Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning
Welcome to Bedrock Talks, a podcast from the team at Bedrock Learning that delves deep into the heart of literacy in education. Hosted by the insightful and experienced educator Andy Sammons, this podcast stands as a beacon for anyone passionate about enhancing literacy skills and understanding its pivotal role in education.
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Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning
21. Implementing a disciplinary literacy solution in secondary school with Katie Chanter
Katie Chanter is a literacy leader for a large secondary comprehensive school, and has extensive experience of teaching English- including language development in early years. She has successfully implemented Bedrock, both tier 2 and 3 vocabulary, in her school.
In this podcast, she discusses her gradual approach to a successful implementation, and how she has successfully navigated the territory of gathering and sustaining momentum for tier 3 vocabulary as a whole-school disciplinary literacy tool.
Hi everyone, welcome to Bedrock Talks, our podcast, which again continues to improve and gain listeners, which is great. Something we've not really had much this year is kind of true Bedrock champions, people who kind of are really implementing it and have launched it and implemented successfully in their settings, and so I've been keeping my ear to the ground, trying to out for people who, who, who have got experience of doing this in schools. Um, and we're really lucky to have katie chanter today, um, who is a, who is third in command and, uh, reading champion at her school, um, and I I was initially um set up to meet with the school to kind of talk about their implementation and and and plans for next year, and I came across katie thing, and, and I just at the end of the meeting I said, by the way, can you come on my podcast please? And then here we are. So thank you so much for coming on she's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Um so, um, initially, what I really want to do is kind of tease out um what you know, you, you are, you are responsible for literacy in the school and you've got wider responsibility for that. How do you see that successfully in a, in in a secondary school at the moment? What, what place does that have you think?
Speaker 2:um, well, I mean, it's been. It's been an interesting journey with coming into literacy in um in a secondary school environment. Um, and our school's focus has been disciplinary literacy over the years, so it's been part of our walkthroughs and part of the whole school development plans because we understand the need of improving vocabulary and literacy skills across the whole school. So ultimately we had the opportunity to introduce Bedrock to the school and it's worked alongside our deliberately vocabulary development to ensure the students are building a wide range of vocabulary and that it can be used as part of the current curriculum content. So we've had departments building that within their schemes of work already and then the Bedrock side of it has come in to support that. So we're trying to. It's actually been like really um influential in seeing the range of vocabulary that we already had in place and being able to access other areas that we might have missed, and so we can make it far more comprehensive and one thing I was struck by when we first spoke was that you're obviously not head of english.
Speaker 1:You're you're third in charge of english, and obviously not at the moment on slt. And yet literacy is a really big deal at your place and you've obviously you're obviously a big voice in the school to be able to be delivering bedrock and lots of these things, and they're you're obviously highly regarded. So how, how have you managed to forge that kind of role for yourself in the school?
Speaker 2:I think the advantage that I've had is that I'm actually a primary trained teacher that moved across to secondary school, so prior to where I am now, I was working in a middle school environment, so I had the experience of teaching year five and year six and seeing what came prior what came prior, so it was a lot easier.
Speaker 2:I think when I, when I took on the role as key stage three um, it the focus was um third in command. It was focusing on key stage three in that transition. So I think because of my knowledge of sats, bringing that in um and then looking at how that we then build upon that to transition into those gc curriculums, I think I was able to have that bigger vision. So people trusted my prior knowledge of phonics, my prior knowledge of vocabulary development, how that weaves into teaching reading and writing, because secondary English curriculums, as you know, don't have so much focus on the teaching of reading and writing as they do on the content delivery and the analysis side. So you have a lot of students that come through with those gaps and people aren't always skilled at how we can best fill those gaps for those students so.
Speaker 1:So your vision was very much your vision for the role was was actually quite intertwined with with your experience of earlier years. That's really interesting and I suppose that really did give you that authentic voice in the space of running a key stage three curriculum. That's really interesting. And and so when it do you see, how does that link to your vision of literacy overall? You know, if someone was to say to you you know, you, you are a key voice of literacy in your school, um, and you've talked about disciplinary literacy, but how would you describe your vision for what literacy is in your school? You know someone says to you how do you go about doing your role? You know what makes you different from a literacy literacy coordinator in a school somewhere else. What is it that you do that's distinct? I'm really because something about your setting something.
