Once more for the people at the back

It’s been a busy few weeks with respect to discussion and debate about literacy in the public domain. I have been interviewed a number of times by print and electronic media and inevitably only segments and sound-bites of my comments are used, so there’s not much nuance in the discussion.

Two key events in Victoria have been catalysts for this media activity:

1.       The announcement by the Victorian Department of Education that a Year 1 Phonics Screening Check will be mandated in this state as of 2023. Details of this plan are still to be announced, but I am at least assured that it will include pseudo-words, which are essential, as I will explain in more detail below.

2.       The release by the state opposition of its literacy policy, which privileges systematic and explicit reading instruction, accompanied by well-resourced teacher professional learning and an increase in the speech-language pathology workforce in schools to support the development of children’s oral language skills and their reading progress.

My tracking of the mainstream and social media coverage of these announcements flagged up the usual misconceptions, deliberate or otherwise, so I thought it might be helpful to lay some of these to rest in one place, hence this blog post.

As you read through these points, give some thought to Chesterton’s Fence, a concept I first encountered when listening to an interview with Stephen Fry. The Chesterton’s Fence parable reminds us that taking things away (when we didn’t understand why they were there in the first place) is easy. Re-instating them is infinitely more difficult.

 

Myth / misconception	Setting the record straight
The debate is about “phonics Vs whole language”.	I have blogged about this previously. In 2022, if you’re still debating this topic as phonics Vs whole language, then you’re a few seasons behind on the storyline. The debate now centres around the translation of cognitive psychology-informed “learning science” into the early years reading space, plus the level of knowledge that early years teachers have about the nature of the English writing system. The contemporary debate is also concerned with teachers seizing their professional integrity from the clutches of bureaucrats, education academics and union officials and calling time on being sold content and pedagogies that are not fit for purpose.   The game is up on teachers being the last to be invited to the knowledge-about-reading party and they are fit to riot on the streets about the fact that they have had to fight their way in.
The science of reading is a “one size fits all” approach.	This is one of those hackneyed clichés that immediately signals that the speaker or writer knows nothing about the science of reading, and less about how to challenge it. The science of reading, like the science of anything, is a body of work, amassed over several decades through the painstaking efforts of researchers from a range of disciplines, using a variety of methodologies. Like the science of how to treat brain tumours, or the science of improving electrically-powered vehicles, the science of reading lumbers along, with different branches and facets, and different internal debates, as it should. I suggest you ask those who reject the science of reading if they also reject the science of perception, the science of memory, the science of language, and the science of procedural learning. If not, why not? If anyone can point me to a body of scientific evidence that supports the generic, eclectic collection of approaches that loosely bundle under the heading “balanced literacy” I will cancel my weekend plans and read it. My weekend plans are safe though, because such a body of evidence does not exist. Inexplicably, however, in 2022, balanced literacy continues to be the approach supported and endorsed by many education jurisdictions in Australia and in other English-speaking countries. I wonder how much of this support for the balanced literacy status quo can be traced to an embarrassed and self-conscious unwillingness to invest in teacher knowledge and skills at the pre-service and in-service levels, so that our teaching workforce is genuinely “classroom ready” on exit from university?   “Balanced literacy” sounds so reassuring and complete. Its survival has been propped up by the fact that it is seemingly “good enough” for more than 50% of students, even if it does look the other way and shrug its shoulders at those who don’t achieve benchmarks after three years of formal instruction. I wonder whether balanced literacy proponents would be comfortable going into a class full of fresh-faced 5-year-olds, randomly selecting 10-20% (at least) and sending a note home as follows: Dear parents We use an approach to reading instruction that only works for some students. We’re sorry to inform you that your son or daughter won’t become a proficient reader. We imagine this is going to cause you and them considerable grief and will cast a long, dark shadow over their futures – academically, vocationally and for their mental health. We don’t intend to do much of any substance about this, but now you’re aware of it, it’s basically your responsibility. I notice some in the academy are now arguing, disingenuously of course, some version of “balanced literacy includes systematic phonics”. Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim that it’s better for children to learn the code via indirect immersion in beautiful children’s literature, and then in the next breath claim that this instruction is “systematic”. It just isn't. Teachers know this and parents know it. In hindsight, students know it as well, but it’s too late then.
