Explaining or justifying literacy instruction?

In their piece on The Conversation this morning, Queensland education academics Drs Stewart Riddle and Eileen Honan referenced a previous article of mine on The Conversation* (co-authored with Alison Clarke) as a source of “misinformation” about how the teaching of literacy is approached in Australian schools.
 
I was mildly bemused to see that today’s piece opens with an effort to persuade the reader that there’s nothing controversial about early reading instruction. Ironically, this position is refuted in the NSW Department of Education document to which they link:

For decades now, phonics has been the subject of great public debate. It seems everyone has an opinion on it, so much so that a host of myths and half truths have arisen.

While experts argue about how much emphasis should be placed on phonics instruction in classrooms, just about all agree the teaching of phonics and phonemic awareness is critical to children learning to read.

Anyway, we’ll put that inconsistency aside.
 
Stewart Riddle and I have had a number of collegial on and off-line interactions about reading instruction and teacher education and I think it’s fair to say we’ve both gained from these discussions. I find it hard to disagree with some of what he and Dr Honan say in today’s piece. In particular, they emphasise the importance of fostering early oral language skills as a means of supporting children’s transition to literacy in the early years. The two randomised controlled trials in disadvantaged schools in Victoria in which I have been an investigator (one ongoing) have as a central platform teacher knowledge and practice concerning children’s oral language skills, in particular phonemic awareness, narrative skills, vocabulary, and comprehension (see this link to the completed OLSEL study). So there’s much common ground here. 

Where things become problematic, however, is when we interrogate the evidence pertaining to teachers’ language knowledge concerning the teaching of literacy. Unfortunately there is a growing body of Australian and international research that points to unacceptably low levels of explicit linguistic knowledge on the part of practising teachers. In a study published by my group last year  we found that not only was knowledge poor, but teacher self-rated confidence regarding their knowledge was disproportionately high; this means that teachers are not good at “knowing what they don’t know” with respect to their knowledge base. It is important to note that these difficulties did not only apply to knowledge pertaining to decoding skills (e.g. the ability to define key concepts such as phoneme and morpheme, and the ability to accurately count phonemes in words), but also existed in domains pertaining to semantics and grammar. 

I have no doubt that organisations like the Australian Literacy Educators' Association  have a genuine commitment to fostering early literacy skills in Australian classrooms, but to be seen as a credible force, they need to move beyond defending current classroom practices to interrogating the evidence concerning uneven performance in our schools. This unevenness cannot be conveniently and simply explained away on the basis of funding arguments, as some schools punch well above their weight when it comes to reading performance in spite of socio-economic disadvantage.

I have blogged on this topic before, in a piece entitled Taboo topics: Reading instruction and teacher education. Talking about teacher knowledge cannot be a taboo topic, any more than the community would condone us not talking about gaps in health professionals’ knowledge and skills.
 
Australia’s poor performance on reading being re-packaged as “moral panic” for readers of one particular newspaper is disappointingly trite and simplistic. The youth offenders and children in state care who have been the focus of my research for the last 15+ years deserve better than that from education academics. Sadly, their language and literacy skills are so poor, they cannot take part in the debate. They become part of the silent throng of adults who are illiterate and are excluded from the economic mainstream, as featured on this morning’s episode of Radio National’s Life Matters


So Drs Riddle and Honan may be explaining more than they think when they describe how literacy is taught in Australian schools.


*Note - this link was subsequently amended in the Riddle and Honan piece and replaced with this link, which is a discussion around the views Alison Clarke and I expressed in our February 2015 piece on The Conversation



(c) Pamela Snow (2016)

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Snake Oil Toil

Things have been rather quiet over at the Snow Report of late. As you might imagine, the reasons for that are many and varied, but chief among them is the fact that I have been ridiculously busy with writing projects. Associate Professor Philip Mendes (Monash University) and I are in the final throes of editing an international text on leaving state care (to be published by Palgrave in late 2016/early 2017), I've just finished a book chapter with Professor Jacinta Douglas (La Trobe University) on psychosocial aspects of pragmatic language impairments across the lifespan (for a forthcoming text being edited by Professor Louise Cummings, to be published by Springer in early 2017; and just to ensure that my fingers don't stray too far from the keyboard, Dr Caroline Bowen and I are well into the process of writing our book Making Sense of Interventions for Children's Developmental Difficulties to be published by J&R Press in (hopefully) early 2017.