Speaker 2:I'm really trying to push that triangulation between reading, writing and oracy and I think the oracy side gets dropped an awful lot and that's because people don't know how to structure conversations, how to teach students how to structure conversations and then when we are so, we can do a think, pair, share activity, but unless you've got a sentence stem that tells them exactly how to structure, asking questions of the person they're having that conversation with and the key vocabulary words that they need to include to model back those responses, um then I don't think it's always going to be successful because it can't then translate into the writing.
Speaker 2:So unless you have that triangulation of the reading, the writing and the oracy skill set, I don't. I mean that's. My ultimate vision is that we have a very clear strategy that shows, you know, that is, developing vocabulary, rehearsing that in conversation, creating that verbal dialogues which then feed into our writing so that they, it all happens a little bit more organically. Because I think that when we're teaching vocabulary we tend to do it a lot in isolation and that context of vocabulary is so important in understanding how words can be used, the nuances, the subtleties, and that's where the real power in vocabulary and how we provide written responses by GCSE level comes into play, and there's so many contextual factors to that. That only happens with conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it's interesting that, um, for example, you know, my very own distinct kind of example is the idea of the word misanthropic in christmas carol. That's a tier two word. It's a sort of word that you might hear on the news, for example, potentially, but actually in the context of a christmas carol it becomes almost like a tier three piece, because there's something deeply symbolic going on with that character that isn't just about in being miserable. And just as when I do my cpt sessions, I often I often push myself to pull up a top tier answer from a subject that isn't english and I try and say, look, you know geography teachers, history teachers, tell me if I'm, but this is what I'm hearing from this response. That makes it fantastic and I try and have the conversation live and I think.
Speaker 1:And so the next thing I want to really ask you about was when it comes to your current implementation and that almost that triumvirate there of reading, writing and oracy, reading, writing and oracy how does where does that stand in relation to bedrock? You know what's bedrock done for you, or at least you know there might be teachers at your school thinking hang on a minute, I don't click on bedrock every lesson. Look at that. I know that I get that completely, but at least from behind the scenes or whatever it is, how has that supported that thinking?
Speaker 2:I think what we've done really well with our implementation is that we didn't go too hard, too quickly, and it's a process that's going to take time, because you're trying to change your mindset that literacy is part of everybody's curriculum and we all know that and all teachers know that because they're always teaching vocabulary. But I do think there's still that barrier that literacy is always attached to English rather than it actually being a skill set on its own. And so we started off with trying to make sure that the departments that were implementing Bedrock to start off with were behind that ethos, so that they can then be champions for that for the rest of the school, because other departments can then follow suit and say I can see how effective this is, I can see that there is a power behind this. So I mean, we started off, uh, with english, obviously because it's part of my you know, it's my department, um, and we started off with library lessons became bedrock lessons. Um, we have half an hour a week for years seven to nine in the library where they have access to the vocabulary in the grammar.
Speaker 2:Um, and that was their, you know that time to do that so that every student, whether they had access to technology at home was getting that opportunity in school to access uh, bedrock, um. And we also made um because the MAPA side of it is what we've been rolling out for the whole school. We've kept the uh vocabulary in the grammar just within English, just so that we could manage that and monitor that and it's become part of our homework policy. Um, and then we started just with some small departments, since uh, not small departments, but not the whole school. So modern foreign languages, science and humanities were the departments that we started off with. Um for.
Speaker 2:MAPA um. So they started to build their curriculums and started to set vocabulary as homework.
Speaker 1:And what message? Because obviously this is difficult. What message did you give to those departments? You know you maybe stood in front of them, sent them an email to stop them thinking oh, another thing, what was it that you articulated about MAPPA that made that work? And be honest, honest, you don't have to kind of give a polished version mostly um.