Children should not be asked to read pseudo-words as part of a phonics screening check.	Sigh. Put the kettle on for this one. Writing systems are codes for spoken language. In English we have an imperfect code, in the sense that it is not blessed with 100% transparency, like for example Italian, Spanish or Finnish. This reflects the history of English and its rich borrowings from other languages of not only vocabulary items (words) but also their spellings. Pronunciation is a much less stable player than spelling, and its propensity to slip-slide around (over time and across geographic regions) can make spelling look like the culprit for the challenges in reading and writing English, where that is not always the case. All of this means that learning the code and its intricacies takes longer for children learning to read in English and it is an even riskier endeavour when they are being taught by teachers who themselves, have not been taught about the intricacies of their writing system (decades of whole language instruction and eroded content in initial teacher education can take a bow here – see Chesterton’s Fence, above). So – what do pseudo-words have to do with the nature of the English writing system? Pseudo-words are words that are “phonotactically legal” but are not currently regarded as “real” words. Now we need to bear in mind here that the distinction between “real” and “not real” words in English is much fuzzier than some might think. Is “google” a word? What about “selfie”? “Mansplain”? Language is dynamic because it belongs to its users, so there is not an arbitrary, black and white distinction between “word” and   “non-word”. That’s one of the reasons we are not still using Samuel Johnson’s dictionary – it does not contain the words that have come into English since its publication. Lexicographers have the fun job of tracking changes in language over time and ensuring that new editions of dictionaries keep up with usage changes that have become so commonplace that they need to be recognised in new editions of dictionaries.   Further, to a young child, whose lexicon still has tens of thousands of words to be added, a real word may be judged by them as a non-word, simply on the basis that they have never heard it before and so have no reference point for it. We also need to remember that if it’s having children read the work of high-quality authors that we’re after, they will have to be able to decode through non-words to engage with these texts – think Lewis Carroll, JK Rowling, Dr Seuss, Julia Donaldson, Spike Milligan….the list goes on. So – when we ask children to decode a pseudo-word, we are simply giving them an opportunity to demonstrate a transferable skill they have learnt in the classroom - the skill of decoding through an unfamiliar word and “getting it off the page”. This is what children need to do with all unfamiliar words so that after a few exposures, the word is “knitted in” (orthographically mapped) in their longterm memory, and they can say it, spell it and explain at least one meaning for it. Its identification then contributes to the overall task of reading comprehension. Making a fuss about asking children to read pseudo-words is as logical as protesting about them being asked to wash their hands before a meal. It doesn't make sense and it’s not in the best interests of the child.
It is insulting to teachers to suggest that reading instruction needs attention.	What’s insulting to teachers is withholding decades of knowledge about oral language and the nature of the English writing system from them and then looking the other way when large percentages of children fall further and further behind as they progress through the year levels, in plain sight of their perplexed, often guilt-ridden teachers. I wouldn’t mind a dollar for every teacher who has written to me or approached me at a school or a conference to say: “I am wracked by guilt when I think of all those children I could have taught to read, if only I knew then what I know now”. Why should teachers have to pay for education degrees that are devoid of evidence-based reading instruction content and then have to self-fund their own learning expeditions, while simultaneously processing their anger and guilt about their inability to deliver on the most basic community expectation of their degree - that they can teach a child how to read? Universities need to stop gas-lighting initial teacher education candidates and pretending that they are preparing them to teach reading. Overwhelmingly, they are not.
Teachers are professionals and should be allowed to exercise their own judgement and preferences about how they teach reading in their classrooms.	This is another put-the-kettle-on moment. I have blogged previously about professionalism and education. Some in education like to promulgate the myth that the lucky folk in other professions, such as medicine, psychology, engineering and accounting get to make their own decisions about how they practice their craft. Of course, they do have latitude to exercise discretion here and there, but in the main, being a professional means signing up for a highly constrained form of public accountability. It does not mean “Don’t question me. Just let me get on with this in my own way”. It does not mean that in education either, and the work of educators would have very low currency in the eyes of the community if it did. Many teachers and school leaders are seizing the accountability stick and using it to drive the agenda around student outcomes. Would-be spokes-people for teachers, such as union leaders and education academics will do more favours to teachers by showcasing accountability than they will by marching the “choose your own adventure” circus into town. Professionalism in other professions also means accountability and public scrutiny, which can involve periods of suspension, mandated re-training, and even de-registration for failure to practice at the expected standard. People who speak for teachers can’t cherry-pick the parts of professionalism that are appealing (like making autonomous decisions) and shirk the undesirable parts, like being held to account for poor student outcomes.
