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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.
Each episode is a journey into the world of literacy education. Andy brings together a diverse array of voices from across the education sector, from seasoned teachers to renowned academics, policy makers to literacy advocates. All of our guests share a common goal: to explore and expand the horizons of literacy education.
We go beyond surface-level conversations. Our discussions are in-depth, nuanced, and filled with insights that only years of experience and expertise can bring. We tackle a wide range of topics, from innovative teaching methods to the latest research in literacy, the impact of technology on reading and writing, to strategies for engaging diverse learners. Our aim is to provide a platform where the complexities of literacy are unpacked and understood in a way that is both accessible and enlightening.
Join Andy and his guests as they illuminate the multifaceted world of literacy. Subscribe to Bedrock Talks and be part of a community that believes in the transformative power of literacy. Together, let's shape a more literate, informed, and connected world.
Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning
40. The complexities of reading... and what teachers can do to address them with Dr Megan Dixon
What happens when students can decode words perfectly but can't comprehend what they're reading? Dr. Megan Dixon, a literacy expert who bridges the worlds of classroom teaching and cognitive research, unpacks this growing challenge facing schools today.
The conversation dives into what Dixon calls the "elongation of the ability range" - the widening gap in reading proficiency that teachers are encountering, particularly at secondary level. With piercing clarity, she identifies how our digital landscape has fundamentally altered how children engage with text: "Reading is a really active thing. You have to work your brain hard to engage with the text, to question your own understanding." Yet increasingly, students approach reading with the same passive consumption habits they've developed through social media.
Dixon outlines four research-backed pillars that form the foundation of reading comprehension: vocabulary depth, text structure understanding, inferencing abilities, and metacognitive monitoring. Her explanation of inferencing - distinguishing between "locally cohesive inferences" and "globally cohesive inferences" - provides teachers with a practical framework for targeted instruction beyond basic decoding skills.
Particularly valuable is Dixon's nuanced take on the role of prior knowledge in reading. Rather than simply front-loading information before reading, she advocates for "activating" students' existing knowledge and experiences, teaching them to independently extract meaning through questioning and active engagement. This approach empowers students to become independent readers capable of tackling unfamiliar texts with confidence.
The podcast concludes with practical classroom strategies focused on creating environments where students monitor their understanding and feel comfortable admitting confusion - the very behaviours that characterise proficient readers. As Dixon notes, "We need to get away from the idea that there's failing in not understanding everything the first time. That is the process of reading."
Ready to transform how you approach reading instruction in your classroom? Listen now and discover how to develop active, engaged readers who don't just decode words, but truly understand what they read.
Dr. Megan Dixon has just collaborated on the DFE's new work supporting secondary schools with reading, and is a postdoctoral research assistant who collaborates with Professor Jane Oakhill (University of Sussex) and Distinguished Professor Kate Cain (Lancaster University) on research into literacy development. A specialist in both early years and primary education, Megan also brings deep expertise in secondary literacy. She serves as the Early Years and Primary Specialist for a family of international schools and is a globally recognised educational consultant, known for her work supporting literacy development across all phases of education.
hi everyone. Thank you for continuing to subscribe and download, review etc etc to the Bedrock Talks podcast. My name's Andy Sammons. As always, I lead teaching and learning here at Bedrock, and today we have Dr Megan Dixon, and I'm going to have to wind myself up here to get through all of the incredible things that she does and is and contributes to. We've got a postdoctoral research assistant.
Speaker 1:She works with Professor Jane Oakhill at Sussex University and Distinguished Professor Kate Kane at Lancaster University. She's also an early years and primary specialist for a chain of international schools and is an educational consultant widely known across the world and certainly the UK on all things literacy and literacy development, and a lot of you will probably be familiar with her with the recent DfE work on supporting reading in secondary schools with Jessie Ricketts, lucy Floyer and Megan herself as well. I think that's gone down a storm so far. When I've spoken to the schools who have referred to that work and who have used it, they thought how useful that's been in terms of dropping something very tangible in front of teachers that they can actually use in their classrooms. I found it really interesting as well. So enough of me, dr Megan Dixon. Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thank you. It's lovely to be here and it's lovely to be able to talk with you about all things kind of language and literacy. And can I just start off by saying thank you, andy, for mentioning that training program and guidance that Jesse Lucy and I worked on together along with a whole host of other people across the country. I'm really pleased to hear that it's being received well and people are interested in finding it helpful. Um, that was our aim. Well, we weren't.