Speaker 2:I was just super enthusiastic about the fact that. If, though, there's going to be work at the beginning, long term it will take the pressure off of the vocabulary teaching within curriculum time. Um, because you have got these resources there that are going to teach you that vocabulary. All you need to then do is start building in follow-up activities into, like your starters. So the work's been done at home. You're now using your show me boards to say you know, okay, right, can everybody write three synonyms of um, ambition, for example, for english um, so that we can start to feed in as starter activities? Um, yeah, so it's trying to see that it's actually it feeds in and it can be part of it, but there would be work at beginning to do that. But what they did start seeing is like oh, this is taking me, like you know, an hour or so to set up my curriculum. Yeah, but that's all I've had to do for the term, and then I just need to set my assignments on teams for homework, and it does itself. You've just got to check and monitor that. So it's more about oh.
Speaker 2:I think we've been working more on how do we monitor it? How do we ensure there's the engagement. How can we promote students being engaged where they're not engaged? Because you don't always, you're never going to hit 100%, 100% of the time. And also we started to see patterns and waves of where there were where lots of teachers were really pushing it, and then we can see the engagement goes up and then we've got busy bits in time where everything's got a little bit full on and then it dips again and then we can see that there's been another boost and it's come back up again where there's been an assembly where we've repromoted it, or we've clarified how it should be used for homework or we've tweaked it up to make it more accessible for students.
Speaker 1:So it's, it's a process. Yeah, you can't get away from all those little bits you've just said there. And I often say to my team when I'm training them, when I'm talking to them about how, how we speak to schools, it's listening for those cues, like you've just said there, about the assemblies dropping it into, pushing it in lessons, and it's having that voice, that kind of controls that controls the direction of travel, and I think that's really important implementers need to need to remember, isn't? It's those not only the small steps, but then it's you know, you look at the eef implementation advice around sustaining and the other thing that we talk about the eef. Then now I mentioned that because they talk now about the importance of implementation being a social process, and I think what you did there was articulated to teachers, the fact that actually I mentioned that because they talk now about the importance of implementation being a social process, and I think what you did there was articulated to teachers, the fact that actually, yeah, there's some thinking to be done upfront, but A that thinking is really important.
Speaker 1:About the 10, 20 most important words to unlock understanding in that subject, the space to have that thinking time, but then articulating just the pragmatic. Pragmatic, you're going to have to do less work. And I never forget it was um, uh, I think it was our own, our founder who spoke to a school about this and said but you've literally just got to plug your words in the knowledge out. The deep learning algorithm drives itself the to pop. The knowledge organizers populate themselves and now you can put it on the board as well.
Speaker 2:You've moved on to. What I was going to say was the big barrier that I had with my staff was the fact that they couldn't see what the kids' activities were, because they wanted to be involved. So they want to see how it's being delivered. And that was you know it's like, if I can't see this activity, how can I know it's effective? And you know it's like, if I can't see this activity.
Speaker 2:How can I know it's effective? And you know a massive respect to the professionalism of our staff that they wanted to have that level of involvement and so once the classroom hub was introduced and they can actually use those it's the same lessons being used as pre-teaching, being able to be used to support elsewhere or so that they can just get a viewpoint and go. Actually, I don't like that activity. That doesn't work for my kids. I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 2:I'm going to take that one out and they've got that control over that so I think that once they felt that they had a little bit more control over it, I think that's made a massive difference. I think that can be a big push for next year. Um such, also, along with them, our literacy lessons. We're intending to introduce the grammar videos as part of our literacy support group lessons so they can be used as starter activities. I've started to do that in my classroom where we've not been able to have a bedrock lesson. I've been using those show me board activities and going along the grammar videos and building that into classroom activities. So it's you know, know, it's a really, really powerful resource and I think we're only scratching the surface of how we're using it within the school.