So on most days, I look a bit like this (just with a slightly more crazed look in the eyes):

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While the book with Philip and the chapter with Jacinta have had an exclusive focus on solid academic, peer-reviewed literature, our task of writing Making Sense is altogether different and has taken us down some bewildering tracks, where the light is poor, the language is highly impressionistic and brazen claims are a dime a dozen. We've both felt on a couple of occasions that we'd have to hand back our PhDs if our academic colleagues saw the kinds of websites we've been frequenting of late. Every so often we both need to push away from the desk and breathe deeply. There is soooooo much neuroflapdoodle out there!! We've been reminded too of the torture of the ancient figure Sisyphus whose labourious toil could never be completed, and some days we've had a pretty good idea of how he might have felt.

We've been reading both promotional websites as well as scouring the academic literature for evidence of evidence. The latter is a sometimes interesting exercise. The task of distilling information for the parents in particular (but also teachers and clinicians) whom we hope will be the book's readership is immense, and at times seems like it will have no end. We are endeavouring to cover as many of the well-known scoundrels as we can, as well as featuring some up-and-coming snake-oil merchants of lesser-known fame. Some approaches of course, make a modicum of theoretical sense, and look like they perhaps should work, though the evidence does not support this optimism. Others make good theoretical sense, but lack an adequate research base on which to make a sensible judgement at this point in time. And still others are just plain nonsense and would be laughable were it not for the parents whose hopes signal the next sale in the interventions bazaar (or should that be bizarre?).

I was reminded of the enormity of our task today, when a clinician emailed me about yet another technique that looks like it is deserving of a mention in Making Sense: Neuro-Fit Systems.

The Neuro-Fit website starts with the usual, generally OK-sounding, and difficult-to-refute nod to mainstream neuroscience

"The brain and body work together through the central nervous system comprised of neurons and neuropathways. This entire system relies on our senses to gather information from the world around us and transmit it to the brain through these pathways. Immature neural development, chronic stress, and traumatic events can produce inefficiencies in neuropathway communication."

 However there are soon typical red-flags that should arouse concern on the part of parents, clinicians and teachers: its reference to a neurobiological approach (whatever that is), the fact that it is somehow a good fit for a myriad of disorders, and that like many snake-oil approaches that have gone before it (older readers of this blog will remember the Doman Delacato Technique), it is based on a neuro-sequential (patterning) approach. I'm not sure whether to be relieved or alarmed that Neuro-Fit staff are required to be first-aid qualified and to have "competitive athletics experience", but I can tell you that all of these factors and its reliance on testimonials rather than anything even resembling research mean that it is almost certainly an approach that clinicians, teachers, and parents should steer well clear of; regardless of what the good folk at Channel 7 have to say.

Caroline and I are facing a law of diminishing returns when it comes to the number of snake-oil approaches out there and the time (and words) available to us in Making Sense.

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Oh, and yes, we are making space for those approaches for which evidence is at least promising. It's not all bad news.

(C) Pamela Snow 2016

 

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Stuff they don't tell you about research success

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This week, I was asked to say a few words at the opening of a Higher Degrees by Research (HDR) festival, at the Bendigo campus of La Trobe University, where I am the Head of the Rural Health School.

This gave me pause for thought about why some people are happy, productive and "successful" in the research space, and others are not.

Here's a few pearls I've gleaned along the way in my own research career, which started relatively late, as I spent some 13 years in clinical practice before returning to study and completing a PhD. As an aside, I don't regret one of those years in clinical practice - they provided rich, complex experience and gifted me some precious and enduring friendships.

So, what I have learned along the way?