Speaker 2:We weren't intending to um in any way, shape or form, solve any problem or provide a silver bullet for for anything, but just a starter for 10, really something we say tangible and practical that schools can use, hopefully without too much preparation, to start the conversation or to further the conversation that they were having. And I want to emphasise as well that, although it's sort of transcribed and come down to 45 minutes and a couple of guidance documents, it's taken us about two years, wow, Because we really really wanted it to be right. So it's been through an initial process a collaboration with lots and lots of educators across the country to get their voices and their perspectives, lots of review, a pilot in which we collected a whole bunch of data which we analysed, and then a complete rewrite, actually um, taking into consideration all of these processes, and then again um out to review. So lots and lots of people have been involved in it. So it's it's.
Speaker 2:You know, we've kind of coordinated this process, but it's a really collective effort I think when I picked it up and read it, I thought there's no way this has been knocked up.
Speaker 1:And read it I thought there's no way this has been knocked up in six months. You know there's. This has been a long time coming. So that leads me to my my kind of my first question. Really, just give us a sense of your, your background and recent work. And obviously you're a name that's well known to me, because when I spoke to Jenny Webb on the pod and obviously I know Jenny quite well she's mentioned you a number of times, which is the big reason why I kind of sought you out. So what's your kind of your background on your recent work?
Speaker 2:then, linked to literacy, so you know I've been hanging around in the education sphere for a really long time and I've always made it a part of my career trajectory to have two trajectories really. So I've been a teacher. I've been trajectories really so I've been a teacher, I've been a school leader, I've been a head teacher. I've worked in multi-academy trusts in various executive positions. I've worked for the education endowment foundation. I established one of the first education endowment foundation research schools. I was one of the first five leaders and directors of that um and and I've worked in various kind of different capacities, lots and lots of school improvement. I've delivered uh lectures to teachers in initial teacher training and I'm an associate lecturer at Sheffield Ham.
Speaker 2:So lots and lots of very um. I get. I'm quite active and I get maybe a little bit bored with things and I like to be challenged. So a long career in education doing all sorts of different stuff. But I've also, along that at the same time, maintained a research career. Really I've always been very interested in research and how we apply and translate research findings into practice in the classroom and across schools. And so through that, in my kind of desire to know and understand more, I've done a lot of academic learning at the same time and you know, that's my own personal choice, my driver so, rather than perhaps doing mpqs and executive leadership, I've completed a PhD.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think that's just incredible. I mean I know what that takes, because my other half has done similar things and that's, that's no mean feat. Um, shout out to dr.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah I've had a hard graft but but you know that's my driver and that that's I. I have, at the end of the day, a kind of desire to deeply, deeply understand both the research processes and how we understand. At the moment, children and young people acquire literacy skills, be that reading, writing or spoken language, um, and the integration and the interconnection of them all, and then to deeply kind of consider and reflect and think about how we can effectively translate that evidence in research yeah, so, so on that.
Speaker 1:Then we talked off air briefly about the the profile of of colleagues listening to this podcast and I kind of said I think it's. It seems to be lots of teachers with a really curious interest in the research and applications to the classroom, but also literacy coordinators, head teachers, exec heads, ceos. So for the benefit of all of those stakeholders, what for you? How would you distill the challenges that schools are facing? You know, let's say you're new in role or you've been in role for a while and you maybe want a little bit of a different angle of attack here. Where do you think the main challenges come from when it comes to developing literacy across the different sectors?
Speaker 2:so there are. There are challenges at each different area, each different section, sector, so we could talk about early years, primary, secondary and phases within that. There's a generic issue amongst that across the sector at the moment, I think, is that we've kind of gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. So when I first started my career, actually finding research or finding writing that was research was you had to hunt it down, you had to look for it. Um, you, you perhaps, you know, had access to it if you were involved in a some kind of training through a research institution or a university or involved in a study or something like that. Now we've got this ecosystem where we're absolutely bombarded with it all the time and I think one of the main challenges for everybody at the system is to identify the, the nuggets, the golden nuggets within that ecosystem, the bits that are really going to make the difference, um, uh, to children's outcomes, and to keep consistently coming back and saying and challenging ourselves to be absolutely critically reflective about whether that new exciting thing that you've just read about in a paper is really ready to be applied within a classroom situation. So I think that's general, that perhaps this ecosystem has exploded for the good. I think it's great that we have information and it's easily available and whatever, but'm not 100 sure always that, uh, the whole system is applying the kind of skeptical, critical faculties that we need to really use that effectively.