Speaker 1:Really, what I love as well about the classroom hub at the moment and what I've done a lot for schools, particularly teams where the english department are the ones that are initially trialing or using mapper, is. I'll just say to them add all 3 000 words to your english curriculum, just do it, and you can sequence the 10 most important ones for homework if you really want to. But actually you don't have to sequence the word miser in a christmas carol or, you know, generational divide in an inspector calls. You don't have to sequence that. But how powerful is it just to be able to type it in and bring it into the lesson anyway? That's really and that and that and that's the. That's the climate we're trying to create.
Speaker 2:I did the same thing with the word tyranny, because it comes up with Animal Farm, it comes up with Julius Caesar and then it leads into Macbeth.
Speaker 2:So we can start to see, and what I really liked was actually you've got the activities for tyranny in Macbeth, the activities for tyranny in Animal Farm to make it contextually relevant to the students, so when they're doing their activities they can see that tie-in specific to the topic that they are working on. But then they can see that words come up, hang on. We've done the word tyranny, yeah, but have you done it in relation to Macbeth? How would you then use it in that context and how would that be different to how you would use it in Animal Farm? And I think that that's going to become very I mean, I'm just again just scratching the surface with that at the moment, but I think that over time that's going to become very powerful and I think that the fact that we've always had in our mindset that this was not a 12-month project, we always had that this was going to be a three-year- project before we could really get going on it.
Speaker 2:and you know, to really see that impact, that nothing changes in one year, it has to become an embedded practice. And I mean my colleague who pitched the idea of bedrock had been to a school and referred to it as a bedrock school.
Speaker 1:And I think unless you have that ethos that we are a bedrock school, um, it's not going to have the same impact and we've come into this with that mindset I think it's interesting because when I, when vocab, first did the rounds and it was like a thing that people, I, I, I hold my hands up, I thought it was going to be a thing that fans are a harsh word, but I thought it was going to be just one of those things that became really big.
Speaker 1:And then something else was really big um, and alex quickly was writing his books and I was reading about them, reading them and reading various things about creating a culture of vocabulary. I'm thinking, but how do you do that? Like, what does that mean? And, and I think one of the since coming to bedrock myself and looking at the knowledge trends reports you can get, looking at the direct subject, specific curriculum reports you can get, and the grammar holistic assessment um. Today and today, for example, I was working with a primary school um on their sats results and I have now exported for them and put together their block placement, their holistic assessment um and their reading test results on one literacy diagnostic see, that's because we use the grammar holistic assessments to um, inform our grammar interventions, so literally interventions for the summer term, um, so that that's what we use it for.
Speaker 2:We pulled out where people had the low, you know, the most gaps, um, and then we put in place, um, you know, that core grammar intervention and it exactly the same way. But I mean seeing it as a literacy journey for the student and seeing that holistic approach. I mean, at the moment I absolutely love the fact we've just got our reading tests. I've just done the final reading tests for the summer. So we've got our year seven to 10 reading ages in reading tests for the summer. So we've got our year seven to ten reading ages in.
Speaker 2:But I love the fact that you have the standardized score within that, because that can we can put that in comparison with our sats results and the cats testing that we do. So we actually have that, you know, that coherent 100 marker all the way through, and then we can look at why they're anomalies with that, why you know if they're 100 here, why are they not 100 there?
Speaker 1:and we can start looking at that data and what's informing the barriers for those students and their learning I, I, I love the standardized age score piece because when schools give me a standardized age score from two different points, literally if they're, you know, relative to their age, as long as they're, if they should be above 100 in both cases. But you can see the value add there as well and I think it's it's nice that schools are now starting to come around to that way of thinking around. You know, if they were 102 before, but they're 100, 105 now, they've made three, you know three levels there, three points in the standardization school, which is so, so important, I think absolutely, and I think moving forward that's going to be so essential.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think the school at the moment is still very stuck in reading ages and um, because it's familiar and we've always used reading ages, because we used to use accelerated read before to do our reading age tests um, and you know that's gonna be another mindset of how do we use this data to work with data that we've got elsewhere and have far more comprehensive collective data that can've got elsewhere and have far more comprehensive collective data that can inform a better picture of our learners and the other thing as well, of course, that I often talk about when it comes to the bedrock test, about reading test, um, I know we hadn't intended to get onto the reading test today particularly, but, um, the sub skills, being able to say to a head of history or this learner is really struggling with evidencing ideas, being able to say to a head of English that their inter and intertextuality scores in indirect questions are low.
