When Loretta met Misty: my response to a recent Talking out of School podcast episode

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Thanks to a share by my colleague Dr Nathaniel Swain, I recently listened to this episode of the Talking out of School podcast, in which Dr Loretta Piazza interviews A/Prof Misty Adoniou. I was frustrated and disappointed about the number of misconceptions and misrepresentations contained in the interview, and will address what I see as the key problems here:

A/Prof Adoniou recalls her own experience of phonics instruction several decades ago and places great store in the fact that she found it boring and wondered as a child why she was not learning letters in the context of words.

There’s a few problems here:

- Anecdotal accounts of our own experiences of learning to read are just that. They’re a bit like noses. We’ve all got one, but we can’t extrapolate too much from their size or shape about noses at a population level.

- A/Prof Adoniou apparently misses the irony of the fact that her early reading instruction was successful. She’s now a PhD-qualified academic, and that would probably not have happened without early reading success and the academic achievement it affords.

- Children are not usually the best judge of what they "need" at a given point in time. That's why they're not in charge of bedtime, the supermarket shopping, or curriculum design and delivery. 

When asked by Dr Piazza why “speech therapists” (sic) work in literacy, A/Prof Adoniou attempts to explain the scope of speech pathology (SLP) practice (to her credit, she uses the correct term) but incorrectly positions this work in schools as “medicalising” literacy.

This is a mischievous distortion. Some SLPs do work in medical contexts, such as hospitals, but those who are in schools obviously do not. The fact that SLPs have knowledge about a range of neurobiological disorders does not make their work in schools “medical” any more than it has this effect on the work of teachers in special education contexts. Worryingly, in a 2021 study of ours at La Trobe University, we found that practitioners who are dual-qualified as teachers and SLPs reported that the substance of what they know about reading came from their SLP degree, not from their teaching degree.

For anyone who is interested, there’s a detailed explanation of why SLPs work in the literacy space in this 2019 blog post of mine. It is not “over-reach” and the professional body, Speech Pathology Australia, provides detailed guidelines for practice in this and a range of other domains. If people genuinely want to know why SLPs work in the literacy space, perhaps it would be wise to pose that question to an SLP, or to the professional body.

While critiquing the term “science of reading (SoR)”, A/Prof Adoniou walks right into the straw man trap of suggesting that some (happily she does not say "all") SoR advocates talk very narrowly about phonics and specifically, systematic synthetic phonics (SSP).

I defy A/Prof Adoniou (or anyone else for that matter) to provide evidence of such narrow advocacy, at the expense of vocabulary, fluency, comprehension etc. To set the record straight, how phonics is taught is a fundamental point of disagreement in reading debates, so it is understandable that this is where much of the nitty-gritty discussion occurs. My position is that children need to have efficient tools for sub-lexical analysis of novel words of increasing length and complexity. Teaching decoding explicitly equips children with a transferable skill-set that in turn promotes automaticity and fluency. These are key ingredients for reading comprehension. I hope this explanation also addresses Dr Piazza’s later question “What’s wrong with predictable texts and getting children to look at pictures?” Predictable texts and reliance on picture cues of course promote an illusion of early fluency and proficiency that for a significant proportion of children results in the pernicious Year 4 slump (which in practice probably becomes evident in Year 3). 

A/Prof Adoniou describes reading as a “social” activity that should not be “medicalised” by health professionals like SLPs.

Reading is not a social activity. Reading relies heavily on individual linguistic and cognitive sub-skills such as knowledge of the alphabetic principle, understanding how phonemes and graphemes map to each other, phonemic awareness, working memory, attentional control, and self-monitoring (among many others). Being read to, and later on, reading to others are activities that have a social element but once again, reading is not fundamentally a social activity. Social activities involve interaction, for example conversation and games that entail sharing and turn-taking. When proficient readers join a book club, that is a social activity, but reading per se is not. Struggling readers do not benefit from "social" interventions. They benefit from support targeting specific sub-skills. Teachers and children alike have been done a great disservice by the positioning of reading as a social activity. This is worthy of delegation to the neuro-myth hall of fame (or perhaps shame).

In the context of discussing the range of abilities that can be expected in a classroom, Dr Piazza provides a fundamentally flawed description of what she calls a “normal distribution curve”.

Rather than re-hashing this here, let me summarise briefly what it does mean to say a distribution of scores fall under a normal (bell-shaped) curve. A normal curve means 50% of scores fall above the central point (where measures of central tendency, the mean, median and mode are all of equal value), and 50% below. Approximately 68% of scores fall immediately either side of this mean (i.e., within 1 standard deviation, which is a measure of distance from the mean). A further 28% fall plus or minus 2 standard deviations from the mean and in total, over 99% fall within 3 standard deviations (either above above or below) the mean. It does not mean (as stated) that “50% of children are in the average range”.