Speaker 2:And if I can just draw in a little example, it's a slightly different example, but in the guardian yesterday was a really, really beautifully nuanced article by Dr Lucy Foltz and she's talking about mental health interventions and how they're used in the classroom and it's a beautifully articulated description of evidence-based practice. In my viewpoint. She's talking about the data. She's talking about the data. She's talking about the research. She's talking about summaries and overall findings of the research and actually saying, well, what we thought might be helpful ie perhaps whole class interventions around mindfulness we have to become acutely aware of the fact that they may not be helpful. They may actually be doing harm and we need to take that really, really seriously. I think in an ecosystem perhaps we're not as acutely tuned into the fact that new things that we try, yes, they may be effective and they may make changes that are positive, but perhaps they might not.
Speaker 1:It's uncomfortable, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It's really uncomfortable, and that, for me, is that position about being the researchly evidence-based and evidence-informed stance. We can have a stance, but it's always having to be shifted. We need to be totally aware of what's happening in front of us in the classroom.
Speaker 1:So when it comes to reading development in, say, primary versus secondary, what do you think are those kind of the structural challenges that schools and colleagues are facing in those areas specifically?
Speaker 2:some of this. If we, if we start with kind of primary and early years, that's really kind of a good place to start. So we've had a lot of literature produced and a lot of policy documentation. We talk about the reading framework and it's very, very clear and very precise about what it wants to see in schools, as is Ofsted in the framework. And yet sometimes, or a lot of cases and I find this when I'm working really closely with schools is perhaps sometimes the prescription is at such a level that there are some counterintuitive side, negative impacts of what people are being asked to do.
Speaker 2:And so one of those challenges that we see in the system and if I was a young kind of fresh-faced literacy coordinator, getting my hands on on my, my subject in key stage one or key stage two, one of the immediate things that I would be putting in place is looking really hard at my data collection processes and my evaluation processes and say what data will tell me what's going on really effectively and what's working and what's not working. How can I set up systems and structures that will help me evaluate the effectiveness in the classroom on the children themselves? The script that comes with our synthetic phonics program, perhaps, and the most popular synthetic phonics programs are heavily scripted and heavily controlled. The script that comes with them can on occasion not be as helpful as perhaps we would like it to be. So in that context, I think in those kind of lower down sort of early years and primary, I think perhaps the implementation of the materials has become more important than the impact on the children themselves yeah, I understand.
Speaker 1:I think you know we're talking, whether you talk about teaching to the test and you know performative, you know I've been in schools before where I've started an initiative, for example, something like we start with a do now task, with five quiz questions and things like that, and I think I've been guilty of this before where you, where staff will be more bothered about having five questions on the board than actually the content of those questions Because it's we're rushing, we're time poor, and I think it's just important to reflect on that.
Speaker 1:And that kind of brings me to the next, the next point around. Reflect on that and and that kind of brings me to the next, the next point around. I think this is a really tough nut to crack because at least in primary it's closer to the time of inception of where the child may have some of those difficulties. But I spoke to jenny webb the other week about this in her schools around. You know pupils getting up to year nine, year ten, and they can decode, but can they read and and it's so? I guess the guess, the question is is it worse for secondaries? Is it more complex for secondaries in some way?
Speaker 2:I think for secondaries, one of the challenges that I see massively is that no one's in charge of it, because secondary teachers are subject specialists. The English teacher teaches their discipline, which is English, it's english literature, it's english language. It's how it works. It's not literacy. We're not what I would define literacy as in the skills of being able to read and write. So in secondary schools and the secondary schools that I work with and I do work with secondary schools across the country um, to consider this issue around literacy, one of the things that I come up against is the wrong terminology. But one of the challenges that we face is that I'm talking to the head of English, who's suddenly been put in charge of the reading strategy across the whole school, but in his head he's also seriously concerned about year 11s and their GCSE. Of course, we're going to get through pay, the english language paper a, which is a completely utterly and totally different thing, and I'm, I'm, I could, you know I can see that from a senior leadership perspective. We'll give it to english because they do reading, but actually they don't do literacy and they don't do the acquisition of reading. So I think this is really tough.