Speaker 1:paper two, question four, aqa then you know, even summarising, you can't do paper two, question two, on AQA if you can't find evidence and summarizing it. You can't do paper two, question two, on aqa if you can't find evidence and summarize you can't. So that's the skill is those, it's those insights that you can share across the curriculum I feel I get really excited about when I speak to schools, um, and and that kind of leads me on really nicely actually, to the kind of the uh that your plans, as as you, as you move ahead with, with Bedrock into next year, and I want you to sort of almost Let your guard down here and tell me what the utopia is.
Speaker 2:Oh, I've dreamt. The utopia for me would be a literacy strategy in which we have very clear assessment points as a trust. I mean my big dream would be a trust literacy strategy where we can see from reception in where the barriers are, we have an assessment point, we have a very clear intervention strategy so we can actually create a literacy learning journey for students all the way from reception, all the way to year 13. That would be the absolute dream and that we can just really clearly see that mapping that progress as the students go through from, you know, early years all the way up, because you know things like we get our students that don't pass, then get their four in their GCSE but then they go and do a retake in year 12. What's the literacy support that's being put in so that they can access that more than just content if they've got to that point?
Speaker 2:Um, and having that clear strategy strategy from all the way through, all the way up to year 13,. Because the vocabulary development in year 13, it's so extensive and how that comes through into A-level, I mean it blows my mind the vocabulary that they have to know to be able to be successful. So that would be the dream alongside with a very clear reading writing, oracy policy, and that everything just the lines. It's so embedded that every classroom is able to use the same strategy, no matter what the subject is. For vocabulary development, the oracy side of that, implementing it in their discussions, and then it's feeding into their writing. So it doesn't matter if you're picking up a history book or a geography book. The structure, the vocabulary, it's very clear that they have the same systems so that they can effectively communicate their thoughts and ideas. That that's the dream I.
Speaker 1:I spoke to a school this week and they used a term.
Speaker 1:I know that there's, that there's overlapping here, right, but she the the colleague spoke, she spoke to me, she said about used the word cognitive interference, and I really like that word because actually, literacy is such a it it runs the risk of being a generic thing, that is, some is something to everyone but nothing to everyone.
Speaker 1:At the same time it's like because, but really, what disciplinary literacy has allowed and what I hope bedrock allows schools to do, is give them a foothold into, into understanding what's going on, whether it's your holistic assessment, whether it's your knowledge trends and your tier two, whether it's your mapper in the tier two, whether it's your MAPA in the classroom.
Speaker 1:I think what MAPA and what CORE allows you to do and this is how I'm starting to speak to schools in this way is start moving towards what you described there around the whole diagnostic piece, around not just three tests a year, three reading tests, which are really powerful and really important, because obviously we have our, our platform for that now, but vocab grammar mapper being those constant insights, granular insights, class level insights, so that leaders like yourself, so that, so that you know teachers have got a really clear sense of what's going on in their classroom and their schools at any one time and I mean it sounds like that's where you're moving towards next year. When I when I spoke to you at your school recently about the plans for September, it sounds really exciting. It sounds like you're on the verge of doing something quite big there.
Speaker 2:I do, I know, I do genuinely believe that, because we've always had that long-term vision for bedrock and for literacy, that, um, I mean, you guys are coming in to help deliver the cpd from day one and that's gonna really have a massive impact. Um, and I do think we need to use you guys more, which I don't think we used you enough last year. I have a habit of trying to do things on my own and I think that there needs to be a, you know, more of a collaboration between bedrock and the schools. Um, but I think teachers who are leading bedrock need to do that.