Improving decoding skills does not transform reading comprehension skills.	Decoding has been described as a constrained skill; there’s a fixed number of phoneme-grapheme correspondences in English and once these have been encountered and learned (stored in long-term memory), they are available to assist students to decode new, unfamiliar words. As students’ vocabularies and knowledge of morphology grows, this also assists them to find their way through polysyllabic words, which in many cases are “higher-order” Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary words, if we apply frameworks such as those described by Isabel Beck and her colleagues. Comprehension, on the other hand, is an unconstrained skill. It depends on a large number of “moving parts” in written text and the ability to decode is simply the non-negotiable entry point. Students then need to grapple with the fact that the meanings of words change according to context and as function of polysemy. They need to understand how syntax works to convey meaning – sometimes by embedding ideas within each other, sometimes by changing word order (active to passive), and sometimes by assembling long, complex sentences containing multiple ideas. Students need to understand figurative language, of which there are many varieties in English, and they need to bring background knowledge to the task of reading comprehension. Reading scientist Nancy Lewis Hennessy, in her 2021 text The Reading Comprehension Blueprint likens this process to a factory assembly line. When one component or process is missing or faulty, then the product that rolls off the end of the assembly line will also be incomplete or faulty. So too, it is with the role of decoding ability and reading comprehension. If skills in decoding are improving but reading comprehension skills are not, then we have only attended to part of the problem and we need to turn our attention to the other facets of language comprehension that support students to understand what they are reading. Saying that “improving phonics doesn't fix reading comprehension” is akin to saying “putting a steering wheel in the car doesn't make the car drive safely” if the other components are not fit for purpose and properly installed. But try driving your car without a steering wheel.
Some children just can’t or won’t learn to read. We have to accept this inevitability.	I am always amazed when I hear some version of this assertion. Cognitive science research suggests that we should be successful in teaching 95% of children to read yet in reality we know we fall well short of that bar. There is no moral or ethical defence for designing and maintaining education systems that hard-wire a high rate of failure. This is particularly indefensible when the burden of that failure is unreasonably borne by those who are disadvantaged to start off with. If education does not offer a leg-up to children from disadvantaged backgrounds, where will they learn to read? Prison? The unemployment queue?
Structured explicit reading instruction kills the love of reading.	I am not aware of any actual evidence to support this meme but have been in enough classrooms delivering structured, explicit literacy instruction to have seen the engagement and joy of achievement displayed by children as they master the code and gain independence as readers. I have done extensive research on populations of adolescents who are struggling readers and am pretty sure that if they had sufficient literacy skills to write a comment on this blog post, it would say that what killed their love of reading was being unable to read.
A school’s reading data is mainly a reflection of the socio-economic status of its parent community.	Family socio-economic status is certainly a strong contributor to the academic achievements of children – no surprises there. When children enter school, however, we should see a gradual diminishing over time of the influence of the home language and literacy environment and an increase over time of the influence of the instructional environment. The quality of the instruction that students are exposed to is the one lever that teachers, schools and school systems can pull – if they have the will and conviction to do so. This is evidenced when we see reports of high-achieving low-SES schools. Their communities have not sent them “better children”; their teachers have shifted their practice to provide better instruction. This does not necessarily require more funding, but it does require a re-direction of funds.
People who are not classroom teachers have no seat at the table on commenting on reading instruction.	This pot-shot is usually levelled at speech-language pathologists (SLPs), who are told to “stay in their lane” by some who are misguided or ill-informed about the scope of practice of the speech-language pathology profession. Reading is a language-based skill and SLPs are experts on language, as part of the human communication system, so it is not surprising that they (we) are working in schools in growing numbers. Not only are SLPs in schools in growing numbers, but they are also stepping up to support initial teacher education. The La Trobe School of Education, of which I am a part has just appointed its fourth SLP to its academic staff. You are going to need to get used to SLPs in the reading space as that horse has already bolted. Such is the nexus between teaching and speech-language pathology that there is a growing number of practitioners who are qualified in both disciplines. Interestingly, they typically report that what they know about reading, they learnt in their speech-language pathology degrees, not in their initial teacher education. The claim that only people who are classroom teachers have anything of value to say about classroom teaching reflects poorly on those who make it and shifts the focus from the educational needs of children to the professional egos of adults.

