Posted on by Dr James Shea · 2 Comments

Fast reading and fast readers

“But the privations, or rather the hardships, of Lowood lessened. Spring drew on: she was indeed already come; the frosts of winter had ceased; its snows were melted, its cutting winds ameliorated.”

(Charlotte Brontë, Jayne Eyre)

I always recall the word ameliorated as it turned up in Jane Eyre when I studied it for A level. ‘What an unusual word,’ I remember thinking at the time. Clearly it means the weather improved or changed. An unusual word and it drew attention to the pathetic fallacy in the text reflecting the shifting plot. If I was reading it out aloud I’d add a spring like tone to the sound of it to add a reading cue for the listener. This is why when we listen to good readers we understand the meaning more efficiently.

What happened there was inference. As a reader, motoring through the text at full speed you meet uncommon words. You may, as was the case with me at the time, be meeting the word for the first time. However, most times, with a combination of grammar and reading cues, you can decode enough of the meaning to continue reading without pausing to look the word up. This is a very specific reading skill which overcomes the raised extraneous and intrinsic load of meeting a new word whilst reading at pace. Decoding and inference at pace is what you need to be able to do in order to be a reader who can switch to different texts at ease – older texts, texts from other countries, texts in translation, texts with stylistic adaptations for effect and so forth.

Now I say all this because recently an interesting paper garnered attention in the English teaching community. The paper focused on what it called ‘fast reading’. It’s an unfortunate phrase that gives you the image of a teacher rattling through a text at speed. In fact, it means a teacher reading without interruption, without popcorning to other children in the class, without pausing to discuss the impending doom captured by the cleverly inserted pathetic fallacy, but instead consciously embedding tone and emphasis which provide reading cues. There is much merit in this – fast reading will help children decode and infer at speed and be able to use this ability to infer meaning when reading other new texts for themselves. You would, of course, then still be wise to explicitly teach inference at pace amongst other aspects of the teaching of inference. Teaching inference is a large part of what an English teacher does and is rooted in reading, listening and in processing the language with sophistication.

All good so far, what’s the issue? Well, one thing teachers have taken to is pre-teaching vocabulary before a chapter. This means the teacher will pre-read the chapter, identify the new words likely to trip up the readers and then pre-teach them before the reading of the text. This removes the extraneous load of meeting a new word and therefore makes the reading experience have a lower intrinsic load. You can see here the immediate issue – the pupils aren’t developing the decoding and inference skills needed to process new words at speed in fast reading. Pre-teaching vocabulary isn’t transferable to a new text. A pupil can’t pre-read a chapter, identify the new words then pre-teach themselves the words before reading the chapter again.

The answer is complicated again. There are times when a word can be solved by grammar or reading cues to a strong enough degree. The reader has to be able to decipher the words to the degree needed to function. I could read, ‘The nearest elder, a Ntask, was still several miles away…’ I can see the unusual word ‘Ntask’ is a proper noun, a name of an elder, this person might have some kind of rank, status or gender, but in terms of reading I can carry on without needing to stop and start looking this up. If, however, the sentence becomes impenetrable and my reading is wholly arrested by my inability to decode a word I might stop, lightly hold my finger on the word and my kindle would very kindly pop up a definition of the word including ‘in usage’.

Now, in an English class, the reality is I can’t simply hold my finger on the word because we have paper books and I have a whole class of pupil readers with me. So there will be times when I pre-teach vocabulary. There will be times when I do pause at a new word with the class and quickly teach the inference needed to decode the word. I have got to expose them to the raised intrinsic load which has been delivered by the raised extraneous load and then teach them how to resolve this using decoding and inference.

Inference itself goes much deeper than this light touch analysis. We are English teachers and we can pause and dwell on a passage before going ever and ever deeper into a text. But at the same time, we must be careful to not think that removing extraneous load in reading is always helpful. In some instances, it removes intrinsic load and the pupil never gets to develop the transferable knowledge and skill necessary to read at speed in such a way that it brokers them to other texts.

Our challenge, as English teachers, is not to teach them solely for the measurable now, but also for the unmeasurable future. A time when we hope our former pupils are enjoying reading a wide range of new and challenging texts for themselves as adult readers.

Posted on by Dr James Shea

Is it important that they enjoy your subject?

Should enjoying your subject be part of learning it?
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Reading through the latest in the TES on the Shanghai Mathematics study I was struck by a quite simple statement.