Speaker 1:They need to use you guys, because you are the experts and you can inform us on how to do this well I think the thing is is that when I speak to schools is I know, you know, I think I'm I what I know I am an expert in is I am an expert in bedrock, I am an expert in the things that when a school says we're struggling to use it for this, this doesn't really work. For this reason, I've got complete forensic knowledge of everything inside bedrock and how it works and I can suggest utilisation to perfection almost because I know what's what and where it is. But what I also pride myself on is the ability to ask questions to schools as well. So not just come in and say, do it this way, that's how you should do it, and then, if not, you know you can't do it properly. Actually it's sometimes it's just about teasing out some of the aren't something out the questions as well, because we don't have all the answers. But I think you're right that collaboration is key isn't it?
Speaker 2:and um, also, uh, you talk about, you know, for next year as well, um utilizing it more with our eal students, with our scnd, and we have a hearing resource base as well and, um, I do think that empowering more the staff to use that to support, um, the struggling learners, um, I think that's going to be massive for next year as well, do?
Speaker 1:you know I'm sure I've said this before, apologies if anyone's listening to this. Uh, who's heard missteps before? But I do quite a lot of data triangulation for schools around, like kind of you know, reading ages, standardized age scores, gcse outcomes, and then and quickly and and and, uh, platform engagement. And I did this and get this triangulation a few months ago and it came out that the eal learners who'd used mapper had made loads of progress and I thought that's that's too good to be true. That's a freak of nature that doesn't work. But then it happened again two, two weeks later and it's happened three or four times. A shit, I mean. You look like you know why. Why is it? I, I think I don't think there's. You look like you know why. Why is it?
Speaker 2:I think I don't think there's a, you know, I don't know whether you've hit a magic formula with it or not, but I do think the fact that when you are looking at the vocabulary development, the way that the programs are working, it has images, it's teaching in contextual concepts, it's giving them synonyms and antonyms to try and help, sure they have a deeper understanding, um, and the opportunity to write up their responses as well. I think, because you're hitting it from so many different angles, um, and it's not just here's this word, learner's word, here's this definition in isolation go eal. Learners are going to need to understand it in a different context. They're going to need to see in real life scenarios, otherwise they're going to need to see it in real-life scenarios, otherwise it's not going to have that hit and I think that you do do that quite well with the program.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because something I thought was genius when I came across it was a couple of schools Because obviously, the way that WAND is set up to link to MAPA, they created some Key Stage 3 or Year 7, 8 and 9 EAL bedrock classes. So you know, key Stage 3 EAL English, key Stage 3, eal Maths and whatever, and the leaders and the teachers in those departments were able to kind of put the words in front of the EAL pupils who just it wasn't't about ability, it wasn't about them having a particular scnd requirement, they just needed access to those words. And our mapper words go all the way down to key stage one, um, so you know, being able to kind of unblock things that you know key stage three for an eal learner who is fine but actually would need the word villain sequence to them plot, some of those things that we take for granted oh, absolutely, and even I mean we've done it the same.
Speaker 2:We've done it with an scnd group so that we can look at tracking them separately. Um, and you know, we we didn't have them as a group on sims, but we spoke to you guys and we were able to organize that so that we could track their progress separately as a group and look at how that was working and their engagement and how you know so we can keep them on track as well.
Speaker 2:Um, and you know, and it has been effective. Interestingly, all of our top bedrock users this year have been boys, um, in every year group. So, which is interesting, because we're always looking at that gender divide and that gender gap and that comes up. And you know, there's that stereotype around girls do more reading than the boys.
Speaker 1:But you know, I mean, if it's keeping that engagement, so that was, that's a definite trend in our school, that the boys are the top bedrock users I mean, this is a another one for me that I think is a really important question to ask, and I promise you it's not a loaded question, this is a genuine question. What's? What's your view on the idea of the reading for pleasure agenda? What do you think about that?