I would also question Dr Piazza's apparent acceptance of the fact that 25% of children in a class will struggle with reading. While there will always be a lower band, that group does not necessarily need to be cast into the wilderness of perpetual struggle. We should be actively working against a normal distribution for reading skill and seek instead to shift the tail of the (peaked) curve to the right. SoR advocates argue that we should be achieving reading proficiency for 95%-plus of students. That seems far more child-friendly than accepting a 25% failure rate.

A/Prof Adoniou argues that teachers operate like “scientists” in the classroom because they are constantly observing their students and making instructional adjustments.

I’m really not sure that this warrants the use of the term “scientist” but if that is the position that A/Prof Adoniou is adopting then we need to talk about the background knowledge that those scientists bring to their work. There is an abundance of published evidence indicating that teachers lack critical linguistics knowledge that supports optimal reading instruction (see reference list on this page). In fact, A/Prof Adoniou has written about low teacher knowledge herself, observing (p.104) that “Numerous accounts of beginning teachers note a lack of content knowledge about how the language works – most particularly, the basic constructs of the English language”. Pleasingly, this is a key focus of the recommendations of the recent (2023) Teacher Education Expert Panel Report.

Dr Piazza expresses exasperation about the decision in Victoria to adopt a phonics screening check (PSC) - or what I would refer to more correctly as a Clayton’s PSC.

There is reference to this as a perplexing decision by a high-performing state to base its practice on a change adopted by a more poorly performing state (South Australia), without acknowledgement of the fact that SA’s NAPLAN data has shown improvement since the PSC and associated pedagogical changes were implemented. Let's not forget too, that following the 2016 trial of the PSC in SA, it was reported that "For many teachers and leaders, the PSC was an eye-opener with some expressing surprise and disappointment about the results - particularly for students they identified as strong readers" (p.18).

Victoria may be the strongest performer at a macro level but that does not mean that there are not children being left behind in the early years as a consequence of not being efficiently and effectively taught how to decode. The widening achievement gap in Victoria was also not mentioned. Further, there’s a growing (but unknown) number of schools in Victoria shifting from balanced literacy to instruction that aligns with the SoR, so those schools will be helping to boost Victorian NAPLAN data as well.

In the context of discussing the PSC, the hoary pseudo words chestnut makes an appearance.

There’s some predictable and unfortunately disingenuous angst about testing 6-year olds on these apparent abominations, with no pause for thought about the extent to which nonsense words turn up in high quality children’s literature (Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, JK Rowling, Julia Donaldson, Dr Seuss, and so on). I suspect A/Prof Adoniou does actually understand why they are used in the PSC, as she references their use in laboratory research. It’s disappointing that she did not use this opportunity to do some much-needed myth-busting about their importance as part of brief a progress monitoring screening tool. Similarly, no SoR advocates (to the best of my knowledge – always happy to be corrected) suggest that teachers “teach non-words” to the children in their class, as implied by A/Prof Adoniou in this podcast. It’s possible some teachers give children non-words for decoding practice and for having fun with sounds, but that’s not the same as “teaching non-words”. Let’s remember too, that all words were once “non-words” so this is not a robust, binary distinction, as the ever-evolving nature of English reminds us.

Another important point that is conveniently not raised in the context of discussion about the PSC is the fact that England’s performance on the international PIRLS test is improving while Australia’s falls significantly below that of comparable OECD nations and is not trending upwards.

It is not possible of course to attribute England's PIRLS data solely to the introduction of the PSC in 2012, but as a policy and practice centre-piece, it has clearly been pivotal in driving changed practice at instruction and progress monitoring levels in that nation. With 20% of Year 4 students in Australia failing to achieve proficiency by international PIRLS standards, we have, as Jordana Hunter and Anika Stobart observed in May this year, "some work to do". We know that schools in disadvantaged areas can change their student achievement and well-being by changing their instructional practices, so let's not even think about blaming disadvantage for this (though the phenomenon is sadly over-represented in disadvantaged post-codes). It's teachers, not post-codes that produce children's reading achievement and we should be celebrating and learning from the successes in schools such as Churchill Primary in Victoria.

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I am a big fan of listening to podcasts to broaden my knowledge and perspectives on all things language and literacy, and education more generally. It’s rare, however, to experience so many jarring moments in which misinformation is presented and stated as fact. I would be very happy to receive an invitation to be interviewed by Dr Piazza on this podcast, as a way of setting the record straight on some matters and presenting alternative views on others.

