You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.
Chris Such’s tips:
- Learn about reading development (03:31)
- Analyse words using morphology and etymology (19:21)
- Assess reading difficulties and respond (26:53)
- Feign enthusiasm when necessary (38:54)
- Depressurise learning (48:17)
- BONUS: 7 micro-tips (1:04:37)
Links and resources
- On Twitter, Chris is: @Suchmo83
- Chris’ blog is: primarycolour.home.blog
- Chris’ book is The art and science of primary reading
- The episode of the Thinking Deeply about Primary Education podcast is here
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Watch the videos from Chris Such:
Podcast transcript:
Craig Barton 0:00
Hello, my name is Craig Barton and welcome to the tips for teachers podcast. The show that helps you supercharge your teaching one idea at a time. This episode I had the absolute pleasure of speaking to primary English specialist and author, Chris such. And I’ll tell you now this is one of my favourites. Yeah, it is a good one. Now sponsor slots for this podcast are open. So if you want to let the world’s most interesting listeners know about your book, product or event, just drop me an email out three other quick things. Firstly, just a reminder, you can view videos of all of Chris tips plus the tips of my other guests and 20 exclusive video tips from me on the tips for teachers website. These videos are great to share in an apartment or a training session. Secondly, you can sign up for the completely free tips for teachers newsletter, over 2000 of you have done so far. And that way you receive a exclusive tip in your inbox every Monday morning. And the idea is you try that out with your classes in the corner. And let your colleagues know about the newsletter if you think you’ll find it useful. And finally, if you do find this podcast useful, and I really hope you do, please could you take a brief moment now would be great. Just to review it on your podcast player of choice. It really does make a difference. Thanks. And a reminder, all of the newsletter videos and everything can be found on tips for teachers.co.uk. All right, back to today’s show. Let’s get learning with today’s guest the wonderful Chris on spoiler alert, here are Chris’s five tips. Tip one, learn about reading development. And I’ll tell you what that is absolutely fascinating that part of the conversation. Tip two, assess reading difficulties and respond. Tip three analyse word using morphology in atom ology. And I’m talking like, I know what they mean. Tip for failing Foos YaSM, when necessary. And Tip five depressurize learning. Now as I say at the start of our conversation, Chris is a primary specialist and an English specialist to areas that I am ashamedly A bit clueless about. So it was just fascinating to listen to Chris Oh, and as a bonus, when we finished those five tips, and I push Chris to share some of his micro tips that he shares on Twitter and we get through about four or five of those and they’re absolutely brilliant as well. If you look at the episode description on your podcast player, or visit the episode page on tips for teachers don’t code at UK. You’ll see I’ve timestamps each of the tips so you can jump straight to the one you want to listen to first or read. Listen, enjoy the show. I know you will.
Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Chris switch to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Chris. How are you?
Chris Such 2:48
Hi, Craig. Fantastic. It’s a real pleasure to be here.
Craig Barton 2:52
Dad happy that you’re here. For the benefit listeners. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself ideally in a sentence?
Chris Such 2:58
Yeah, hard to put it in one, but I’ll give it a go. I’m an experienced primary teacher and school leader from Peterborough. And I’m now a reading consultant. And I guess the thing I’m probably most well known is a very strong word to use. But I’m known as the the author of the art and science of teaching primary reading. So yeah, that’s me.
Craig Barton 3:19
Fantastic. Now, I’m often out of my depth when I interview people, but I’m doubly out of my depth with you because I’m clueless at primary and I’m clueless about all things English and reading. So this could go either way this, Chris, but I’m looking forward to it. Let’s dive dive straight in. What’s the first tip you’ve got for us today?
Chris Such 3:35
First tip is that I think teachers should learn about reading development. Now everyone is a teacher of literacy to some extent, we have a shared responsibility across the profession for making sure that pupils become confident, capable readers. And it means that I think it’s incredibly valuable that all teachers develop some understanding of what reading is, and how people learn to do it. Now, the easiest thing for me to do here would be to say, okay, that’s the tip. Now, go read my book. But I read, I understand that lots of people, if not, the majority, won’t have the time or the inclination to read a whole book about reading. So with your permission, what I’d like to try and do is to sum up what reading is and how we do it. For your listeners in I don’t know five or six minutes is okay, perfect. Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s probably a bit beyond me, but I’m gonna give it a go. So, I think a good place to start is with spoken language. When you are trying to understand what someone is saying and you’re working out what’s what’s going on with their words, you are comprehending their language and what we mean by that is we are not remembering the exact words they say you are building a mental model of the relates to the thing they’re talking about. So in short, you’re building meaning from their words, and this relies on certain knowledge, knowledge of the words themselves. In the real world concepts that the words refer to, and it also relies on your knowledge of how those words interact. Now we learn this stuff fairly naturally, something we’ve evolved to do, because spoken language is at least kind of 10s of 1000s of years old. And we do this thing when we’re reading. This is one competency that we need to develop in order to be able to read language comprehension, building meaning from words. But there is a second competency that we need to develop when we’re reading, and that is the ability to recognise words on a page. Now, this is the case because of course, written language doesn’t work directly with spoken sounds, it works through representing words using squiggles on a page. So in order to recognise words on a page, we need to become experts in dealing with our writing system. So if we want to know how reading develops, we need to know a bit about our writing system. So I’m gonna explain a little bit about it now. Because we are trying to represent spoken language in squiggles on a page, what we do in English is we try and take some of those sounds, and encode them, we try and pick a set of symbols and represent some sounds. Now there are different choices that we could have made with our writing system for you kind of what size chunk of sounds to deal with. But the size chunk of sound that we deal with in our writing system is something called the phoneme, we can think of it as the atom of our spoken language are the smallest chunks of sounds that we can categorise in spoken language. So for example, in the word shop, we can break that down into these atoms of spoken sound. And we can tell that they’re phonemes, because I can’t take and break it down any further, I can’t break that into two separate sounds. So at heart, our writing system takes this size chunk of sound, and tries to represent it in symbols. Other languages use different sized chunks of sound. So Japanese represents syllables. For example, that doesn’t work in English, we represent phonemes. So
in English, we will use that letters of an alphabet, either individual letters or small groups of letters to represent individual phonemes. And when we do that, we call that individual letter or set of letters, or grapheme. There are relationships between the phonemes and graphemes, in our writing system, that it relationships in effect between the sounds and the letters we use to spell them. So if we’re going to recognise a word on a page, like shop, we have to identify the phonemes. So up, but we then also need to be able to blend them together because our isn’t a word shop is a word. So in short, for us to recognise words, we need to be able to know the relevant correspondence between sounds and spellings between phonemes and graphemes. And we also need to be able to use it. Now that would be a relatively easy thing to learn. If there were a nice one to one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, as there are in many languages, so in say Estonian or Finnish or Welsh, there is close to a one to one correspondence between the symbols and the sounds. So this means that as soon as you know how the word sounds, you can spell it and you know, you’re going to be right. But in English, that’s not the case. I mentioned the phoneme earlier, where we can represent that with the grapheme sh in words like shop, but we could also represent it with the grapheme CH, in words like Chef, and with other graphemes as well. So there is this complexity in our writing system, and we call it we can think of our writing system as this code of correspondences between graphemes and phonemes. And it’s a complex code. Now the reason for this complexity is because English written language is really old. And our pronunciations have evolved over time. It’s been built around lots of different languages that have been used as people have come into people have come into England. So it’s really complex. But the other reason why it’s complex is because there are chunks of meaning that are spelt consistently in our language. So take the word walked, and the word hinted. Both of them have this IDI bit on the end that shows that we’re talking about the past. And it’s spelt the same way in both words, which is useful, but they represent different sounds we say hinted we don’t say walk it. So this is the reason why we have this complexity in our writing code, because there’s meaning that’s encoded in there as well and because of the history of our words, but in short, if we are going to recognise words, we need to become experts in this writing code. That’s base Around the phoneme, and we need to kind of experts in using this code as well. So that’s how we recognise words when we can use that code and when we know about that code, but we also have this other competency that I mentioned at the start, which is building meaning from those words, when we can recognise words and build meaning from words, then we can read. And that’s kind of the short and long of it, just one, a couple, a couple of nuances to add there. I’ve talked about these competencies as if they’re entirely separate. I’ve said we’ve got word recognition, and language comprehension. The reality is that they become increasingly integrated, as we learn to read, which is the reason why when you read something, it won’t feel like you are recognising the words and then building meaning you’ll feel like you’re doing it all at the same time, because these two competencies, as we become expert, become increasingly integrated, are interwoven. And the very last thing I’ll say then is, okay, if there were these two competencies, how do we teach them? The short version of that is that explicit instruction for both of them is really useful, and vast experience of using them is essential. So in the case of word recognition, I’ve talked about that code of correspondences between phonemes and graphemes, between sounds and letters. If we teach some of that code explicitly and say, Look, this, this letter can represent this sound, if we teach that explicitly, and we teach children explicitly how to use that code. That’s called phonics. That’s all phonics is it’s just teaching some of that stuff that’s in our language explicitly. But we also need loads of experience of then putting that into practice to learn the majority of the code. Phonics isn’t going to teach children every single aspect of the code and where it’s going to be applied necessarily. Experience with text experienced decoding of first supervised and then eventually independently gives people that experience that pattern spotting so they learn the code, so a mixture of explicit instruction and vast experience. The same is true for the other competency for language comprehension. We, as I said, we learned that quite naturally when we’re exposed to a language rich environment, but we can also teach parts of it explicitly. I can teach vocabulary explicitly, I can teach a curriculum so that children know lots about the world to help them comprehend what they read, I can also teach children what to expect from different kinds of texts. In summary, there are these two competencies, word recognition and language comprehension. And if we develop both of these, then we can become an expert reader.