 

Meanwhile, in the midst of all of this media interest, on Saturday October 1, I delivered a keynote presentation at the Sharing Best Practice conference in Ballarat, that was organised by Canadian Lead Primary School principal SueKnight and her hard-working, knowledgeable and committed local team of science of reading change-makers. This was a sold-out event attended by 250 primary and secondary teachers from all over Western Victoria and from further afield. One of our La Trobe Language and Literacy Master of Education students drove for 14 hours from central NSW to attend.

Teachers giving up the final Saturday of their school holiday to attend science of learning events sends a very strong signal to their respective sectors: we want to do this better, and we want to be supported in doing so. Now. The direction of travel is clear. I hope education leaders and policy-makers are listening. 

(C) Pamela Snow (2022)

 

What’s faster: changing reading instruction in initial teacher education or tar dripping through a glass funnel?

I have written recently about the process by which schools undertake change in their approach to early reading instruction. This requires a conscious, conscientious and sustained process of around 3-5 years work, in order to build teacher knowledge and skills and embed new practices as routine. It is not a trivial exercise, and it is not for the faint-hearted. Some teachers decide it is not for them and move on. Principals like Sue Knight who have led such journeys describe a kaleidoscope of emotions experienced by teachers when they see what they, and by extension, their students have missed out on, with respect to understanding reading, writing, and spelling.

The most common refrains from such teachers?

Why wasn’t I taught this at university?

I feel so bad about all of those students who I now know I could have taught to read.

This week, the Australian Assessment and Curriculum Authority (ACARA) released the new national curriculum, after much consultation and public debate. Two key, and pleasing changes in this document are that predictable texts will no longer advocated in early years reading instruction and nor will the popular, but empirically-baseless three-cueing (multi-cueing) approach. Alison Clarke explains the problems with this tired old work-horse here.

I am pleased to see these changes, as they represent progress towards Australian early years classrooms being released from the shackles of approaches that take no account of the needs of novice learners in the face of one of the most complex writing systems in the world. Because of this theoretical and practice gap, too many students are left behind, and we simply do not have the intervention resources to catch them up.

Will this change be enough for us to do the necessary 180-degree U-turn away from balanced literacy? No, it will not.

Will providers of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs continue to smile and wave with glib reassurances that “Phonics is in the Australian curriculum and our course is accredited by the relevant authority, so ipso facto, we must be preparing our students to teach phonics”? Probably.

But this is about much more than phonics, and as I have described previously, anyone who characterises this as a debate about “phonics Vs whole language” has been hibernating for more than a decade.

This is a debate about the extent to which deep knowledge of linguistics and the English writing system underpins everything that goes on in the literacy block across the primary years. It is a debate about how to teach vocabulary, morphology and etymology, sentence structure, inferencing, spelling, fluency, and writing across genres, amongst many other things.

There’s a revolution occurring from the ground up in schools, with teachers thirsting for this knowledge, flocking to online short courses, dedicated Facebook groups and other communities of practice such as Think Forward Educators, to gain the knowledge that has existed for a couple of decades (at least) and they paid for, but did not receive, at university.

It’s time though, for Australian universities to join the revolution and share the heavy lifting on delivering and endorsing teacher knowledge and practice that ensures truly outstanding and inclusive practice for all students in all classrooms. This should not be a lottery or (un)lucky dip for parents.

Perhaps you have heard of the famous Pitch-Drop Experiment at the University of Queensland? 

Having commenced in 1927, it’s the world’s longest-running laboratory experiment. It’s a fascinating story and I recommend you reading about it.

                                                                         Image source

Why am I mentioning it here?

Firstly, because the way that we have been experimenting with reading instruction over recent decades is going to push the Pitch-Drop Experiment off its longest-running pedestal if we’re not careful. It may not be a laboratory experiment, but it has certainly been a poorly controlled social experiment and one that would never receive approval from a Research Ethics Committee.

And secondly, because waiting for change on reading instruction in initial teacher education has become eerily similar to waiting for the next drop to fall. (Spoiler alert: it took 8 years for the first drop to fall, and since 1930, only 9 drops have done so).

We need to reduce the viscosity of change in teacher preparation for reading instruction and widen the funnel neck so that rich content pours freely into university lecture theatres, tutorials, assessments, placement activities and on into classrooms everywhere.

Our 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy did not endorse Balanced Literacy (on the contrary) but nor did it shift the needle on ITE content, as demonstrated in the 2019 Short-Changed Report. Instead, as Alison Clarke observed, some phonics lipstick was applied and it was business as usual.

Teachers are changing and now university academics need to as well. At the University of Queensland, they have cameras poised 24-7 so that the next pitch drop is not missed. If we don’t have teachers being met in the middle by university academics, we can be sure that our rate of change will continue to be on par with the rate at which the pitch is dripping through that funnel at the University of Queensland: excruciatingly slowly.