Talking out of school should not mean being careless with accuracy and completeness in the messages conveyed to teachers.

 

(C) Pamela Snow (2023)

There’s a new world somewhere. A response to the release of the Teacher Education Expert Panel (TEEP) Report

                                                                   Image source: Joshua Rawson-Harris, Unsplash

 

On July 6, the final Report of the (Australian) Teacher Education Expert Panel (TEEP) Strong Beginnings, was released. There have been over 100 reviews of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in Australia since 2008, yet no substantial reforms have resulted. Let's not forget too, the 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy. Not one university or education jurisdiction in Australia adopted the recommendations of that report. We can only ponder how different our position would be, 18 years on, in 2023, had the response to that report created the disruption that was clearly needed. I have blogged previously about the resistance to change in ITE on reading instruction, likening this to the quirky and painfully slow pitch-drop experiment that has been running at the University of Queensland since 1927.

One might reasonably wonder (a) why we have had so many reviews of the preparation of this critical and large workforce in recent years, and (b) why will this one be any more effective than those that rest in the existing giant ITE reviews graveyard? I’m not sure that I can provide definitive answers here but can hazard some guesses on both.

First up, let’s be clear about the Terms of Reference (ToR), given that much of the criticism of the report by its detractors focuses on the education ills the recommendations do not address (because they were not in scope).

The ToR are located here and can be summarised as:

·       Strengthen the link between performance and funding of ITE;

·       Strengthen initial teacher education (ITE) programs to deliver confident effective, classroom ready graduates;

·       Improve the quality of practical experience in teaching, and

·       Improve postgraduate initial teacher education for mid-career entrants.

 

In Priority Reform Area 1, there is a strong focus on what might be broadly termed “the science of learning” and “impactful pedagogies”.

 

Strangers to this debate might be surprised, in 2023, that a government-auspiced report needs to mandate content in ITE that prioritises high-quality knowledge about the brain and learning, and an understanding as to why some instructional approaches are more effective than others.

Sadly, this is the case however, because of the free rein (or reign, if you prefer) that university education faculties have had with respect to what they do and do not include in ITE programs. This has occurred in spite of the regulatory frameworks around ITE, because it has been possible for providers to bring their own interpretative lens to quite elastic criteria. Elasticity works in providers’ interests, as the extent to which individual providers meet AITSL requirements is in reality, dimensional, and not binary. No matter how well-intentioned, I am sure readers of this blog can see the obvious problems with the implementation hither-to of these standards in practice:

 

It's worth considering some anomalies in the education sector about the brain and its involvement in learning, and the way that pre-service teachers are prepared for making pedagogical decisions in the classroom.

For many education academics, the idea of children’s learning being based on underlying cognitive processes that interact with internal and external stimuli is almost an abhorrence. It’s fine to talk about learning as a social activity and to make vague references to “meaning making” in learning.  Reference to information processing, working memory, and cognitive load, however, are not uncommonly treated dismissively. No doubt these were absent from the ITE programs that most current education academics completed, and that perhaps makes them seem daunting and foreign. If we say we want our children to be life-long learners, however, then it is reasonable to expect our education academics to lead from the front and display curiosity about so-called “new” ideas in education. This openness is typically afforded to ideas that align with current beliefs and ideologies, regardless of their evidence-base, but resistance to evidence that is “out of paradigm” (such as that from cognitive psychology research) ranges in my experience, from passive ignoring to open hostility (of course in the middle, there are academics who are open to this evidence, and they must be given credit for their willingness to consider new paradigms in their work).

     In contrast, learning about trauma-informed teaching has rightly become a popular form of professional development for teachers in recent years. In such sessions, teachers learn about the different evolutionary levels of the human brain, their typical development and specialisation for different regulatory systems, and ways in which they are disrupted by exposure to different forms of childhood trauma (neglect and/or abuse of various forms, including vicarious trauma associated with domestic violence). I personally have delivered such sessions over the years and have attended sessions delivered by others. I have never heard a syllable of objection, anywhere, to teachers learning about the human brain and its functioning in this context. When brain development is positioned in the context of learning science, as a way of discussing everyday pedagogy, however, all hell breaks loose (as we have seen on social media in response to the release of the TEEP Report), and the folkloric memes and neuro-myths about human learning surface thick and fast:

      - All children learn differently
- We have to take account of children's learning styles
- Approaches that work in one setting can't necessarily be applied to classrooms in other settings
- Teacher-led instruction helps students pass tests but kills (select as many as you wish) - creativity / collaboration / communication / problem-solving / co-operation
- And so on.....