Craig Barton 12:38
Flipping, I could listen to you all day about this. I genuinely could I find it a fascinating area that I’m ignorant of completely. Just a couple of follow up questions on this, Chris. Firstly, is from my reading of Twitter, and it’s always a dangerous thing to do. I get the sense that there’s a big controversy here, particularly around phonics, loads of people are slagging off phonics left, right, and centre. Loads of people seem to be big advocates. Could you just summarise for someone as ignorant as me? What’s the debate there?
Chris Such 13:07
Oh, it’s very difficult to summarise but at heart. There is a lot of misunderstanding in this debate because the word phonics is used to describe lots of different things. So we can teach phonics in different ways and one of the ways to teach phonics is called systematic synthetic phonics. That’s where we teach the code and how to use it. And the systematic part means we plan it out and we organise it step by step. And we make sure that it kind of is incremental. So we start with the easiest bits to learn the most common bits in our language and we build up stage by stage. That’s what the systematic bit means. The synthetic bit means that we teach those correspondences from the very beginning. We don’t teach children to memorise loads of words and then go, Okay, now you know these words, you can recognise some correspondences within them. From the very beginning, we’re saying this word is tip IP tip from the very beginning, we’re teaching these correspondences. Now, there is a really good body of evidence to suggest that the best way to teach word recognition is through systematic phonics. And there’s a suggestive amount of evidence to suggest that doing that in a synthetic way. So teaching these correspondences from the very beginning, is is more effective. It isn’t absolutely overwhelming at this point. But phonics, but teaching phonics in a systematic way has a massive body of evidence for its efficacy, where the controversy comes is that people have tend to portray phonics as a way of teaching reading. And if you think about what I’ve just described, it’s a way of getting children started with the process of word recognition, which contributes to reading and so if you think that phonics is the way that reading is taught, you will assume that that completely ignores all of the other stuff. So in reception where systematic synthetic phonics is taught, alongside that we are developing pupils ability to comprehend words in speech, their ability to speak. We read wonderful stories and picture books to develop their understanding of the world. There are all of these other bits and pieces that come along with phonics. But if you have in your mind the idea that phonics is teaching reading and effectively, that’s all we’re doing, or that that is meaning that other aspects are being de prioritised. Then you can understand where the controversy might arise.
Craig Barton 15:30
Excellent. Got it. And just two final follow up questions from me Chris on there. So the first is, I’m I’m the father of a three year old and I’m panicking Chris straightaway write because you often hear as much detail I often hear parents say, or maths isn’t taught like it used to be when I was at school. I don’t know what’s going on with this. For me, as a parent, I’m thinking I don’t have a clue how readings taught at all. And I’m trying to do the best. We always rebooked me and Isaac. But I’m thinking should I be sounding out these words now and he’s I think what He specialises recognising his name, he can find his name and anywhere. But in terms of kind of recognising the word cow or something. It’s like he’s never seen it before in his life, even though most stories involve a cow at some point. So for a parent, like me have a three year old, and even for parents listening for slightly older students, who aren’t as familiar with obviously the technicalities of this, what what’s the best thing parents can be doing
Chris Such 16:23
today, saying the best thing that parents could be doing is, well, obviously engaging with reading what you’re doing already. But I would say that once children begin the process of word recognition, through the identification of phonemes, in words, I would start by encouraging that, excuse me, your school will, or your child’s school will almost certainly send home books that give them the opportunity to practice. The grapheme phoneme correspondences that they will be learning while they’re in school, that will be a really important thing for you to practice with them. So at first, when children are learning the most basic sound spelling correspondences, they might only have that the books that they bring home might only contain words like tip and top and pets and pattern, this sort of thing. And children, you’ll be encouraging your child to identify the sounds that are being represented. So it tip, and you’ll be encouraging them over time to do that for every word that they encounter. So identifying sounds within words is a really valuable thing to do, in particular, trying to identify these smallest chunks of sound, which will be easier when you see these decodable books is the key thing to allow them to kind of get started. I don’t think that there’s no harm whatsoever in enjoying texts at the moment. But when they begin to do that, make sure there’s lots of practice so that they embed as the go to method for recognising words, identifying the phonemes within words, and then blending them together.
Craig Barton 17:57
Fantastic. And final question. And I always like to try and play devil’s advocate when I interview so this is my horrible question to ask Chris. So as a secondary maths teacher, do I need to know all this? Or can I just kind of cross my fingers and hope it’s all been sorted by the time they arrive in September? Yes.
Chris Such 18:14
It’s a really good question. Because I know it’s pie in the sky to say, oh, okay, maths teachers, I want you to teach reading, as well as teaching, you know, algebra and certs and all that kind of stuff. That said, we by having a better understanding of reading, we are relatively able to identify where pupils are struggling with reading, we’re better able to support them. When we asked them, we want them to spell a word when we want to introduce a bit of vocabulary. By understanding how our writing system works at least a little bit, we’re able to teach them this in a way that builds on what they’ve already learned. Rather than just by saying, this is a word, I want you to know it equally, I would add my partner’s a secondary math teacher, but she’s also a form tutor. And she says she has benefited massively from being able to hear children read and start to recognise what the individual issues that they might have relating to reading are through a better understanding of how our writing system works and how reading happens. And I dare say that might relate to another tip I will describe later.
Craig Barton 19:16
Fantastic, and I love nothing more than a teaser as well. So that’s brilliant. Okay, what’s Tip number two, please.