1. After you've carefully selected your PhD supervisors (that's another blog-post in itself), make it your business to soak up all the mentoring and support they can offer. You'll never again be on the nursery slopes, so submit to the ignorance and naiveté and drink from the font of your supervisors' wisdom. Listen carefully. It's fine to make some mistakes along the way, but you don't have to make all of them.
2. Your research supervisors are a bit like your parents - they are expected to literally "supervise" you, to give you feedback (positive and negative), to set boundaries (you can't answer every known question on your topic) and to set timelines (it's not OK to roll your candidature over year after year like your car registration). You don't have to like your supervisors and you don't have to be their friends. (That said, I count myself as very fortunate to still on very good terms with both of my PhD supervisors and I still publish with them both from time-to-time).  As with the parent-child relationship, you are expected to develop increasing independence over time.
3. Your PhD probably won't change the world. It's actually an apprenticeship in which you're meant to be learning stuff. A lot of what you learn goes under the heading of "hidden curriculum" - how the publishing game works, how the hallowed halls of academia function, which stats program is easiest to use, and where to buy the best coffee on campus.
4. Find out what matters in academia and do more of it. People who get ahead typically have a clear program of research, and say no to temptations to stray too far from it. They also work incredibly hard, invariably in what might otherwise be seen as their own time: evenings and weekends. "But that's bad for work-life balance" I hear you say. Well maybe it is and maybe it isn't. You'll need to decide at different points in your career how this plays out, but you need to understand that those with whom you're competing for research funds and academic posts are almost certainly working many more hours than those for which they are paid. Someone had to say it.
5. Publishing matters, so if you're not a strong writer, you need to develop your skills, or prepare to be lost in the publication crowd.
6. Don't be too distracted by presenting at conferences. Don't get me wrong - conferences are important for sharing data, receiving feedback, and networking with colleagues. But a conference presentation doesn't carry the same weight on your CV as a peer-reviewed publication. If you're wanting an academic career, it's the latter that is important.
7. Think about where you're going to publish. This means considering journal Impact Factors, target audience, and the actual quality of your manuscript. Be strategic (and realistic) about the match between the size and rigour of your study and the likelihood that the Editor of Nature/The Lancet/BMJ etc will be sitting by the phone waiting to hear from you.  
8. Learn about metrics such as h-Indices. Sure, they are highly reductionist and potentially even flawed. If you have an h-Index of 10, you're hardly getting credit for that amazing Cochrane Review that has been cited 280 times, as it has to just sit alongside the other nine papers that have been cited 10 times. Remember too, that your work might be oft-cited because people think it's a good example of a poor methodology or shoddy practice. I wonder how many times the (subsequently retracted) Andrew Wakefield autism-MMR study was cited? Learn to love all your h-Indices equally, whether the "official" offering from Scopus, or the always higher version offered by Google Scholar (because it picks up a lot of grey literature not included by Scopus).
9. Don't be afraid to change tack in your research career. I started off studying communication impairment and psychosocial outcome after traumatic brain injury and now have a focus on two key areas: language skills of young offenders and literacy education (as many of you would realize, there's a sad link between the two). I do some related work on young people in the state care system, but try to be careful to always be able to articulate clear links between my research interests.
10. Make sure you can answer the "so what?" question about your research. If you're going to spend a good part of your work (and non-work) time consumed with a particular issue, you need to be able to explain to funding bodies why it matters. Your research should also, therefore, pass the pub test (or failing that, the grandmother test) - it needs to be able to be packaged to make sense to the tax-payer who may well be asked to fund it.
11. Related to the "so what" question is the notion of translational impact. What are your findings going to translate into and how? Your answers to these questions should drive your dissemination strategy, covering peer-reviewed journals, reports, conference presentations, and the use of social media.
12. Collaborate. It's been said that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. To be honest, I think you can only go fast on your own to a point. You can sometimes quickly get certain specific tasks done on your own, but if you want to achieve significant outcomes in the research space, you need to form collaborations with others who share your focus and interest. But you don't all have to fall into the photocopier. It can be tremendously beneficial to have different paradigms, disciplines, and methodologies represented in your team - provided there are good reasons that are driven by the research agenda, not by misguided charity about finding a role for a drifter who has lost their way research-wise. Remember too, that funding bodies look at the quality and make-up of teams and this assessment can be weighted quite heavily in the overall rating of your project.
13. Kiss a few frogs. By that, I mean cold-call people interstate and overseas whose work is cognate to yours, and share your most recent publication (in which you have hopefully cited their work). Most researchers are delighted to hear that someone far away is aware of their work and has taken the trouble to get in touch. I've formed a number of enduring international collaborations in this way and have published with at least two of them. Sometimes you won't get a response, and sometimes it will be like a luke-warm bath. That's OK, and it may not be about you - it may be because their life is complicated at the moment and your timing was unfortunate.
14. Expect set-backs. They will probably be many and at times, quite painful. I read a wonderful article via Twitter recently, called Me and My Shadow CV. Read it. It's a great reminder that we don't see the rejected manuscripts and grants, or the unsuccessful job applications when we look at the profile of someone we see as an academic star. However it's the entries on this ghost-document that provide us with valuable learnings, not to mention an extra layer or two on the rhino hide we call academic resilience.
15. Speaking of Twitter, if you're not using this incredibly valuable platform, you almost certainly should be. I have discovered whole new professional global networks of people who are interested in things I'm interested in. Invariably these days if I come across something new and interesting, it's via Twitter. Try to follow a few people whose views you don't necessarily share too - it's good to have your assumptions nudged from time-to-time, and to know how others think on your topic of interest (even if you're pretty positive that they're wrong).
16. Be reliable. Successful researchers can't tolerate unnecessary weights in their saddle bags. Be known for being the person who states what they will do, commits to delivering in a timely and thorough manner, and then does so.
17. Enjoy the ride. For all the lows and frustrations, the life of a researcher is deeply satisfying. There is great personal satisfaction in having a paper published after the long haul of funding, ethics approval, data collection and delays, multiple manuscript drafts, late-night data-wrangling, responding to appallingly misguided reviewer comments, and other set-backs of various forms. I am reminded of this when, from time-to-time, I receive an email out of the blue from a total stranger, telling me how they have used such-and-such a paper to change their practice or influence a policy maker. H-Indices are all well and good, but it doesn't get much better than knowing that somewhere, you've made a small difference on the ground. 