Speaker 2:I think also prior there's been a little bit of a perception that primaries teach kids to read and we just pick up on that. Yeah, and I think in the last you know, maybe five, ten years there's been an exception. It's that no reading. We all learn to read continually through our entire lives. Actually, we never stop learning to read and we never stop learning from our reading, as long as we are carrying on reading, obviously, and but so there's a little bit of a challenge there.
Speaker 2:But the other thing that comes through when I'm this is anecdotally. I have no kind of hard evidence data, but anecdotally I have no kind of hard evidence data, but anecdotally what I hear from school leaders is when they have a system of assessing reading perhaps the bedrock assessment or the NGRT or whatever else is out there what they see is an elongation of the ability range ability range so they've got a wider ability range coming into their classrooms, whereas before they would hope that you know they'd have a majority of children who are particular. They're confident in that particular level. They've had some outliers either side, so some brilliant readers and some ones that they know they're going to have to work with. Now that's spread and diluted, so they're faced with as they perceive it, and fast, perhaps bigger range of reading proficiency and what's causing that?
Speaker 1:do you think what's caused that?
Speaker 2:I mean, I I have no hard evidence, data can make some guesses. Um, I can guess that covid has had an impact. Um, we know that covid has hit society in a huge variety of different ways and I don't think we've even got to the bottom of how it's changed things. Um, and I feel it's dropped off the agenda a little bit in terms of conversation and we need to bring it back up and start reflecting more. Um, I think perhaps it's also a reflection of how primaries teach reading and the shift around, like you were talking about, perhaps an overt focus on decoding what I might, in a really old-fashioned way, call barking at print. So I can perhaps have a child in front of me who sounds like they can read okay when they read aloud which, by the way, is not necessarily the same as how they read internally, silently in their head. When they read aloud, in a kind of performative performance kind of way, they can sound fluent in to pick up another word. They can read with a pace we might say it's a certain number of words per minute. Um, they can make their voices go up and down or have some kind of presidy, but actually when you start asking them questions that are over and above actual, real, simple, literal retrieval, just pulling answers out of the text. They're not putting the pieces of the text together.
Speaker 2:Other people, other colleagues, I know so Lucy Floyd, we were talking about this the other day. She was saying that she felt that perhaps there's a little bit more passivity in children, that reading is a really active thing. You have to work your brain hard to gauge with the text, to question your own understanding, to repair your own understanding, to pick up the pieces that are there. And she is seeing a little bit more of a situation where students are passively disseminated stuff, knowledge that sort of thing. And she said also she was talking about social media, where she felt that maybe it's very passive, isn't it? You can passively consume stuff rather than actively engage it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this came up no idea about it. Poverty is another one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's another massive one. I actually came across something online yesterday and it really stumped me. It was a chap who was saying that one of the biggest injustices in the modern world is that we seem to have stolen childhood from children and this idea that actually they're used to having toys in their hands and now increasingly earlier age devices and things that will stimulate them, rather than going outside or rather than picking up a book to stimulate their own imagination. For, coming from the inside, so to speak, everything comes from an external force and our external agent, and I think that's a that's. I think that I do think that I mean, I've read yohan hari's uh, stolen focus, which is a really powerful piece of work on the fact that cell phones and social media had literally been designed to tap into very primal parts of our brain. That so reading becomes even more taxing by comparison. Right, it's a hard thing to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I'm cautious about all of these things because I think, you know, I think we don't know enough about it, and so I'm cautious. And I also, you know, as you know, I work internationally.
Speaker 2:I see huge benefits from some of these things that are being tapped into absolutely in other contexts and other situations, um, and I also think that, as a parents, have become increasingly risk averse. So we're talking about going outside. Well, you know, when I was yeah, when I was a kid, I used to just go out and run. You know, my mum was like back home at six for tea, sort of thing. That doesn't happen nowadays for all sorts of different reasons. So I think you know constrictions on childhood, childhood has changed, perhaps a way, and I think COVID had quite a big impact.
Speaker 1:I think yeah, and if we get into kind of the mechanics of reading we had a really interesting chat off air about this. I mentioned Carl Hendricks' sub stack that's just come out around, you know, the idea that one small study has perhaps found that prior knowledge isn't everything when it comes to reading. Now, obviously, some prior knowledge is obviously critical. Some prior knowledge is obviously critical, um, I would imagine, when you pick up, pick up a book, whereas you know it's not all about it, can't? It can't be one or the other completely. There's some nuance there. So I guess that's where I want to ask you to pick up on that thread around the nuance between prior knowledge and reading across the curriculum so I think nuance is a really good word that you've picked up on there.