Chris Such 19:25
So tip number two is to and again, like the first few tips I’m going to talk about I’m gonna relate to reading. So this is another one. I think it’s useful to analyse words to develop vocabulary. So earlier on when I was talking about the writing system, one of the things I said was that the history of words and these chunks of meaning are baked into our writing system. And when it comes to developing vocabulary, we can actually take advantage of this. So for example, if I want to teach A student what the word unhelpful means. I could just say, Here’s the word unhelpful. It means this, and I could get them to use it, I could get them to practice using it. And hopefully they would have learned that one word. In contrast, if I take that word unhelpful, and I break it down a little bit, I look for chunks of meaning such as well help on its own. Obviously, we know the meaning of that fall. This is the this is a chunk of meaning that turns a word into an adjective, which we see in other words, and earn this chunk of meaning at the start of the word unhelpful, which suggests that the meaning is somewhat changing, it’s being negated or the opposite in some way, by analysing the word into these components, we’re not just teaching them this one word, we’re helping them to understand their writing system that will support obviously, their reading. But they can also then apply this to new words that they learn. So if they come across the word, merciful, and they know what the word mercy means, they’re more likely to recognise Oh, this is an adjective that relates to mercy if they come across the word unnatural. By explicitly talking about this idea of this morpheme urn, we can recognise that, Oh, I see what’s going on here. This is this natural, it’s the opposite of this. It’s being negated. So by analysing words, we can support children to deal with new vocabulary, but also to be better readers. If I may, I’d like to give one more example of that as well. So in science, if we’re talking about the word microscope, again, I could get a microscope out, I could point at it and say this is a microscope. But if I start looking at the root words, in particular, that make up microscope, the, I believe these are both Greek root words, I need to check that might be Latin, but I think they’re Greek. If we identify micro meaning small, or I know in mathematics, it has quite a specific meaning I think it’s like is it 10 to the power of minus six or a million effectively and scope, meaning an observation device, then when pupils come across words like microfilm, and microwave and words like telescope and horoscope, again, by looking at these chunks of meaning, we haven’t just learned one word, we’ve learned some some bits and pieces that are useful for understanding our wider writing system. final example, you’ll you will already know this one, I’m sure. But say the word I saw Sully’s and I started these triangles. If we look at the root words, within there, we have isoft, meaning equal or the same, we have scalars, meaning I believe legs, so we have equal legs. So two equal legs in the triangle. So we’re talking about two equal sides. Now that’s useful for when if pupils come across the word, or this component of a word, this morpheme ISO relating to an isobar, or in chemistry an isomer, or an isotope, or even when you crack out the isometric paper in mathematics, you are, you’re kind of helped there. And the great thing is with something like isometric paper, the you know, the teacher down the corridor a few weeks before might have introduced children to the idea of iambic pentameter. And when they were talking about metre, they’re talking about measures in some way. And also when they were talking about pent, so five measures in some way in this poetic rhythm, you’re, they’re also relying on what the maths teacher a few years ago was taught when they introduced Pentagon, the idea of pentagon, so we’re talking about five here. The great thing about this is by understanding this stuff, and by introducing this stuff, we’re taking advantage of stuff that we kind of know implicitly through becoming expert teachers, but we’re making it explicit to children. And it allows us as well to forge genuine connections across the curriculum that are useful, rather than anything that might be kind of just tacked on.
Craig Barton 23:45
I love this. I absolutely love this. It was it’s been a relatively recent development in my teaching to look at words, etymologies. And I think it was maybe Alex Quigley, when I interviewed him years ago, he put me on to this. And maths is a fertile ground for this because there’s loads of Latin and Greek roots to words. And even if you just in Google etymology, and then the math word, you often get a really nice, kind of, almost like a tree diagram, which shows you this part came from here, and this part can, and there’s sometimes an interesting story behind as well, which is really nice. But I’ll tell you where it all kicks off for me, because you can help me with this, right? So maths is full of these, I’m gonna sound like I’m really fancy, it’s but one big word, I know these polysemous words, right, which are really problematic. So I’ll give you two examples. I’ll give you a kind of fairly obvious example, then my favourite example. So the obvious one is something like frequency. So if you imagine a kid’s just been in a science lesson, and they’ve been doing about wavelengths and stuff, and obviously frequency, then they come into the maths lesson and we start talking about frequency in terms of the number, the number of outcomes that’s happened in a probability thing. You can imagine how confusing that is for the kid right? Like how annoying is English the fact that you’ve got these words that mean completely different things, but I’ll tell you my all time favourite example of this and I’ll shut up and Dylan William told me this one is similar. So similar is a really bad word in maths because in the rest of the world, similar means a little bit alike. Whereas in the maps classroom, it is a terrible because it means a very specific thing, it means the shape has been enlarged by specific scale factor. And kids always get similar shape questions wrong. But Dylan told me, in Welsh, there’s a different word for the mathematical meaning of similar so it’s distinct from the other word. So the Welsh kids are absolutely fine on similar shape questions, whereas the the English kids are really struggling. So polysemous words, they’re problematic, aren’t they? I guess is my point there.
Chris Such 25:33
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think in most cases, there is still a kernel of, of truth behind them. So in terms of frequency, while they have these different specific meanings, there’s this underlying idea of how often something is happening in a given period. And recognising this with pupils and saying, well, at the heart of this, there is something that they have in common. But yes, we need to remember exactly how they work in in different subjects or in different topics. So yeah, it is a challenge and trying to take advantage of that similarity without it being similarity. Without it. Without it overwhelming, kind of their understanding. And then thinking that oh, it just means this exact thing in both cases is of course a challenge. I mean, I think an even greater challenge or the kind of relates to this. I’m what were some of my favourite words are words like cleave, where it means that the word cleave can mean to separate, and it can mean to bring together so it, it contains within it, it’s opposite definition. So cleave means. So how you deal with that? I don’t know and how that’s come about. About I don’t know. So but yes, no, there is there’s no getting around the complexities of of English, I’m afraid. But I do think there’s still a value to this, this pattern spot spotting at heart?
Craig Barton 26:51
Absolutely. Okay, Chris, what’s tip number three, please.
Chris Such 26:56
So it’s my last tip on reading. And it is when it comes to reading, assess, don’t assume. And what I mean by that is when I’ve spoken to secondary school leaders, when I’ve spoken to primary school teachers in places where I’ve worked as well, I’ve often seen teachers say, Well, this kid struggles with reading. And so we’re putting in place a reading intervention, which is a bit like saying, this student struggles with maths so I’m putting in a maths intervention. Well, what component of maths Are you focusing upon? What is it that they struggle with? Is it mental arithmetic? Is it they, they don’t have committed to memory number bonds and multiplication facts that they can then apply to more interesting mathematics? Is it is it other stuff? And the same is true with reading? So thinking about things that I’ve described in other tips, when we’re looking at someone who’s struggling with reading, is it the case that they simply completely lack the coat knowledge. So they come across a word like split, and they can’t say, Well, this could be
all it and they just don’t, they can’t do that. If so then that’s what they need to be taught. They need to be taught explicitly some code knowledge so that they can begin to recognise words for themselves. But perhaps a kid is fine with that maybe they’ve got a perfectly decent bank of code knowledge enough to get started adequately reading and being successful reading words. But maybe they can’t blend words so they could recognise it. But when they try to blend it together, they say, Sit or spit. That’s a really common issue that children come across. And if that’s the issue, target that support that intervene with this particular thing. But even then it may be a particular student is struggling with reading, and they’re fine with those two things. It’s just that when they come to come across words, with multiple syllables, polysyllabic words, they start to struggle. So maybe they need support, breaking the words down into syllables, and then decoding each of those and putting it back together. And again, maybe the student is fine with that, when what they struggle, when you hear them read, what you notice is that they’re decoding words fairly well, but it’s very stopped start. It is there’s no fluency. There’s no flow whatsoever. And in this case, what they probably need is lots of practice. They don’t need an intervention, necessarily that relates to teaching the code or how to use it. They need lots of guided practice with someone they need to be heard, read. But again, maybe a student’s fine with all of that you hear them read, it sounds pretty fluent, but they just don’t seem to be understanding anything that’s in the text. And maybe that student needs a brief intervention to awaken them to the idea that it’s their responsibility to be actively comprehending rather than just letting the words flow by or maybe they have issues relating to maybe they don’t recognise the words that are in the text, maybe they don’t understand the concepts that are being described by the text. And maybe that means that when it comes to their knowledge of the world and their vocabulary They don’t have that to the extent that it helps them in relation to the sort of things they’re going to learn at school, they might have a really broad and deep vocabulary in other things, but in the kind of things we want them to learn at school, it’s not there. And so maybe we support with that, in short, just saying, this kid’s got reading difficulties, here’s a reading thing that we do is nowhere near is nowhere near good enough, and it isn’t going to support children, you can spend lots of time when you have lots of wasted time in trying to help them and I can, I can imagine what listeners are thinking right now, which is, okay, I’m a teacher, I’m not in charge of how we support children’s reading across the school. How can I possibly assess this stuff? How can I work out what’s going on? Well, nothing is an adequate replacement for genuine systematic assessment in a school with you know, phonics assessments that identify different components of fluency assessment, and perhaps even standardised comprehension assessment. That kind of stuff is really valuable if we want to work out who is struggling to learn to read. And yet, it can still be valuable to assess these things just through hearing a child read, if you hear them read for a couple of minutes, you can identify well, do they have coat knowledge? Are they recognising? You know, the the sound that the phoneme or the phoneme? When they’re coming across it in writing? Is it blending that they’re having a problem with when you ask them to sound it out? Is it kind of if you say, Read this words, and they’re identifying phonemes, okay, but they’re not blending it, then that’s the problem is a fluency issue, as I mentioned, is it stopped start does a read, seemingly redefined, but don’t understand, just by hearing children read for a couple of minutes from a roughly age appropriate book, we can get a pretty good grasp of, well, what stuff do I do they need support with? Do I just need an opportunity to hear hear them read in form time? Or do as some schools have done? Can I just set them a set of a system where sixth formers are occasionally hearing struggling readers from year seven? What what’s what support can I put in place to match the difficulties with reading that they are having? So in other words, as I say, assess individual reading difficulties, and this can be done in quite an informal way, rather than than just assuming you can tackle reading as a whole thing.
