notice about what the spec would be. I mean, I remember waiting for it for ages and it coming out the last minute?

Haili:

Yeah it was, yeah, and we haven't had like really high quality training on it and I think people have kind of just done their own thing and maybe panicked a little bit. And you know, some of the best responses I've seen have only had like a couple of, for example, tracked Scrooge's character across the text by looking at sort of particular words he's used. That Dickens is used to describe his movements or his mannerisms or his thoughts, and they only need to be tiny words, you know, and I think it's that focus on. Actually, we don't need to flood an answer with quotations. Let's pick the best, most juiciest ones.

Andy:

But it's really hard, isn't it? With pupils? And I've had this before with all manner of pupils, all manners of prior attainment, and some of them say, you know the famous I've got? How many quotes do I need? Yes, and all of it's. All of it's rooted in fear of what do I need? You know, that sort of performativity versus actually let's get that, get that. Let's think about deep understanding and deep, deep sort of for one of the better words spiritual engagement with the text. I think it's really important to kind of think about literature in those terms, and this is what I mean when I talk about discipline and literacy. You know, grating pupils into that club. I think we have to engage people into that club. I think that's so important. And look, when's the book coming out?

Haili:

Well spring. So it's currently in with Routledge. I'm just waiting for the cover options to come along. It's gone to the editors now and it's going to be part of a series, so it's the first in a series. So the next one is on an inspector calls.

Andy:

Oh, my goodness, Amazing. I mean, I don't teach anymore at the moment anyway, but I will definitely be buying that.

Haili:

Thank you.

Andy:

Thank you so much for your time today. It's been so lovely. I know that this is going to be a heavily downloaded podcast. I know that people want to hear from you, so thank you so much for your time. I think there's some really important threads here around. You know, operationalising how we can get this stuff into into schools, into classrooms, so that students and young people can find their voice, because this is something I've discovered recently. I think it's so important for the time that a pupil studies a subject. I mean, for example, I hated DT at school and I dare say. I dare say that I wasn't particularly engaged and wasn't a particularly great student to teach. But I wish that I had, and I wish that my teacher perhaps engage with me a bit more to try and get me thinking like a, like a designer, technology professional.

Andy:

You know, to that level. I wish that I'd had that relationship and I think as much as possible. If people's not going to take your subject beyond a certain point, that's fine. It's not the point. The point is is to give them as much exposure to as wide a different amount of disciplines as possible, and that's where I think this literacy has got to offer us, and I think I think your new book and what you're, the work you're doing and the way you speak about things is helping that along the way. So thank you On behalf of everyone, thank you very much and it's been a real pleasure speaking to you today, and thank you so much.

Haili:

We'll be in touch Sunday about the launch.

Andy:

All right, take care.

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Andy Sammons

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