Image source: PPT stockThis week was
an historic one for the state of Victoria, with our Education Minister and
Deputy Premier, the Hon Ben Carroll MP announcing a major change in government
policy settings pertaining to reading instruction. You can access the
Department’s media release Making
Best Practice Common Practice in The Education State as well as reading about
it via open access links such as this one from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
Students
at Victorian state schools will all be taught reading using phonics from 2025.
The centrepiece of this announcement is that as of 2025, systematic
synthetic phonics will be mandated in all classrooms in the first three years
of school. This means Victoria is effectively the last Australian state or territory to
formally abandon balanced literacy, an approach I have written about previously,
here
and here,
and have described as being “neither fish or fowl” – it is not whole
language and nor is it structured, explicit literacy teaching. It is unfortunately
whatever the person using the term wants it to be.
Many people and
organisations, including Hedi
Gregory and Sarah Gole, and their team at Dyslexia Victoria Support, countless individual school
leaders, teachers, allied health professionals, and parents, and of course the La Trobe SOLAR
Lab team (including our PhD students, Master of Education students, and
dedicated tutors), ably supported by the La Trobe Education Dean, Professor Joanna Barbousas
have contributed to this outcome. Alison Clarke OAM deserves
a special mention in this regard, as she has campaigned for many years via
persuasive, “cut-through” blog-posts, as well as making high quality resources available
to classroom teachers, parents, and clinicians – often at no charge. Dr Jennifer
Buckingham, FRSN CF has provided countless policy briefs to support
decision-makers and practitioners, and Jordana Hunter and Amy Haywood from the
Grattan Institute contributed their highly influential Reading
Guarantee Report earlier in 2024. Dr Jenny Donovan and her
team at AERO have been synthesising evidence for policy-makers and practitioners
since the establishment of AERO in 2020, and folk like Lyn Stone have been out there treading
the boards in schools, tirelessly providing professional learning to teachers,
left high and dry by initial
teacher education that missed the mark on reading and spelling instruction.
Dr Nathaniel Swain's Think Forward Educators has been a grassroots and low-budget source of high-quality professional learning for teachers and school leaders. Several Victorian primary school principals who have been early adopters well ahead of the curve, have been generous in supporting peers in other schools to make changes. Jo Rogers, a retired Victorian primary teacher has written countless opinion
pieces for The Age, such
as this one as well as making inquiry submissions, such
as this one. Let’s not forget too, the Australian children’s
authors, who’ve backed this in over the long haul, such as Jackie French and Sally
Rippin.
Many in the
mainstream media have also contributed considered and incisive articles and
commentary to the public debate in recent years, with names such as Adam Carey at The Age,
Rebecca Urban,
formerly of The Australian, Louise Milligan at
the ABC, Ellen Fanning
of Radio National, Dr Norman
Swan of Radio National, Lucy Carroll at the Sydney Morning
Herald, Robyn
Grace at The Age, Jordan Baker at The Sydney
Morning Herald, and Sarah
Duggan at Education HQ, coming to mind. A little further afield, but no
less influential, was Emily
Hanford, and her award-winning Sold a Story podcast.
These are not exhaustive lists and I apologise to any people or organisations I have unwittingly overlooked.
Less helpful
in this debate, has been the Victorian Branch of the Australian Education
Union, that released
a statement this week denouncing the Minister’s backing of evidence-based
reading instruction and claiming a lack of respect for the professional autonomy
of teachers. My message to the union, which I tried to post on their
Facebook page, but strangely, comments were “restricted”, is this:
Unfortunately, the AEU seems to have a definition of
"professionalism" that is at odds with the rest of the community's.
Professions which are held in high esteem at community-level are those whose
practitioners are mandated to operate within narrow parameters and are held to
account (often publicly) when they do not do so - think pilots, medical
practitioners, nurses, psychologists, engineers, etc. They do not get to
"choose their own adventure" in the way that schools and teachers
have been able to with respect to selecting from a buffet of approaches on
reading instruction.
The Education Minister's decision will result in reduced
workloads and improved professional satisfaction for teachers - two key
outcomes that unions are normally invested in. This has already been
demonstrated in schools that have adopted this teaching model, without any
additional resourcing. The Education Minister took advice from a number of
teachers and school leaders, including attending an event on a Saturday,
attended by some 360 passionate and committed teachers from across the State,
and fielding spontaneous questions from the audience - without exception
demanding greater rigour and a requirement from government that reading be taught explicitly and systematically in every school, not just those who happen
to choose to do so.
The Union has a fantastic opportunity here to be on the right
side of history and be part of a major overhaul in which everyone can be a
winner: students, teachers, parents, and the community at large. In all
likelihood, others will be rolling up their sleeves and working around the
union rather than with them.
Questions put to me by journalists this week were in the
main, well-informed, but there’s still a number of misconceptions that we need
to address.
First and foremost, we need some clarity around what the
term “phonics” means. I prefer to see the word “phonics” used as an
adjective, with a noun to follow, either knowledge or instruction.
Phonics knowledge is what we want children to acquire, through
their instruction and through the process of statistical learning, about
how speech and print map to each other in rule-governed and morphologically
patterned ways in English. Phonics instruction, however, is what is
delivered by teachers, in order to support this learning by students. There
are a number of different approaches to phonics instruction and they vary
enormously with respect to:
·
*The teacher knowledge they require about how the
writing system works in English.