Craig Barton 32:16
Oh, I love this, right. I love I always love a link to math, as you’ll know. And I like that you often get kids say, I don’t like maps, I hate maps, I can’t do maths. And then it’s when you dig into it, you find out actually, it’s algebra that they don’t like, and then you dig in a bit further. And it’s specific thing within algebra. And my first question is, do you find can kids do that? Generally, if they say, I don’t like reading, and you dig in a bit? Bit more kind of specific? So what is it about reading? You know, like, can they? Do you find kids can identify, oh, it’s the blending? I can’t do? Or? Or is it more is the oldest more on the teacher to identify make sense.
Chris Such 32:52
And with reading, it’s very much more the case that it’s on the teacher to identify that stuff. Because if you can’t usually, if you can’t do one of these things, particularly if it’s something quite foundational, like, identify words, then it tends to be the case that pupils really will not like reading, because often they’ve been asked to do lots of it. And they have effectively struggled with it for years and years and years. So they’re being perfectly honest, when they say I don’t like reading because it because our understanding of what we read is almost like this emergent property that comes from these two competencies that I mentioned, when they say I don’t like reading, yes, there might be something individual that’s underpinning that this problem. It’s probably not the case that that’s the bit that they don’t like, and it’s probably almost certainly the case that they can’t recognise their own, the bit that they are struggling with.
Craig Barton 33:46
Got it. And my final question is, you mentioned there that if I’ve got this right, kids could be struggling with the phonemes, the blending the fluency or the comprehension? Is that very much a hierarchy? Is it kind of if you don’t get the first one, and if you struggle with a phonemes, you can’t do anything else is? And does that mean? If If you sense that a student is struggling with reading, it’s almost like a checklist that you can go through to say, have they got that they have they got that? Or is that oversimplifying things?
Chris Such 34:12
Oh, no, there’s there’s I think there’s definitely a sense of hierarchy. It isn’t the case that we teach it in a hierarchical fashion in that we don’t have to wait until children have, you know, developed understanding of sound spelling correspondences to teach language comprehension. We can be teaching and should be teaching these bits kind of side by side. But in terms of word recognition, it is definitely the case that I if a child can’t recognise words, then for me to say, Oh, well, they can’t comprehend. Well, I’ve no i It might be the case that there’s vocabulary problems there as well or when it comes to academic stuff, but I won’t be able to tell that because they can’t recognise words. So if in doubt, the way you want to approach this is the stuff that we teach through phonics, so code knowledge and blending. If that’s not there, that’s to go to, that’s the first thing you would deal with because you can’t be a fluent reader. If you haven’t developed some level of expertise with that, if that’s in place, then your next port of call is fluency. If the reading is reading as this fluent, then even if they have brilliant understanding of the world, and of the vocabulary we’re going to use in schools, they’re probably still not going to be able to grasp what they read, because the words will simply be not flowing fast enough and automatically enough for them to be able to devote the cognitive resources to comprehension. So if phonics seems to be okay, the stuff you teach them, phonics seems to be okay, the next port of call is fluency. If that’s okay, as well, then I would start looking at comprehension stuff because you can’t actually work out whether comprehension is the issue in and of itself, if the other bits and pieces aren’t sorted. So there is this hierarchical nature in terms of, well, what am I looking for? So yeah, I would say that that’s definitely the case. And I dare say, I kind of spelled that out in one of the chapters of of my book.
Craig Barton 35:59
Amazing, amazing. Now I’m aware, we’re going to move away from reading. So I’ve got to ask you a bonus question here, Chris. And this is I’ve been looking for someone to ask, you know, stuff for ages on there. So you’re my mom here. So here we go. So when I started my kind of mid career crisis, when I started reading, all about cognitive load theory, and all this kind of stuff, one of the things that really struck me was this redundancy effect, how it’s a really bad idea to kick it with loads of redundant information. And one kind of, kind of practical application on there seem to be that if you give kids like a word problem, I’m talking maths here. So if you’ve got some problems, where they’ve got to read three or four sentences, you know, somebody’s buying an ice cream, it’s all kicking off, blah, blah, blah, what I’ve done in the past is I’ve kind of bang that up on the board, then all of a sudden, first, I start talking about it. And that’s really problematic, because the kids haven’t had chance to read it. And then they’re like, they’re trying to read it. I’m trying to listen to me at the same time. And that’s it, that’s a disaster. But the thing I’ve really struggled with is, when a word problem appears on the board, is it a good idea for me to start kind of Trump, you know, kind of tracking along and reading it with the kids? Or should I just shut up and let them read it first, and then we read it together? Is, is the good practice for this? Because I get the sense that this could you know, this is applicable to all teachers of all subjects?
Chris Such 37:14
Yeah. So when it comes to the redundancy effect this with reading, people will say, well, it’s clearly the case that if I am reading the text at all talking over the text, or even just like say, just reading aloud for children, then probably they’re trying to read it at the same time as they’re trying to listen to it. And that’s going to be problematic. Now, this doesn’t mean that it’s never a good idea to read text that’s shown with children. If you’re doing that, and you’ll say, reading text and pointing to words, you might be developing their ability to recognise the patterns within written English, if that’s what you’re aiming for, that might be a useful thing to do. But in this case, that’s almost certainly not what your main focus is, you want them to understand this question, I would probably advise that either you cover it and read it aloud to them first, and then show it to them. Or the reverse, you show them it, they have the chance to read it. And then you say, okay, eyes on me, maybe even hide it, and then say, now I’m going to read it aloud, I’m going to read it, I’m gonna say the question aloud to you as well. So they’re not doing both at the same time. In short, when it comes to reading something that allowed that’s on, that’s also shown to the pupils in a class. It really depends on what your goals are, if you’re maybe trying to support the development of word recognition and understanding the patterns of our of our spelling system might be a good thing. And if, however, you’re looking for them to understand the question, comprehend it, then and that’s your main focus, you’re probably best off giving them a chance to read it first on their own before reading yourself, or the other way round, reading it to them, then giving them the chance to read it themselves.
Craig Barton 38:52
Amazing. Okay, Chris, tip number four, please.
Chris Such 38:57
Okay, so moving away from reading now. This one is kind of quite personal to me. I think it is a really important thing, to some extent, at least to feign enthusiasm for every aspect of what it is you are going to teach. Now. I would imagine as secondary teachers, you probably have quite a deep love for almost everything you teach, maybe not everything, maybe not everything but close to everything you teach, even if not the process of teaching. It’s certainly the kind of mathematics that’s behind it. Whereas a primary school, we teach everything. And so there are going to be bits and pieces that we just don’t really aren’t really interested in. But I’d like to kind of share a little anecdote. A few years back, I think was about five years ago, I had the privilege of observing two teachers teaching the same lesson. They had planned it together, they decided what they were going to do and they taught it one after the other so that I could watch both teachers having a go at it. And it was a history lesson and we have these artefacts that we got from the local museum. And one teacher introduced the artefacts and said, Okay, so this is what we’ve got here. I know it doesn’t look particularly interesting, but there’s some, there’s some nice stuff here, it tells it links to our Victorians topic. And then the lesson was fine. The kids learned plenty, and it was fine. It worked, okay. And as I was there as this tray of artefacts was being passed to the teacher next door, and the teacher next door, immediately covered it with like a tea towel, and then took it into the room next door, and you can imagine what’s gonna happen next, she said, Well, these artefacts, now, these are going to blow your mind, because we’ve been learning about the Victorians. And this is going to give us such an insight into what we know anyway, effectively just implied that this stuff was fascinating stuff. And then there’s this big reveal, and the children were fascinated. Now I recognise that this might feel a bit primary, you know, this, this almost like being a Blue Peter presenter. But I think having worked briefly in secondary schools, particularly as a, you know, a teaching assistant who saw lots and lots of teachers, I lost count of the number of times when teachers introduced something and effectively said, Well, I know this isn’t the most interesting thing in the world, but and that sense of being apologetic for what you’re teaching, I really didn’t like, and I just, maybe this is just a prejudice. I can’t say it’s anything that’s based on evidence, necessarily, but I always thought, there’s at least one person in the room, even if it’s just me as the Teaching Assistant, there’s one person in the room who finds this fascinating. It doesn’t matter how dull something sounds, there’s likely to be at least one person who’s actually kind of interested in this stuff. And even if there isn’t, it’s your job to portray to embody this idea that what you’re teaching has inherent worth, even if you don’t think it does. So. Yes, the tip is feign enthusiasm, at least to an extent for what it is you are trying to help children to learn.