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(C) Pamela Snow 2015


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How to influence your students' brain chemistry and other handy hints

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I'm not the first academic commentator to be critical of the rapid infiltration of classrooms by so-called "neuroscience". Indeed some teachers at the coalface are also sceptical of this latest education movement, though it is not always easy for them to speak out against the zeitgeist when a charismatic presenter spruiks the virtues of teaching to the "whole brain". I say "so-called neuroscience" because in the main, this is neuroscience-lite at best, and neuroflapdoodle at worst. Either way, it comes packaged in an over-simplified box and is promoted to teachers via equally over-simplified sound-byte messages.

I think it's fair to say the average classroom teacher has limited-to-zero knowledge of neuroscience. That is not a criticism of teachers, nor of teacher training. Teachers need to understand factors that promote good learning and positive behaviour. They also need to learn to apply skills in the classroom that increase the likelihood of good learning and positive behaviour occurring. Knowing something about the inner workings of the human brain may or may not be useful in these endeavours, I really don't know. The question is akin to whether I need to know about the inner workings of a carburettor in order to be a good driver. Maybe we should devote time in the pre-service teacher education curriculum to neuroscience and maybe we shouldn't. However I am quite certain that we should not be feeding teachers (at any stage of their careers) a diet of pseudo neuroscience, and dressing it up as "research-based".

Education has a long history of loving its fashions and fads, and one of the more recent skirt-lengths is so-called "Brain-Based" (or "Whole Brain") learning. There's a large number of Youtube clips demonstrating this approach in action. If you're not familiar with it, I suggest you have a look and decide for yourself.

At least one Faculty of Education at an Australian university is offering teacher professional development on this approach. Yes, it's possible, in spite of the rigours of peer-review, to find research to support almost anything. However, we don't accept such reasoning in medicine, aviation, or engineering, so why should we accept it in education?

The term "research-based" devalues the currency if it only means "there's a study published in a journal somewhere that says this might be okay". Medicine woke up more than twenty years ago to the idea that all evidence is not created equal, and hence in the health sciences, we refer to levels of evidence. This hierarchy gives us a yardstick with which to exercise our scepticism and offers some protection against the hasty (and potentially premature) adoption of approaches that may be no better than current practice, may create an opportunity cost, or may actually be harmful. In health sciences, of course, we are exposed to the impact of our poor practices, as people deteriorate and sometimes die when we don't get it right. In education, practitioners are quarantined from having to see effects of poor practices; children disappear from view, progressing automatically to the next grade, until an inevitable tipping point at which an ongoing relationship with education is no longer tenable.

Why does Education not engage with the notion of levels of evidence?

Children are not in a position to give or withhold consent regarding the teaching and learning experiences they are exposed to in the classroom, and in most cases, their parents are not either. So it's the responsibility of the other adults in the village to call out practices that do not maximise the limited developmental window that is available to convey core skills to all children in the early years.

Faculties of Education running courses for teachers on brain-based learning is akin to Faculties of Medicine running courses for doctors on homeopathy. The latter would see editorials in major newspapers and would potentially threaten the good standing of the medical program in the eyes of accrediting bodies.

Come on Education. It's time to get serious about producing, accessing, stratifying, and using evidence.


(c) Pamela Snow 2015


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