This reflects the longstanding absence of neuroscience in pre-service education programs, and the fact that this vacuum has been filled by what are commonly referred to as “neuro-myths”. It can be years before some teachers come to the full and disquieting realisation that these are in fact mere folklore. Once in the education water however, these myths are extremely difficult to disrupt. It is particularly pleasing, therefore, to see specific mention of the eradication of neuromyths from ITE programs in the TEEP Report. Informing teachers about basic brain science should result in two equally important outcomes: it should support them to incorporate evolving scientific findings into their teaching across their careers and should afford them some protection against the next neuromyth that tries to finds its way into their classroom.

We should not be experimenting on children, any more than medical practitioners should be experimenting on patients, or airline pilots should be experimenting on passengers.

In reality however, when responsibility for teaching reading (for example) is devolved to the individual school level (as occurs in many Australian jurisdictions), children are being subjected to unregulated, poorly designed and implemented social experiments. Children are not in a position to give or withhold consent for such experimentation and neither are their parents. This is unethical. Further, there is no community accountability for the outcomes of these experiments and when a significant proportion of children do not succeed, this is mis-attributed to non-school factors, such as parents not reading enough to their children in the pre-school years. This discourse is disempowering for all concerned, not the least of whom are teachers.

There has been a long-held position in education faculties that teachers should be allowed to teach in way(s) in which they are most comfortable and which they believe are the best match for their particular students.

Like many edu-memes, there’s an element of substance here in the sense that we need all human services practitioners (teachers, health professionals, social workers, lawyers, psychologists and so on) to adjust their practice sensitively and respectfully according to key characteristics of their end-users. Here we might consider factors such as levels of disadvantage, English-language status, disability, and trauma-exposure. It might be fair to say “one size doesn’t fit all” if by "high-quality, evidence-based instruction", we meant conducting ourselves in exactly the same way with every different class, regardless of geographical location, socio-cultural, and individual factors. But no-one does mean that. The sustained muddying of these waters has allowed many education academics and policy makers to persist with their “there’s no better ways to teach, just different choices that teachers need to make” hooey.

This is problematic because

(a)   It ignores the fact that there is a hierarchy of evidence in the learning sciences, that indicates the greater effectiveness of some pedagogical practices over others. The very idea of a “hierarchy of evidence” is anathema to some education academics, who take a relativist approach to evidence, based on the notion that there are “different ways of knowing” derived from different epistemologies. Some even go so far as to position this as a tension between science and democracy in education, seeking to steer the discourse away from classroom instruction and management to sociological and philosophical interpretations of the purpose of education. I recall hearing the now 95-year-old E.D. (Don) Hirsch in a podcast interview a couple of years ago, in which he expressed the view that education faculties in the US have been allowed to operate more like schools of theology than empirically-driven disciplines, as would be expected by taxpayers when they think of university departments. We would do well to consider this assessment in relation to Australian universities also. There is no disrespect intended here for theological schools; they are up-front about the fact that they are peddling belief systems. Students who enrol know this. However, I am not so sure that students enrolling in ITE programs in western industrialised nations know that in many cases they are entering ideology-infused echo-chambers, in which ideas, let alone evidence, from other disciplines are often unwelcome. This sounds more like religion than scholarly empiricism to me.

I would venture to suggest that most classroom teachers have only a passing interest in postmodern sociological theorising about education, but a major investment in promoting the best possible outcomes (short and long-term) for the students in their classrooms. Readers can decide for themselves (as the TEEP Panel appears to have done) whether sociological theory or learning science will be the strongest tool in the classroom teacher’s toolkit, at a population level, in these respects. I am not suggesting that an either-or choice should be made, but it is time for ITE providers to remove the milky film from their bathroom mirrors and appraise what is really staring back at them.

(b)   It ignores the hypocrisy of recent decades in which teachers have been presented with an (ironically) unbalanced diet of pre-service preparation to teach literacy. How can teachers "choose their own pedagogy", if they have only been presented with instructional models derived from discredited whole language ideas about the reading process and reading instruction? This is reminiscent of the probably apocryphal story about Henry Ford telling customers they could choose whatever colour they liked, as long as it was black. It seems that teachers are expected to do their own discovery-based learning, often self-funded, after years of watching children being failed by their classroom instruction and feeling increasingly uneasy about the likelihood that with a different instructional approach, most if not all of these children would have succeeded. Sue Knight, a Victorian school principal, has blogged about that phenomenon and the associated teacher anger and guilt here. Bear in mind too, that teachers (and tax-payers) have already paid for a degree. They should not have to then pay again to unlearn a significant amount of what was presented as fact, but was in reality, not embedded in a strong foundation of evidence. Reading instruction is an obvious case-in-point here. 