Craig Barton 41:50
Right, this I’m looking forward to this because the first thing to say I am 100%. With you, I 100% agree with you. The flip side is I’ve struggled with so I’ll tell you a few errors I’ve made. So there are a few. I love maths, I would happily do maths all day long. I do about 95% of maths all day long, there’s 5% that I can’t stand. So I’ll tell you a couple of them now. So I am really bad at visualising things in 3d spatial, I really struggle. And you’ve got to teach 3d trigonometry and 3d Pythagoras and I can’t I really struggle and I don’t like it. I really don’t like it. And in the past, I’ve been I’ve tried this technique, I’ve said, Look, I find this really hard. I’m not a massive fan of this, but I think we can we can get through it. And I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. But I’ll tell you what’s definitely not a good idea. I’ve done this before, I’ve had year 10s. And year elevens tend to be like Lower, lower achieving students in the lower sets. And I’ve said to them, let’s say we’re doing I don’t know, solving linear equations or whatever. And I’ll say, right, we’re gonna do this topic today, I’m not gonna lie, it’s a bit boring. But we just got to get through it, because we’re gonna get good at it. But it’s might be a little bit painful. Now, my logic with doing that is to try and get these kids on board. Because I think one of the differences between kind of, perhaps secondary and primary in this regard is often you’ll get kid you’re reteaching things to kids who’ve seen it before, and maybe have failed with it before. And therefore if I’m going in and saying this is the best thing you’ve ever seen in your life, and they see a linear equation, they think, Oh, my god are messed up in this in year seven, year eight, you know? Yeah. So I think that’s where there’s a little bit of not room for manoeuvre, but certainly, you know, opportunity just to think about it a little more. Because when you’re dealing with kids who know they don’t like something out have struggled before, it can almost backfire. If you say this is going to be great. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Chris Such 43:42
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no, I think, particularly as you say, when you’re teaching pupils that maybe have, you know, gone off the train with with their learning to some extent there aren’t a fan of it. There is a subtlety in here, which is to suggest that you want to imply that the subject is interesting, in that you find it interesting and that lots of people find it interesting. While there might be an acceptance that the pupils themselves might not find it interesting yet, you know, this is it or even this is, this is a really tricky thing to learn, like lots of the things we learned and so it might be while it’s tricky, you might not love it as much as I do. But it’s so sometimes to sell something you don’t have to necessarily convince other people that no you have to love this. It’s more about I really like this. I think this is really interesting. So I’d like to teach it to you. So that kind of thing. In the same way if someone tried to convince me that rugby league was the most interesting thing in the world. I if they were kind of saying to me No, no, you’ve got to find this interesting. It’s brilliant because yeah, I would find that a little bit oppressive, but if they were saying if they just told me why they loved rugby league, what it won’t matter to them. Why they love talking about it. That’s much more of an inviting a proposition. So yeah, there’s a balance there between showing that you find it a subject intro First thing and that it has inherent worth, rather than saying, but and that means you have to love it in the same way I do.
Craig Barton 45:06
I love that. I love that as a really useful distinction. And final question on this, Chris. So what do you do yourself? If you will? First? Can you give us an example of something you may teach that you’re not a big fan of? And how would you almost kind of prep for kind of presenting that to kids? Because one way to look at it is you kind of been a bit fake about it. Right? But you know, give us an example
Chris Such 45:26
where it’s funny should say fake because I, you know, mentioned this particular tip elsewhere before and someone responded, most people were very positive about it and said, Yep, that’s, you know, we have to do that a primary etc. And to an extent that secondary, this is kind of a big part of what we do. Someone said, I think this is ethically dubious, which was not something I’d considered before. I thought, I wonder what they make of CVBS or blue, they must think those people are, you know, like, for the scaffold, but but never mind. Putting that to one side. There is a sense of, arguably dishonesty, though I would argue there’s also a sense of fake it till you make it because I struggle with this. Because if you say to me, what bit of teaching, do you not enjoy? It isn’t actually the stuff that I’m not personally interested in. It’s the stuff that I find a bit of a faff. So primary teaching of science practicals. I don’t like doing that. But I love science. I love practical investigations themselves in science, but teaching it I don’t particularly enjoy. What I would say is, I’m completely honest with pupils, if there was something that I don’t, I’m not particularly good at, you know, I’m I don’t have physical disabilities. Now, I haven’t always but have physical disabilities. Now, if I have to go and teach netball, I’m not going to pretend that I love it. And I’m brilliant at it. I am going to pretend that it’s it’s a good sport. It’s interesting stuff. So there’s that distinction. In terms of preparation, I think the most valuable thing you can do is taking the time and again, this is maybe a slightly more primary thing, taking the time just to understand your subject a bit better, maybe speak to someone who does love this stuff and saying, Well, why do you enjoy it? What do you what do you get out of it? If you’re struggling to kind of imagine even what is interesting about this thing, but generally taking a few moments just to kind of think, well, why might someone find this interesting is it is enough, it’s just enough in your kind of planning phase, if it’s something you really don’t like to kind of wrap your head around it. But again, I just want to emphasise, I’m not saying that we necessarily like dancing around the room and saying that this is incredible. It’s just through your body language, not doing the opposite, not giving the impression that you don’t like this stuff, or that is boring. Because I’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen teachers give that impression. And I’ve seen it happen in classes where there are obviously students who do love this stuff. I saw this I remember particularly in and it was in a lesson. When I was a teaching assistant. They were talking about metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary rocks and the distinctions between them. And the teacher was like, rocks, isn’t it? And there were at least a couple of kids in the room who were like, yeah, it’s rocks. I love this stuff. So I think at the very least, we can’t, we should be careful not to, to curb other people’s enthusiasm.
Craig Barton 48:14
That’s brilliant. Okay, Chris, what is tip number five, please.