“The research also shows that while teachers felt pupils enjoyed maths more when taught using the mastery methods, a survey of pupils did not back this up.

And the researchers warn that previous studies in East Asia have found that pupils are less likely to enjoy maths than those in England.”

The teachers thought the kids were enjoying their mathematics, but they were not. Naturally, there are some subsequent questions you might ask yourself:

Is it that important that they enjoy your subject?

Is it that important the method used to teach them enhances their enjoyment of your subject?

How did these teachers get a wrong perception?

These are important questions. For example, I enjoy running and being a runner. I don’t enjoy hills. I hate them. I don’t enjoy long steady runs. I tolerate them. But the fact that I have to do them to be a good runner doesn’t stop me from enjoying running. In fact, there is some part of me that finds hill running quite interesting and makes me curious. Lactate threshold training is a key part of running and I’m often to be found reading in-depth sport science texts about the very thing I hate. Curiouser and curiouser.

However, as an English teacher it is very important to me that people enjoy English. Even though sometimes English is tedious, frustrating, difficult and challenging in all sorts of ways (as well as being endlessly enjoyable), it is important to me that the end result is that they enjoy English and are fascinated to learn more about the subject even when it is a very difficult area. That ‘curiosity’ is what drives us to opt in to learn more about the subject independently and in our own time. It pushes the ‘subject’ into what we perceive as our leisure time and becomes part of our identity. We begin to source new knowledge in the subject independently and look to locate this knowledge within our current knowledge.

The current GCSEs in English Language and Literature are not holding their own in the marketplace of being pre-A Level recruiters. English is not a vocational subject, rather it develops transposable knowledge and skills which employers and students alike value. In addition, it is a deeply rewarding subject to study on personal and philosophical levels.

I am not one for ‘making lessons fun’. My subject is fun. However, I have to think about whether my perceptions as a teacher of my students are right. My running coach can easily ‘beast’ me to make me stronger, but that would probably put me off running or at least being taught by that coach. So it is important that a teacher has access to student voice. Sometimes it is challenging learning my subject, but I want the overall picture to be one of the students enjoying my subject: student voice is thus important.

Is it that important the methods I use to teach them enhances their enjoyment of the subject? That is difficult. I think I want the methods I use in teaching to enhance their curiosity in my subject. I want to make students stronger in such a way that they enjoy the challenges in learning more about my subject. I also want them to go on to study English at A Level and beyond.

And finally. How did these teachers get such a wrong perception of their students’ enjoyment? Did they mistake progress in learning for enjoyment? Making progress in your subject seems to be not enough to make students enjoy your subject. There must be a fostered curiosity whereby you see and appreciate the challenges within the subject and begin subsequently locating that new knowledge and curiosity within your identity. E.g. You become someone who reads interesting and difficult books as part of your identity.

it’s this last point that GCSE English isn’t fulfilling. The combination of specification, teaching methods and perceived employability are not competing with the STEM subjects. Whilst English teachers can make changes to the latter two, the first one remains out of their hands. There is a disconnect between the discipline of English with its focus on the study of language and its rich range of texts with an emphasis on reader response and the GCSE specifications for English Language and Literature. This is because English teachers do not have enough input into the GCSE specifications. At the moment, the boards are revisiting the specifications for their five year refresh and we need English teachers to have an open and consultative voice on this refresh to better help us to develop the next generation of life long students and teachers of English.

Posted on by Dr James Shea

Cognitive Load Theory and Assessment

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Recently, we did a CPD session on using Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) as a lens through which to view teaching and assessment in HEI. There’s scope for teaching practice to be improved in universities: use dual coding, stop reading out slides word for word and so forth. We also focused on summative assessment design. The difference between schools and HEI is we can design our own formal awarding assessments. To highlight an example of poor assessment design for our session we used the QTS Numeracy Skills Test. When you are trying to work out the question, someone starts reading the question out again, overloading your working memory. It’s an infuriating, but excellent example of poor assessment design through the lens of CLT.