Speaker 2:It is a really complex field and I think if you look at the literature around reading comprehension and reading comprehension development, so if I pick up on the work that's been done by Jane O'Kell and Kate Kane, for example the colleagues that I have the privilege of working for so Jane and Kate would say that there were probably about four things that they reckon and they have spent their lifetime in a career in experimental psychology absolutely focusing on the development of reading comprehension and they would say that there were four kind of main drivers that in school we could really focus on and really think about in terms of improving children's ability to tackle texts, and by this what I mean is a child being able to approach an unknown and unseen text and make sense of it to themselves yeah so the first one of these would be around vocabulary, so the depth of their vocabulary knowledge and what they know about vocabulary and how vocabulary works.
Speaker 2:They're not talking about the number of words. They're talking about how words work, the morphology, the bits and pieces either side, how you use them and and I'll come back to this in more detail in a minute how you infer the meaning of vocabulary from the text around okay, so to avoid your depth.
Speaker 2:Another one would be text structure and organization, so your familiarization and your understanding with how a text works and that hits into your disciplinary literacy kind of idea that we were talking about earlier too. So how words in phrases, in sentences, in paragraphs, in multimedia, documentary, but it did whatever work together to confirm meaning and our understanding of that and how texts are laid out and the structures and the sorts of things that we might expect and predict when we pick up a text in a different sort of way. So we've got vocabulary, we've got text structure and organisation. The third one is inferencing. Inferencing is incredibly complicated, but the two types of inference that the research suggests to us make a real difference are locally cohesive inferences and globally cohesive inferences. So locally cohesive inferences are infer cohesive inferences. So locally cohesive inferences are inferences that help us understand how different parts of the text connect to each other. You can't fool me because we're on a, we're on a podcast here, but what I'm doing is I've got my fingers and I'm kind of moving them along like a train. So if you imagine, what we have is this sense of the center. The words in this, in in the sentence, connect to each other and we each influence each other, and then, from sentence to sentence, we have connections that go through. So we might have a pronoun cohesion, for example, which is something that students, particularly in key stage two and three, can really get tripped up on. Really get tripped up on is that the, the, the, the noun, the person is then transferred to he or she or it or they or that, all of those sorts of things. So local cohesion, which is how the text locally cohesively works together, and the connections that we make those are we infer those connections by taking two different parts of knowledge and putting them together. And then the globally cohesive, um, uh, inferences that we make about how the text works, the character development, the picking up, the different parts of the setting, perhaps if we're using a narrative or in different ways, in if we're applying to a non-fiction text, a reading piece of science or something else. So that's number three. We've got vocabulary, we non-fiction text, a reading piece of science or something else. So that's number three. We've got vocabulary. We've got a text structure and organization. We've got inference.
Speaker 2:And then the last one is how we work on the text ourselves and how we constantly monitor our own understanding of the text, our own understanding of the text. This comes to the idea of being active, but it also comes to the idea that it's our job to be constantly thinking have I got that right? Does this make sense to me? Did I read that word actively? And then having those skills.
Speaker 2:And that's where prior knowledge helps to inform, both within the inferences that we make, but also within the systematic engagement of this constant reflection and constant engagement. So when we read a text, one of the first things we might encourage ourselves to do is to activate our prior knowledge. We read, we look at the outline, we look at what it's got, we look at the title perhaps, and we think what do I already know about this? What sorts of questions, what do I expect? And from there we can automatically start monitoring our understanding and our engagement with that text and drawing upon that. And that's how we learn from a text. If we take it the other way around and we have this kind of conceptual idea that we have to give children knowledge in order for them to be able to understand the text, we're kind of just asking them to apply something that we've taught them already.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that this is why I think there's really good discussions around curriculum and I think it's really important to not necessarily give the pupils all the words before they read a text.
Speaker 2:But it's really important. We don't do that actually. It's really important. We actually just spend five minutes going. Was there anything in that text that you didn't get?