Chris Such 48:19
Another one that’s kind of quite close to my heart. I think we need to take pains to depressurize learning. I think we forget, sometimes what a strange circumstances is that children learning, they are learning lots of stuff for the first time in a room full of their peers, who are often their circle of friends. They are developing as human beings at the same time as learning this stuff. And so the potential for negative emotions, negative relationships with that learning content to develop is there’s a real potential for that, and we want to avoid it. And in particular, I think about the time that I spent working for a couple of years, specifically with groups of children in year five and six, who had fallen out of love with learning completely, they had struggled, and they needed to be kind of turned round effectively in their attitudes towards learning. And when I kind of dug down into what had happened in their learning experiences, and when I thought back to my time as a TA, I recognised something in particular, in the classroom, we want children to become more resilient. We want them to deal be able to deal with all sorts of emotions. So a small amount of excitement over excitement and fear and frustration and disappointment. That’s, that’s natural, and that’s healthy in small doses. But there’s one particular emotion one particular feeling that I think is toxic for learning, even in the smallest of doses is so it’s like the cyanide of learning and that is humiliation or embarrassment. And it’s almost impulse able to avoid entirely pupils will be embarrassed relating to learning in class. And an essential thing that we need to do is to develop a set of strategies that support us to minimise that embarrassment when it happens, and to preempt it and prevent it where we can. So that’s all well, all well and good in theory, let me talk about some practical examples of that. So, for example, I don’t tend to ever say that a question or a bit of learning that we’re doing is easy. Or even if two pupils have had a go away for a while, I’ll never say, oh, yeah, you can do this. Now this is easy stuff. Because there is nothing more pressurising than being told, here’s the thing, you might fail that, it’s really easy. That is a terrifying proposition. So I never ever talked about easy use. And one thing I’ve noticed about working with students that struggle in particular, is they have a very unique, almost relationship with the idea of difficulty with work they are, they tend to go from one extreme to the other, something is impossible, I can’t do it, I don’t get this at all. Then as soon as they begin to understand something, they’re right to the other end of the spectrum. This is easy, I can do this. And they’re just anything Oh, easy, because hold off there a little, because you might struggle in a moment, and I don’t want you to feel. So what I tend to do is try and reframe this conversation around difficulty by saying everything we learn is tricky. Everything we learn is tricky. You might find it to it might feel easier once you’ve done loads of practice. But everything is tricky while we’re learning it. So reframing that conversation and saying to pupils, if they say, Oh, this is easy, actually saying, well hang on a minute. I think this is still really tricky. If you’ve done lots and lots of practice, and it feels easy. Now, grey, but don’t worry if there are some struggles, because this is really tricky stuff. So always selling stuff as tricky. Don’t overdo it. And don’t say, This is impossible. You’ll never learn this stuff. I always say we can do this. But it’s tricky, is, I think a sensible way to depressurize learning. There are loads of other things you can do, though. So maybe this is something that applies more to young children. But I think it might apply to older children as well. If I want to ask a kind of question that has a relatively simple right or wrong answer of the class. And for whatever reason, I’m not going to use mini whiteboards. I’m going to ask individual students, I don’t tend to ask one child who gives me an answer. And then I say, Well, yes, that’s right. or No, that’s wrong. What I tend to do is I’ll ask five or six pupils, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? What do you think? What do you think? And then I’ll say, actually, the answer is this. I’m not responding to that, then to any individual student. If one or two of the pupils have got it wrong, by the time I’ve had all that feedback, it’s not really that one person has got it wrong. No one’s really noticing, who’s got it right or wrong at that point. We’re just discussing things as a class. So if I’m looking to ask for whatever reason, a right or wrong answer, I don’t tend to then say this is right, or this is wrong directly to that one student immediately, I’ll ask a group and then clearly explain what the right answer is. And why.
Another thing? So if I’m giving answers out in the class, if we’ve done a quiz, say and I’m saying, Well, this is the answer to number one, this is the answer to number two. This is the answer number three, etc. May be a primary thing again, but I think I’ve seen it in secondary, certainly in year seven, in the past as well, kids might start to go as they’re taking their answers. Yes, yes. Yes. And this starts with this little chorus of appreciation for themselves that they’ve got it right. Now. I always like to ask the question, and if you take one thing away from this tip, it’s this. It’s how does the child who’s got this wrong feel right now? And can I minimise if there’s a negative feeling? Can I minimise that? Because those students going Yes, yes. Yes. is just not a pleasant thing for the person who is who’s got these things wrong. They’ve tried their best. They haven’t quite learned it yet. This doesn’t make sense. And they’ve got this thing ringing in their ears. So I put a stop to that. I say, Okay, can you know, I don’t want to hear you here. Yes. If you’re really glad you’ve got it. Right. Fantastic. Keep that for yourself, though. For now, just because I’m always hyper aware of how this feels for you, or for the students that maybe haven’t understood something. My favourite depressurized. depressurizing strategy, though, is if a kid does get something wrong, and there’s this moment of social embarrassment. I would as quickly as possible say, oh, you know what, when I was learning this, that’s exactly what I got wrong. I got that wrong as well. Because on the assumption that I hope the class see me as someone who’s relatively competent, and confident in the subject, me saying, Yep, we’re in the same boat. I got that wrong as well. you’re well on your way to learning it. The way I have is just a way to share that social embarrassment and just to take the pressure down as much as I possibly can. So yeah, just just one last one as well, because I know this doesn’t quite relate to learning in the same way. But I think it’s it’s connected. One of the things I remember in my The N Qt year we had a non uniform day. And all the teachers, one of the pupils were encouraged to turn up in, in non uniform, and I turned out without my usual shirt and tie. And there were a couple of kids who had forgotten and or who hadn’t got the letter, and they felt embarrassed. And from then on, I always forget, I always turn up in my shirt and tie so that when that pupil comes in the room, and they’ve got that look on their face of oh, I can’t believe I forgot non uniform day. I can say the same thing. And like, Yeah, me too. I forgot. Just like a bit of embarrassment, shared just doesn’t feel anywhere, like as toxic. So yeah, just finding ways to think about the student who’s got something wrong in that moment. And to make them not feel quite so embarrassed or humiliated, is at the heart of good teaching. I think.
Craig Barton 55:53
Flipping there, Chris, I think there’s a big claim alert coming in. And this is one of the most important tips we’ve we’ve had so far on this series. As it’s such a biggie, this is such a biggie, just just two things from me on this, I think you’ve you’ve done the theory, and you’ve come up with some amazing practical ways. So just just a couple of things for me. The first is I’m I’m a massive advocate of what, again, Dylan million or Dylan William calls tools of mass participation. So things like mini whiteboards, ABCD cards, and so on with with the theory being If a question is good enough, if you think a question is good enough to ask, you want to get as many responses to that question as possible. Now, the thing is, I don’t know if you’ve, you’ve experienced this yourself, but particularly with like ABCD cards, where if you use a diagnostic question, particularly if they’re call it, kids will do this kind of tactical delay, where you’ll say, okay, 321, show me your responses, and you’ll get a few kids will just hold five, just check that everyone else is thinking a similar thing to them. And then they’ll kind of stick there. And when the problem with that, of course, you all immediately you lose all the benefits of mass participation, because now there’s a kind of consensus to copy what their kind of so called smartest kid in the classes is doing and so on. I always sense that that is tools of mass participation. One thing that people don’t seem to appreciate by them is that there’s potential for embarrassment there, right? Like, even if everyone’s showing their responses, and you are thought of something different, you’ve got to be quite a confident kid to first stick with that response and not, you know, resist the temptation to change. But then also, as a teacher, I’m fascinated as to why you think what you think. But that takes some confident kid then to, as you say, to kind of sift through the embarrassment and say, No, I do think the answer is B, even though everyone else thinks it’s C. And the chances are, I’m wrong. It just sounds to me, it just feels to me that this these tools of mass participation, that’s kind of one side effect to them that we need to be aware of as a teacher, if that makes sense.
Chris Such 57:43
Yeah. And I think an essential part of that, if I may go back to the if I anecdotally talk about the times that I worked with students that were really struggled with that, who they were the kids who for years and years had been the kid who held up the whiteboard, it was not the right answer. And it’s tempting to say that well put aside this stuff. There’s just effective ways of teaching, and we’ve got to use them from the very beginning. I think that with most classes, there is a sense in which you have to balance the possibility for embarrassment with, these are the considerations. And what I mean by that is, if you have got a class who are really struggling with social embarrassment, they haven’t developed a sense that they are mostly successful in your subject, then you might need to tone this stuff down. Even if you think of it as the most brilliant, most effective pedagogical tool that you’ve got to hand, you might need to put that to a side for a little while. So thinking about the children that I worked with, what I wanted to do straightaway, was to give them lots and lots of challenging maths and writing bits and lots and lots of struggle straightaway, because I know how productive that can be when done well. But I recognised fairly quickly that now I’ve got to get these kids on board. First, they need to feel kind of successful in mathematics kind of successful with spelling kind of successful with writing, reading, etc. Before I can start using this, this sense of productive struggle. So there is always this trade off and with a lot of these tools. And the question is, and I guess that’s the art of teaching rather than the science behind it, that that that side of going okay, so at what point am I prioritising this sent this relationship with the subject that I’m trying to develop with them? And at what point am I prioritising just the most effective pedagogical tool because I recognise they’re at a stage where they can deal with the odd wrong answer here or there. And that can be over a longer period of time, but it can also be in a lesson, if you think I’ve asked a couple of things. And a few students have struggled. And I can see there, there’s some heads dropping here. It might be think, well, we’re going to do some bits and pieces for a while. Well, I know I’ll be able to get there. I’ll know I’ll be able to rebuild that sense of success with them. I’m going to do that for 10 or 15. then it’s not going to do this next bit because they’re not quite ready for that struggle. So reflecting, not just so it comes back in some ways to formative assessment, but you’re not just assessing, what have they learned? You’re also assessing? How, what’s their relationship with the subject, like in this moment right now? And how can I adapt my instruction in light of that,
Craig Barton 1:00:23
that’s fascinating that I often think of this in terms of, you get people who weren’t, let’s take mini whiteboards, or whatever it may be, they invest time into getting the routine right for mini whiteboards. And that may mean in the short term, they go a lot slower than a teacher who just kind of dive straight in and says, When use mini whiteboards, but that investment pays off in the long term, because the kids, you know, develop this routine, and much quicker using them and so on. But it almost feels to me like another investment we need to make before we start using these tools is to make sure we’ve got this right culture in the classroom where kids have got this foundation of success, they’re not afraid to be wrong being wrong, seen as a natural part of learning. If we don’t invest in that as well, then, as you say, doesn’t matter how effective the pedagogical tool is, if the kids aren’t willing to participate, then you know, forget about it. So yeah, that feels really, really important.