·
*The extent to which children are taught
explicitly, with a scope and sequence.
So, we need to work hard to help the media (and by
extension, the public) understand that this is not a debate about “phonics
Vs no phonics”. Every primary teacher in Victoria already teaches phonics,
but there is currently enormous variation in how this is done, given that responsibility
for reading instruction has been devolved to individual schools. I have written
previously about the fact that I
believe school leaders should be demanding less rather than more
autonomy on this, and that sentiment was loud and clear at the recent SOTLA-La Trobe event in Melbourne,
attended by Education Minister the Hon. Ben Carroll, at which Emily Hanford was
the keynote speaker. School leaders are not able or required to choose their
own adventure on child safety or prevention of anaphylaxis (both issues
on which evidence and recommendations continue to evolve), yet this has been
the case on the core business for schools of reading instruction. This makes no
sense and is the fundamental turn-around in this new policy.
So - what lies ahead?
Although there was rightly a sense of celebration and relief
at this week’s announcement, we must not be starry-eyed about the challenges inherent
in the implementation of new practices and equally importantly, the de-implementation
of practices that need to be removed, because they are in the balanced literacy
DNA – i.e., they are part of an eclectic bundle of approaches that teachers
have been forced to fall back on when not adequately prepared for reading
instruction by their initial teacher education.
Many schools are already on this journey, and some are established
in their new practice, with data (academic and wellbeing) to attest to its effectiveness.
From those who have started the journey, we at La Trobe hear many stories of
the steep hill teachers have to climb to acquire new knowledge that translates
into new practices. We also hear about how difficult it can be to relinquish
practices that are balanced literacy comfort-zones. Here I am thinking of the
following (as examples), which will all need to be de-implemented as part of
this new policy:
·
*The use of three cueing strategies for teaching students to identify
unfamiliar words.
· *Sending banks of sight-words home with children
for their parents to teach to them as visual wholes.
·
*The use of predictable, levelled texts as early instructional
supports.
·
*Use of “letter of the week”.
· *Use of Running Records as the go-to progress
monitoring tool.
· *The use of cute but trivialising and
demeaning “strategies” like Lips the Fish, Skippy Frog, and Eagle Eye – see more
in this 2024
open access paper by Kearns and Borkenhagen.
In their place, we will be looking to see:
·
*Teachers gaining expert knowledge about how the
English writing system works and how oral language and written language both
relate to and differ from each other.
·
*Teachers trained in, and applying one of many evidence-aligned
systematic synthetic phonics programs for initial teaching of novices about
how the writing system works.
·
*Reading instruction and writing instruction
being closely aligned so that mastery of the English spelling system occurs for
both.
·
*The use of “decodable” (phonically controlled)
texts in the early stages of reading instruction, to enable children to
practice the elements of the writing code to which they have been exposed, and
in turn, develop the essential skills of automaticity and fluency that
contribute to reading comprehension.
· *Explicit teaching of vocabulary, sentence
structure, inferencing, and background knowledge, so that the upper strands of Scarborough’s
Reading Rope are being developed alongside code knowledge, from the outset.
·
*The use of rigorous progress monitoring tools
that have strong psychometric properties (validity and reliability) and articulate
to instructional decisions and actions. This should include the introduction of
a full-scale Phonics
Screening Check, not a light-touch version that under-samples the knowledge
and skills in question.
I was asked by a journalist this week “How will we know
we have got this right?
We will know we got this right in five years’ time if
policy makers and academics are no longer falling for the fallacy
of the Golden Mean and assuming that all ideas about reading instruction are
worthy of a seat at the table just because some stakeholders loudly assert
opinions not backed by evidence. There may well be many ways of teaching a
child to read, but that does not mean they are equally effective at a
population level. Government policy has to be about population level
prevention of difficulties and promotion of success.
We will know we have got this right when we see
gatherings of highly motivated teachers at professional learning events (invariably
in unpaid time on weekends) such as Sharing
Best Practice and researchED focusing
their discussion on the details and nuances of classroom practice, not on the demoralising
and exhausting struggles of arguing for better practice and working around
colleagues who resist change – sometimes because they are anxious about it and
sometimes because they have not yet had an opportunity to fully understand its
rationale.
We will also know we got it right when we see public
health thinking, via Response
to Intervention (and its broader “home” Multi
Tiered Systems of Support) employed as the conceptual framework for the
ongoing planning, delivery, and review of reading instruction in Victorian
schools.
We will know we have got this right when we no longer
need to despairingly reflect on the poor translation into practice of recommendations
such as those of the 2005
National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, that has gathered metaphorical
dust on virtual shelves for nearly 20 years.
No society can afford (or justify) the level of reading
failure described in the recent Grattan
Reading Guarantee Report and no system can resource the intervention services
such levels of failure necessitate. Let’s not forget too, the downstream
consequences of low literacy in the form of mental health/substance abuse problems,
unemployment, involvement with the criminal justice system, and unstable
housing. These are all burdens unfairly distributed to children who start from behind in the first place.
As the adult village around our children, we must therefore, not squander the opportunity afforded
by the Education Minister’s announcement this week.
© Pamela Snow (2024)