Speaker 2:it. Oh, it's a complicated one, um, so I mean, we've been pushing reading for pleasure and we have our read aloud program, but I think the problem with reading for pleasure is that, um, there are such a wide range now of texts that are out there we are never going to hit everybody's enjoyment, and the environment in which we are reading in is a classroom environment, and, and for me, for reading for pleasure, I sit on my reading chair, which I set up with my cup of tea, and I have an environment which I create for reading, and that's a physical environment. It's not just that reading for pleasure isn't a mental place. And for someone to say we're going to do reading for pleasure in school, I think that's a clash. Say we're going to do reading for pleasure in school, I think that's a cash, um, because the environment might not be creating, um, that coziness, that comfort, because reading for me is a comfort and that pleasure is a comfort.
Speaker 2:I think that there are different elements, but I think we need to have reading for pleasure, we have reading for learning, um, and we have like so, and I think that they need to identify that this reading here is good for me because it's going to help my learning. This is reading for me, that's fun and it's just about me, ok, and I think that we need to break down that umbrella into smaller umbrellas and provide environments for students to read. I mean, you know we have libraries within schools that sometimes those libraries can be very, very busy places and with lots of things coming and going. They are multi-purpose spaces, multi-purpose learning spaces, but an actual. This is a reading room where we sit and we're cosy and we can hide away in a book and have that escapism, because that's what reading for pleasure for me is.
Speaker 2:But some people it can be different and I think that there needs to be a little bit more delving into what actually does reading for pleasure really look like for people and how can we emulate that within schools. Lots of kids are reading on screens. Why can't that be reading for pleasure? I use my Kindle all the time.
Speaker 1:I think my only issue with the reading for pleasure agenda is that it runs the risk of people feeling like it gets done magically and what you've just said there is.
Speaker 1:I think I couldn't agree more with every single aspect of what you said there. And I was thinking actually of my own. I like reading and if I had time in the day I would just spend. I love it, it's my thing, but something, something I think of you know some people might not feel like that and I think about exercise and actually in the last few weeks I've been running four or five times a week and at the start of that I was literally physically having to leave my t-shirt and shorts and trainers out by my bed, so in the morning I would have to walk past it and say, do you know what, being lazy this morning and I had to put those physical cues there and actually now I don't need them there because it's and there's pleasure coming from that now to an extent, until it gets to winter and I have to hide and when you've got students with so many literacy barriers, you're telling them enjoy reading.
Speaker 2:But this is like hell on earth for me. I will quote a student of mine um, one student was sat next to another student and it's one of my favorite quotes. All the time she said oh my god, don't you just love words? And the other student said unless they're constantly moving around the page so you can't understand them. And that, in a nutshell, for me was the two extremities of how do we meet that need of getting these students that are finding it so hard to read for pleasure? Um, and they're looking at it as this is hell and earth for them at times, because it's such a challenge, and it's not because they don't want to and it's not because they're lazy and because they just can't be bothered. It's just such a big barrier for them, um, which, if it's too hard, we we can't get into that zone of proximal development where it is enjoyable it's horrible difficulty, right, and that's, um, and I think it's.
Speaker 1:I think I'm really proud of the fact that I've been part of an educational community where things like curriculum have driven, have come center stage, where you know I speak to now that my best part of my job is, I meet with people like you. Three or four times a week. I come across someone you know who's got a similar passion to me at least you know and who loves this stuff, and I think we're moving in a really good direction, and I love it when schools really see bedrock as part of that. So, um, it's been a pleasure talking to you, um, and I I think people are going to really listen to what you've said and think about implementation in terms of, as you've rightly said, those small steps, thinking about how, what alignment looks like behind the scenes, thinking about what alignment looks like in front of the pupils, whether that is literally as simple as putting the classroom hub on the board. So people don't, pupils don't see it as just this thing they do for homework.
Speaker 1:Um, I think all of these elements make up a successful implementation and it doesn't just happen magically. Um, so thank you for everything you're doing and your school because you're, you know, bedrock superstars like you, a lot of you. You're brilliant, um, and thank you for everything you're doing and hopefully you know I brilliant um, and thank you for everything you're doing and hopefully you know I would love to get you on again to talk more specifically about your views on disciplinary literacy and what that looks, sounds like in a school. Um, but it's been phenomenal. Thank you so much, katie, for coming on thank you so much, andy.