Chris Such 1:01:11
And that’s a whole school culture thing as well, it’s quite possible that you will inherit, again, primarily the idea of inheriting a whole class, but it’s quite possible, you will inherit a class who maybe struggle with the subject, but have developed a pretty decent relationship with it, where you can go straight in with these pedagogical tools that might cause a little bit of social embarrassment, because they’re used to it, they’re ready for it, they know that in the end, they’re successful, you know. So it isn’t necessarily that you always have to start the year with this stuff. It will depend on the class, it depends on the culture, across the school, etc. But it’s something to bear in mind, I think,
Craig Barton 1:01:44
brilliant. And the final thing just on this, just Just a quick one here. I love this idea. And I’m going to do this now, Chris, of banning the word easy from my vocabulary, when I’m talking about things, it’s gonna be hard for me because I must say about a million times, but it’s gotta go. I completely agree. The other one you often hear is smart, not describing kids as smart. And I guess it’s for the same reason, right? Like, if you tell a kid that they’re smart, then all of a sudden, that kid can’t be wrong, because then by definition, they’re not smart. Would would? Would that be something that you’d kind of try and avoid as well, for a similar reason?
Chris Such 1:02:17
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know that there’s the research into things like growth mindset is debated, rather than absolutely certain. But putting aside the research and just thinking about my experiences, and I know that that’s a, that’s a, that’s a very dangerous thing to say, for someone who likes to consider myself relatively informed by evidence. But just thinking about that, just my personal experiences, telling kids that they’re clever, and telling them that they’re smart, particularly in front of other kids is, it’s just I just don’t see the value of it. i It suggests that we that we value something that is inherent to inherent to them, rather than something that they can develop. So yeah, I absolutely I at heart, I agree with the idea of not really trying to talk about kids being intelligent or smart. I want to talk about what they can do, and what they can do now and what they’re going to be able to do in the future. And that sounds a bit instrumentalist. But that’s, that’s where I’m at. And I think, yeah, I can’t think of the last time that I’ve wanted or felt the need to describe again, say, Oh, well done, you must be really smart. And again, just thinking back to that class that I’ve had, of all the kids, you can guarantee for every relatively high attaining child there is who’s been called smart or for every time they’ve been called Smart. It is the it the kids that are called smart in my experience the most and who developed the most odd and an unproductive relationships, counterproductive relationships, I should say, with words like this. It’s the children who are struggling with attainment, because teachers go to the other end of the spectrum, they will draw a picture, or they will answer some math questions. And they’ll say, Oh, can I go and show this to someone? And invariably, they’ll say, Wow, aren’t you smart? So and again, how one incredible way to pressurise the learning that they’ve done, you’ve got 10 Right, you’re smart, or what happens when they’ve got five? How do they feel when they get to? So yeah, I even if necessarily we don’t have the research to back it up on a personal level I am. I am very big into the the emotional side that we we deal with when it comes to things like growth mindset.
Craig Barton 1:04:35
Amazing. Well, I’ll tell you what, Chris, they were five absolutely fantastic tips. Do you have time just for a couple of minutes just to deep dig into some micro tips Is this alright, I’d absolutely love to Yeah. Oh, this subreddit, right. So for people who don’t know Chris tweets out these micro tips on Twitter, and you’ve also got a thread where you have them all now and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Now apart from the fact my legal team will be in contact about taking my idea of tips for teachers. I thought it would The good thing here just kind of dig into some. So I’ve listed seven map down. Now, obviously, we’re not gonna have a lengthy discussion about law, I was thinking maybe I could read each one out. And then if you felt there was anything you needed to add, feel free. And if not, I’ll read the next one if that’s okay, so I should say My favourite thing on Twitter at the moment, this I think it’s absolutely brilliant. So here’s the first one, at the start of the year, train your pupils not to press too hard with whiteboard pens. So the pens keep a fine point, the pens lasts much longer this way that feels important.
Chris Such 1:05:29
It’s massive. I mean, I have had years where I’ve gone through literally hundreds of whiteboard pens, and just assumed that that was the norm. And I’ve also thought, Oh, well, this, these are just kids this age, well, I was able to train a year to class to press quite delicately with their whiteboard pens, and they lasted and they were able to write more on their boards, I it possibly had some benefits in terms of fine motor control, I don’t know. But it certainly saved me having to take constant trips to the station to station station recovered, it makes a massive difference. And you can actually train children to do this. One thing to know is that if you do have a child in your class, and again, this might be more of a primary thing, who does have issues with fine motor control does press too hard. Don’t Don’t give them a hard time about it. But do accept that for most of the kids, you can actually train them to do this. And then the whiteboard pens lasts so much longer.
Craig Barton 1:06:19
I thought was great. And I’ll select on that thread. I think Emma Turner replied by saying, Keep when you took a pen away, keep the lid from it. So you combine them on. Yeah, I love a little tip like that. So that was great. Okay, tip number two, this is a good one. Once the class are working quietly resist the temptation to start narrating EG, it’s great to see that everyone’s doing this. Don’t forget to do this. It sounds obvious, but many teachers don’t realise they’re even doing it. Let them work in peace. I am bad at this. Chris. This is big, isn’t it as well?
Chris Such 1:06:46
Oh, yeah. And when I say many teachers, what I’m really saying is I do this. And it’s such a difficult habit to break. We get in the habit of thinking, if I’m not talking, I’m not being effective. I’m not doing something. And there’s a there’s a brilliant blog on this subject that I read a couple of years ago. So this is probably unconscious. So not only am I ripping off you, I’m also ripping off Adam boxer. He’s got a great blog called, I think it’s golden silence where there’s, as he is prone to do he explains it beautifully with the graph. Lovely stuff, highly recommend checking that out. But yeah, it’s, it’s really difficult to do. And I would say from learning walks and bits and pieces I’ve seen, I’d say that the majority of teachers could probably benefit and I’m definitely one of them from just letting them get on with something and just kind of zipping it for a while just trying your best I mean if even if that means you’ve got to, you know, hold a pen in your mouth or something to stop yourself from talking. But yeah, I like that tip as well
Craig Barton 1:07:45
be to metre. Okay, number three, this is good. On day one of meeting a class plan to make an error eg skip a word and writing a sentence, notice it or ask another adult to model reacting positively and correcting it. It sounds cheesy, but it helps kids who struggle with this stuff. This feels like it’s related to the embarrassment point you made before.
Chris Such 1:08:02
That’s exactly it’s just another deeper depressurizing strategy that I that I use. It’s so many kids struggle with mistakes, they struggle with it social embarrassment, and you just modelling the fact that mistakes are okay, I make them this is how I react to them, I think is a really lovely message for children to grasp early on. Now, a caveat to that, it’s obviously important that pupils perceive their teacher to be competent, capable, confident in what they’re doing. So you don’t want to be constantly making errors all over the place and making out that you don’t understand the subject or that little mistakes here or there. You know, you write a sentence and you miss a word, and go ah, but what I’ve done there, nevermind. Thanks for pointing that out, move on. It just shows pupils that mistakes can be productive, and that there’s a good way to react to them.