Speaker 1:yeah, and I'm talking more about broader themes. So being able to you know when you pick up a Christmas carol, for example I think I'm talking more about broader themes, so being able to you know when you pick up A Christmas Carol, for example, I think I'm not saying that you would spend, you know, 10 lessons going through capitalism and Victorian London and all that stuff. I'm just talking about broader themes around morality, around generosity, and those things are a useful bed with you know with which to kind of or foundation with which to kind of approach the text.
Speaker 2:I suppose and I would say brilliant, because what I would say was why not start with a question about that taps into the children's or the students understanding of what morality is and how they perceive it and how it relates to their lives, and draw out some key themes there, so that prior knowledge coming from the children as a kind of engagement around how they have experienced these things? And you know, that's a really great example, actually, because I don't know any child on the planet who will not be able to tell you whether something's fair or not, no matter what age they are.
Speaker 1:That's their expertise in my household anyway, and I think that touches on something there where we mentioned briefly about the disconnect between research and implementation, because I think prior knowledge has in some ways morphed into, you know.
Speaker 2:Knowledge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And so you know, if we continually put that word activate in front of it and start to think about how are we going to help the children get to the text? Yeah, we don't, because the the point is and and you know, lucy and and um, jesse and I were discussing this in a very animated way just very recently the point is that we teach the children to be able to independently pick up pieces alone from the text. So they should be, or we should be, enabling them to come to their viewpoints, their understandings from it. And then we have a conversation about and this is very much a jay no kill phrase what's licensed by the text, so what we can say from the text and what we can't. So we can have all these elaborate, to make all these elaborative inferences about the color of someone's clothing, for example, but there's no insight into that in the text and therefore, although it's lovely and it informs our visual kind of situation model, the, the kind of construction that we make of the text as we're reading along, it doesn't add to our value of being able to really pin and draw and understand what the text is trying to say to us. So I think this is an interesting conversation and something that we really need to be able to think really carefully about. And I think it comes back kind of full circle to perhaps some of the things we talked about the beginning of this conversation.
Speaker 2:In that, um, the research that carl hendrix is talking about is published in a journal of experimental psychology. Experimental psychologists are exactly interested in that kind of stuff, constructing beautifully sophisticated experiments which allow them to look really closely at one part of a complex process and seek to understand a little bit more about how that process works in the kind of cognitive system of the brain and how it's all working intimately together. And because of that, experimental psychologists become very focused on one very small part of an interactive whole and in order to be able to control the variables, control the things that influence the changes, they typically um, typically reduce things down and try and control things as much as possible. So we'll have, you know, very tightly controlled questions, very tightly structured activities for the inferences to be made through that study. But that's a completely different world from the messy complexity of a classroom with 30 kids on a wednesday afternoon after it's been ringing all day.
Speaker 2:Do you know what I mean? So this is where this is the. This is where I get to the kind of nuance and understanding and being professionally skeptical and this ecosystem of all this wonderful research that's out there that we have access to now. But we do need to start to be really critical about the fact and look really hard and say, yeah, but that sample was 20 children in uh 30 minute activities with a really tightly controlled outcome. That's in our maths and science. So, although it's fascinating, at the moment, I'm going to hold my judgment about whether it really helps me teach english to year sevens on a wet Wednesday yeah, and and and on that.
Speaker 1:You know you've. I think you've hit the nail on the head there. So the last thing I'd really like to ask you about is you've obviously had a big hand in in the recent DfE piece, which I know a lot of schools are finding very useful. If you could give a piece of advice to a history teacher that's on their way to work right now listening to this podcast, or you know an English teacher who's, or a primary teacher who's looking at you know, for example, a class reader this afternoon, what's your advice to colleagues?
Speaker 2:gosh, it's so, it's so hard, and I think that the those teachers are the gold dust in our system. I really do. It's the teachers who make the difference every day, the conversations that they have, the way they interact with the students, and so I think, um, the main thing I would suggest is to not be scared to give them something that they might not necessarily be understand and be bold enough to have the conversation where you help them understand how to understand the text.
Speaker 2:So, and just to have those questions that are obviously so, you read that and you tell me. So I'm the teacher. You tell me were there any words or phrases or bits that you thought were really confusing? And build, and work to build your classroom environment where the children are really confident and comfortable to go. Do you know what, sir? That bit was a bit weird. What does that mean? Or what does that word mean? Don't tell them the answer. Show them how to work the answer out for themselves or, you know, unpick it.