In HEI, however, we can design out some of these poor assessments. We can also go further. We can look at whether the right assessment vehicle is being used for the intrinsic load being assessed, whether the assignment briefs contain too much extraneous or ambiguous information and other enhancements. In our session, we also acknowledged criticisms of CLT which are that it is a lab based concept: some extraneous load is normal in the field or discipline. This means whether you are learning or accessing schemas of knowledge, it’s not always possible in real life to remove extraneous load. When one of our trainee teachers is teaching, they have to deal with substantial extraneous distractions on their working memory whilst trying to access their schemas of knowledge in order to run the logistics of the lesson, perform in-action reflection and still teach. These can be unexpected answers or questions from a child, an observing SLT listening in on a learning walk or the mother of all extraneous loads – the rogue wasp. In all situations, they will be expected to demonstrate the Teachers’ Standards despite quite a lot of extraneous load (be reassured trainees, we do get better at managing it all). In seriousness though, if we are considering CLT then assessments have to do two things. First, you need germane laboratory style assessments to see if they can achieve the intrinsic load of the topic. For example, at Oxford University, they have increased the amount of time available for the mathematics paper to increase outcomes of all students. The intrinsic load was more important than the ability to cope with the extraneous load of a limited amount of time.  Secondly,  you need field or discipline based assessments to check they can access their schemas of knowledge as required despite the extraneous load provided by real life. As Mark Enser says in his blog, we do get better at this. So handling intrinsic and extraneous load together is something we can improve with practice and experience.

This brings us back to schools. Schools have focused a lot of their efforts on CLT as a means through which to raise the intrinsic load of the content being taught through germane teaching. So far, so good. But secondary schools are spending huge amounts of learning hours teaching towards GCSE assessments – sometimes from year 7 onwards despite the knowledge needed for these requiring just 120 guided learning hours per GCSE. Teachers in secondary school can look at their GCSE assessments through the lens of CLT and ask, critically: are these well designed? I recall the infamous GCSE English question, ‘Is George and Lennie’s dream in Of Mice and Men futile?’ The extraneous load of the unusual vocabulary choice in the question prevented many students from accessing their schema of knowledge about the text rendering the assessment of their knowledge inaccurate. Mathematics papers are notorious for containing higher reading ages than the students sitting them. If the assessment is the same intrinsic load, but starts to test working memory or things other than the intrinsic load of the assessment, is this poor design? Is it failing to test the schema of knowledge held by the student sitting the test? Well, only if it is not done deliberately.

The current GCSE papers have some sections which have a low extraneous load. They also have some sections which are so fiendish that teachers spend disproportionate time preparing students for it, and some sections which deliberately raise the extraneous load (e.g. the English unseen poetry section). If an assessment has a high extraneous load, then it should be because this is what happens in the discipline. If there is no need for a high extraneous load, then the assessment should be as germane as possible.

Those assessments which contain unnecessary extraneous loads also have higher ‘failure’ rates. This is where the assessment has not successfully accessed the schema of knowledge that the students have. They also raise the stress levels of teachers who are held accountable for these poor performances. How many times have you sent a student into an examination confident that they have the knowledge needed to do well only to be baffled when the grade comes back? Preparing students for assessments in a high stakes environment is fraught with difficulties. It can be as simple as not knowing one unusual word that prevents them accessing their schema of knowledge. You cannot control for a poor assessment in the same way we can in HEI. We can redesign the assessment to improve the ability of our students to access their schemas of knowledge and to demonstrate their knowledge effectively. We can also deliberately reproduce tasks from the discipline to better prepare them to work in the discipline. Schools have had this type of assessment (coursework and experiments) stripped from them because in a high stakes environment it is easy for an adult to assist students in managing the extraneous load in the assessment.

What then for schools? Well, currently, they still have scope to design their own assessments from KS1 up to KS3 (government NCTs notwithstanding). They don’t need to reproduce the poor assessment design of KS4 which eats up precious learning time and introduce it into years 7-9. They can also work on allowing them to work on subjects as a discipline. English students can work in the fast moving world of journalism, writing copy to speed; geographers can go out into the field and match the real world to their schemas of knowledge: there is scope for excellent curriculum design where assessment is designed for the students not the accountability system. There is a match between HEI lecturers and teachers for KS1-3 in terms of the ability to design curriculums and assessments.

I’m wary of calling for redesign of KS4-5 assessment because it does nothing but create more workload. However, there is a case for a fresh review of the assessments through the lens of CLT. Can we improve the ability of these assessments to enable students to access their schemas of knowledge and for teachers to spend more time teaching content and less time preparing students for the unnecessary extraneous loads of the poorly designed assessments? I’d be interested to hear from teachers who know their key stage or secondary subject assessments in fine detail and how they view the assessments through the lens of CLT.