Practitioners in professions that are held in high esteem in the community have less rather than more autonomy with respect to their everyday decisions and practices. The consequences of these decisions are highly visible and accountability mechanisms apply when mistakes are made. So, it’s an own-goal when education academics pose faux questions about whether it will be the turn of medicine and engineering programs next, to be subjected to review by a “politically appointed panel” (as an aside, panels for government reviews of anything are “politically appointed” – this is just rhetoric). My response to this question is “no” – because academics in those (and other professions) have long displayed appropriate understanding of evidence and accountability and have exercised care and responsibility in the precious license granted them by the community to prepare future practitioners.

It is often argued (especially on social media) that the community should trust teachers and afford them professional autonomy with respect to how they deliver the curriculum to their students. This is problematic because

(a)   It promotes high variability, and high variability in any system is the essential ingredient for compromised quality.

(b)   It overlooks the fact that being a professional means accepting a highly constrained form of accountability – to end users, to registration bodies and to the community. This is how things roll for health professionals. As noted above, they are not permitted to “do their own thing” and face the heavy weight of accountability if they do so and adverse outcomes occur. This does not mean that such professionals exercise no autonomy. But they do need to swim between the proverbial flags with respect to applying evidence and making appropriate adjustments for the end-user in front of them. What is deemed as “appropriate” depends on a range of regulatory, cultural, and personal factors. Individual practitioners are expected to seek and gain informed consent if recommending significant deviations from evidence-based practice. No-one suggests that these are easy decisions, which is one of the reasons that such professionals are generally held in high esteem in the community. We know that they have a specialised body of knowledge, and we expect them to apply it to the highest possible standards. It will be in education’s interests in the long run, to be held to the same standards of accountability.

It's 2023 and time to find the circuit breaker on regular reviews of ITE that are not only expensive, but futile when they lead nowhere other than to an even more demoralised workforce, and no uplift in student performance.

The reality, unfortunately, is that universities have strayed a long way in recent decades from valuing and delivering knowledge-rich curricula in the science of learning more generally and the science of reading specifically (noting that how reading is conceptualised is generally a bellwether for how learning more broadly is understood). This content has been devalued alongside an elevation of sociology, critical theory and other forms of social philosophy that encourage a challenge to traditional power structures. Ironically, this has been disempowering to classroom teachers. As I have noted previously, this shift has created a Chesterton's Fence problem for ITE. Education academics removed something whose value and importance they did not appreciate, and now they are going to have difficulty re-instating this knowledge in their programs, to fulfil regulatory requirements in a short turn-around. Dr Jennifer Buckingham has written about this core challenge here.

The recommendations of the TEEP Report offer a roadmap for reforming ITE to make it fit for the vital role education plays in the social, civic, and economic fabric of Australian society. It is an opportunity for a major refresh and re-orientation of ITE, such that graduates can assume genuine expert status in their field and be ready to deal with instructional and psychosocial challenges in the classroom. It’s an opportunity to lift the status of the teaching profession, by promoting accountability in everyday instructional decisions and practices. This in turn will make education an attractive career-path for high-performing school leavers and those in other professions seeking career-transitions.

The panel has provided recommendations and a roadmap. Faculties and Schools of Education now need to bring humility and goodwill to the table. This might just be the review that tips the balance and leads us into a new world. Let’s see if we can make change happen before the next drop of pitch falls at the University of Queensland. 

Time will tell and history will judge.

 

Postscript: The title of this post is a nod to 1960s Australian folk group, The Seekers. Readers outside Australia (and younger Australian readers) might like to listen to this recording of them singing their popular hit There's a new world somewhere, they call the promised land. 

Additional commentaries on the TEEP Report can be found at these links:

Greg Ashman: Times are changing in teacher training 

Rebecca Birch: On Standards (capital S)

Jennifer Buckingham: Teacher education reform: Where will all the experts come from?

Elena Douglas: Time that teachers were taught properly too

Glenn Fahey: Education overhaul for teachers a long time coming

Ross Fox: How to help children learn: The evidence is in

Julie Hare: Schools crisis: Why a revolution might be under way

Jennifer Hewett: At last, urgent change for education seems possible

Paul Kelly: Education agenda takes aim at ‘long betrayal’

Ollie Lovell: Strong Beginnings. Reforming initial teacher education.

© Pamela Snow (2023)