Speaker 1:Just spend those few minutes it's so interesting because when I, when I was teaching, it was always the prior higher attainers, you know, those ones who asked the challenging questions of me. It was the pupils who who scored highly and who were getting high grades, asked questions. And even when I I talk about, uh, implementing bedrock with schools, it's colleagues who are able to say what does that mean? Hang on a minute, what does that? I know that might sound like a stupid question, but they're monitoring and actively engaged in their own learning processes.
Speaker 1:And it's so powerful, any kind of process or learning, it's the colleagues that are able to say hang on a minute. What does that mean? Again, I know that's that and it's that kind of, and it's that movement from being tacit recipients to being a reflective participant in what you're trying to achieve. So I'm, you know, when I read, I I read, I listen to audiobooks all the time, I regularly skip back 15 seconds and think, hang on a minute. No, yeah, I read. When I read newspapers, I regularly start and I think there's no failing in that, it no no we should get away from that.
Speaker 2:No, we need to absolutely hammer that idea on their head. That is the process of reading, that is really. That is the thing that we celebrate and it's no coincidence that reflection that you have, sandy, that reflection that you have around the difference between perhaps more higher retaining learners being kind of asking those questions and all that. Um, we know from the research literature that poorer comprehenders, so children who are students who can read, decode word reads and okay, but really aren't making sense of the text in front of them, are very passive and they don't actively make those connections and monitor their own understanding.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's critical.
Speaker 2:There's no coincidence whatsoever. So if I was a class teacher, I would be looking at those children who don't ask questions and going. I wonder why.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's.
Speaker 2:What's the barrier? Is it that they don't understand the question? Is it their spoken language acquisition? Is it that they can't process the speech that's happening in that classroom? That's something a whole world of ball game that we can have another conversation about, another time, if you like. Or is it that they're so passive in their approach to reading that that they have a misconception that just reading the words on the page accurately?
Speaker 1:reading. It's interesting because the last thing I would say is when I, when my son and I read together at night, he often reads the first couple of pages and then I, then I read to him, I finish the chapter off. There's that there's that difference between the two, and I find that same with his writing as well. His working memory is taken up with the decoding, or the encoding, with writing on the page, which is reading or writing, that there's less space for meaning and really understanding what's going on. He has to work so hard at that and I think anything that the teachers can do to model and to deconstruct that process, whether it's really thinking about what is it we're focusing on today? Is it the reading? Is it the writing? What element is it?
Speaker 2:and I think that's a really lovely, that total balance and what you're doing there, andy, is just super, isn't it? Because actually what you're doing is you're giving him practice, yeah, and in, in the kind of pulling the words off the page and articulating them aloud, but you're also allowing him practice in being able to engage deeper with the text, because when you read aloud to him, you also you kind of help his understanding a little bit as well, because you read it with the appropriate prosody and influence and the changing of voices and all of it which helps him understand. But then also and this is another thing we haven't even touched on you're you're ensuring that reading for him is this wonderful, pleasurable activity that I do with my dad and we're really close and I really love it, yeah, and it's so motivational and and means that reading it has a real strong uh resonance, a powerfully positive resonance yeah, and it's lovely because we read these.
Speaker 1:Uh, they're great if anyone's out there's, you know, got sons or daughters in year three, four. There's this wonderful series called I survived and it's, uh, I survived um the the twin towers disaster. I survived the um amazing okay um, I survived uh, we just read, I survived um the nazi invasion. And then he was a young jewish boy fleeing from the nazis, really grounded in. I survived the sinking of the titanic, really grounded in kind of genuine historic, historical events of significance. They've been, they've been great for us, brilliant.
Speaker 2:So much for your time Bright, soft and red. Horrible histories.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, yeah, he's got those as well.
Speaker 2:And I'm now studying history at university. So there you go.
Speaker 1:There we go, make a difference. It's been such a thrill and a pleasure, and you mentioned about coming back on that. I would dearly love to have you back on it's been what a learned?
Speaker 2:Let's talk a bit of language, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's do that. We should definitely do that. We're very interested in that. It's been a pleasure Everyone. If you could, you know, remember to leave ratings on the show and you could share the pod around and get voices. Like you know, megan's out there.
Speaker 2:For more people to hear her would be amazing, and thank you for everything you're doing and you have done for reading in this country and the worldwide and, uh, yeah, massively appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming on. It was been a pleasure, lovely to talk to you. Thank you ever so much.