Craig Barton 1:08:54
Love it. Okay, a few more tip for if behaviour isn’t where you want it, especially at the start of the year, don’t be afraid to set a really accessible task where you know, or can achieve without too much struggle. Use this time to reinforce your expectations for focused work.
Chris Such 1:09:09
There is nothing more challenging and trying to teach something difficult while you’re trying to and then the children are really going to have to struggle with at the same time is trying to deal with behaviour real kind of naughty behavioural issues in a class. If you don’t have expectations exactly where you need them. Then sometimes you just as the tip says sometimes you just need to give them something that you know they can be getting on with. So you can set the standard. So you can say yeah, this is what silent work sounds like this is what we this is how we do silent work. This is how this will work when we do silent work for 10 minutes in a lesson, for example. So yeah, not being afraid to say and it comes back to what you were talking about earlier about many whiteboard stuff, not being afraid to say actually, the most effective pedagogy pedagogy over the longer term isn’t necessarily the most effective. pedagogy in that exact instant, so maybe something really challenging is the most useful thing I can do with this class for their learning in the short term right now. But maybe doing something simple that allows me to focus on behaviour for an afternoon or for a morning just to get something sorted is better for that long term view.
Craig Barton 1:10:19
I love that just a follow up to this. And I can’t remember, I don’t know whether it’s from talking about the promise I’m reading too many books at the moment is too many good ideas hitting me think it might have been dug in Teach Like champion 3.0. He says, once you’ve got kind of behaviour established and make sure that you highlight when that behaviour is going as you intended it, not just highlight when it’s not as you intended. So you can imagine what’s the kick class are doing exactly what you want, then drawing their attention to this is brilliant, this is exactly what we want to do, as opposed to what I always did, was that always okay, this isn’t what we talked about, this isn’t how we do this, and so on. So again, feels related, but kind of flagging up the positive as well feels important. And that’s
Chris Such 1:10:57
true on a personal level as well, if there is ever a student where I think you know what, I’m going to have to make some phone calls across the year with this kid, you know, it might be the, like mum, dad or carer or guardian has said to me, or if they’ve, if they’re not doing what you want them to do, make sure to get in touch. And I know I’m going to have to do that three, or four or five or 10 times across the year, I balanced that out I make a point of yet that was I loved what they did there. Today, I’m going to phone call so that they don’t, for the parents sake as much, or the carers sake as much as anything. So they’re not just picking up the phone going. It’s that person’s voice again, I want them to hear some positives as well. So yeah, highlighting the positives, not just as a whole class level, I think it’s really important on an individual level as well.
Craig Barton 1:11:38
Fantastic. A final three, Chris, if you’ve a new arrival to the class, buddy them up with another kid and ask them to hand out books for a week or two, assuming they’re happy to do so this helps them to learn the names of their new classmates, such a small idea, it’s such an important one.
Chris Such 1:11:52
I it’s once again thinking about that kind of social embarrassment and the difficulties of being in an environment with 29 other children that you’ve never met before, just being able to learn their names, and also just being able to do a job with a buddy. So that you’ve immediately got someone you’ve got a little bit of a rapport with it just smooth that transition into a new social environment.
Craig Barton 1:12:17
Amazing guy. Last to tip six, if you’ve got a class that’s regularly just a bit too loud, I’ve had a few of those, resist the temptation to keep speaking louder to make yourself heard, try the opposite, consciously lower your volume to just above a whisper for a week or two.
Chris Such 1:12:33
Now this isn’t to say you just kind of let their noise go, obviously. But it’s more about once you’ve got them quiet. And once you lower the volume, I noticed this when I had issues with my voice I you know, I didn’t quite lose my voice. But I had a scratchy throat and I just had to speak quietly for a couple of weeks. And my noisy class issues dissipated massively. And I thought, Oh, they’re responding to me as much as I’m responding to them. It’s just recognising that when it comes to volume, there’s a feedback loop between teacher volume and pupil volume. And the bit you can most easily control is your own volume. So just, if in doubt, keeping it low. A caveat to that, of course, is if you have students in the class with hearing difficulties, then you need to think carefully about how you’re dealing with that, though. Again, a caveat to the caveat is again, in my experience of working with pupils with hearing difficulties, noisy classrooms can be really difficult to deal with. So actually, sorting that issue and having a calmer, slightly quieter classroom is actually of particular benefit to those in my experience with hearing difficulties. So you might need to think about I can still do this, but I need to think about seating position or if there’s some kind of vegetation educational technology that you’re using, as you would always do, think about where that’s positioned relative to the student to allow it to be as effective as possible.
Craig Barton 1:13:58
Love it, and the last one of these micro tips, this might be my favourite, I would never thought this in a million years. Buy a decent quality battery powered pencil sharpener and keep it in your desk. Trust me, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without one.
Chris Such 1:14:11
I like to think that this tip is the one that will keep the lawyers away. They’ll keep the light your lawyers off my back because I can’t imagine anyone coming on this podcast and saying you know what, you need an electric pencil sharpener. That really is a tiny teaching tip. But I didn’t have a an electric a battery powered pencil sharpener for years even had one of these ones that seems quite nice where you attach it to your desk in your turn a handle. In comparison, just being able to go, you know, the start of a school day, grab the pencils. And 20 You’re done in you know, 20 seconds or 30 seconds is a complete lifesaver. A tip that’s alongside this. It isn’t especially at primary level but I’m sure secondary as well. It isn’t for the kids to use because the good versions of these sharpeners, the ones that cost about no more than a tenner. You put the pencil in for half a second, and it’s done. Whereas kids will be like, wow, you know, very quickly they’ve got a pencil that’s, that’s half an inch long. So you definitely, it’s for you to use a tip kind of alongside that. Again, this, again, might be more of a primary thing, but having a set of pencils that you’ve just got 20 Spare pencils that are sharpened, when a kid starts to go, Oh, can I sharpen my pencil just going, here’s a fresh one. I’ll take that one, rather than them having to go and have a little chat at the beginning as they’re sharpening their pencil or having to deal with even worse sharpenings at their desk, or in their pencil case. And the chaos of that, I think might be it’s something that I found beneficial over the years, but yeah, most important thing I’ll say today, buy a battery powered pencil sharpener, a decent one, you won’t regret it.
Craig Barton 1:15:47
Say, well, we need to get some kind of affiliate link to the best one below this video would make a fortune on this will be retired in no time. Yeah. Brilliant. Well, Chris, honestly, we’ve had five Biggie tips. And then we’ve had seven and these microphones that this has been amazing. So let me hand over to you now and what should the listeners check out of yours.
Chris Such 1:16:04
So some bits to check out of mine. If you if you are interested in learning more about reading, then I would recommend if you’ve got like just an hour to spare say then I’d recommend an episode that I’ve made of the thinking deeply about primary education podcasts, that’s clear and mackerels, brilliant podcasts that I’m lucky enough to peer upon sometimes season two, Episode Five is where I kind of give an overview of reading over the space instead of over the space of eight minutes or so that I did earlier. That’s over the space of kind of an hour or so. If you are willing to take that extra extra step, then my book The Art and Science of teaching, primary reading is available at all good book book shops, and some ones that are not quite so good. That’s so I would check out those two things would be the place to start a one of the things if you are interested in phonics in particular, the thinking deeply about primary education YouTube channel, there’s a video on there that where I’ve made, it takes about half an hour to watch. It’s designed originally for secondary teachers to learn about phonics and about word recognition or the teaching of word recognition. So yeah, consider checking that out. The last thing to know about my book is I always say this, it’s a way of preventing people from criticising me for my book because I’m a coward. I don’t make any money from it. It’s so I have no I’m not ashamed. I’m shamelessly plugging it because all of the all of the royalties go to will be going to the Malaria Consortium. So worst case scenario, you buy the book, you don’t like it, you’ve made a small donation to a really worthwhile charity, so please consider it.
Craig Barton 1:17:46
Wow, that’s amazing. Amazing. Honestly, Chris, I’m not just saying this has been one of my favourite conversations. This has been absolutely brilliant. So thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us today.
Chris Such 1:17:55
Thank you for inviting me. It’s genuinely an honour. Really. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