Idly watching pitch ooze at a glacial speed out of a glass jar is one thing. Standing by and consciously withholding improved knowledge and practices from Australian teachers and children is something else altogether.

Let’s hope the imperceptible speed of change in Australian university ITE programs doesn't continue to be education’s Pitch-Drop Experiment. 

(C) Pamela Snow (2022)

Leaving the Balanced Literacy habit behind: A theory of change.

Have you ever tried to change some aspect of your behaviour? To eat a healthier diet and/or lose weight? To exercise more? To have a better sleep pattern? To spend less time on Wordle and Wordle knock-off sites? All of these, the last one in particular, are difficult to do. Anyone who has studied biology will know that the forces in favour of homeostasis are strong, and if you’ve studied any psychology (or just lived an average life), you will know that the forces that work against behaviour change are also strong.

So, against that background of knowing how difficult change is to undertake and sustain, it is remarkable to see the level of commitment to change that is occurring in classrooms right across the English-speaking world, when it comes to improving early years literacy instruction, so that children are set up for academic and life success.

This means moving away from a trusted, comfortable instruction approach that has the beguilingly reassuring descriptor “Balanced Literacy”. Now when it comes to diet, sleep, exercise and maybe even Wordle exposure, balance is all fine and it’s what we strive for. The word balance was misappropriated, however, for reading instruction, and mischievously so, to confer false reassurance to teachers and parents that “we’ve got this”: Everything is there. It’s fine. Yes, we do phonics, we just do it in context because reading is a meaning-based activity. 

If you would like to understand more about why and how Balanced Literacy cashed in on the vacant but illusory “golden mean” space in reading instruction discourse but then failed to deliver, you can do so via links here and here. In a nut-shell, Balance Literacy is poorly defined and promotes eclecticism; further, it is not premised on a theory of reading that is testable, reflecting its ancestry in Goodman's Whole Language, reading-is-a-psycholinguistic-guessing-game casserole for classroom teachers.

So – the jig is up on Balanced Literacy; and teachers, literacy leaders, school principals, and in many cases, sector-level advisors, want to know how to support a change process towards a model and set of practices that ensure success for the overwhelming majority of students through mainstream, Tier 1 instruction. This means teaching reading in an explicit and structured way, from a position of strong teacher knowledge.

In this post, I draw on a well-known theory of change, Prochaska and DiClemente’s Stages of Change Model, which is to behaviour change, what the Simple View of Reading is to early years reading instruction: a model that has been around since the 1980s, has been well-researched, and found to be robust under a wide range of real-world circumstances.

The Stages of Change Model was originally designed for use by clinicians working 1:1 with clients seeking to break entrenched behaviour patterns that have become dysfunctional. It has been successfully applied to a wide raft of behaviour challenges in recent decades and also to organisational change. I think it’s worth a close look with respect to changing school-level reading instruction, because it helps us to understand that:

• Change is a process.
• Change is difficult to initiate.
  
• Change is difficult to sustain.
• There are identified points of vulnerability that increase the likelihood of lapse / relapse.
• Deliberate actions can be put in place to protect and sustain changes that have been made.
• If we stay the course on change, the general direction we move in is upwards.
  

An important feature of the Stages of Change model is that it represents change as a cycle, not a set of linear steps. As such, any school could, at any time, in theory at least, move forward or backwards in the cycle and will potentially re-visit earlier phases in aspects of their work. As long as this is recognised and understood, changes can be protected, and appropriate actions can be put in place if lapses (or, less likely, but more seriously, relapses) occur. 

As you can see in the figure below, another important feature of the Stages of Change model is that the overall direction is up. Stay the course, pick yourself up after you fall off the horse, and get back on again, and in time, things will move in a positive direction, in spite of some inevitable set-backs. The change will become the new normal in time.

Image source

In terms of language, some versions of the Stages of Change Model refer to lapses and some to relapse. I prefer to focus on lapses, as these are more likely in the school context than a full relapse to old Balanced Literacy ways. The language of "lapses" is also more forgiving with respect to mistakes that will probably be made, as discussed further below.

Let’s look at the stages identified in the model, which you can see illustrated in the figure above. I will consider each stage in turn, along with the challenges and opportunities it affords in moving away from Balanced Literacy. 

As you will see, some challenges and opportunities turn up at multiple points in the change cycle. My musings on these reflect my interactions with literally thousands of teachers in the last couple of decades, as well as my current work in and with schools.

The opportunities at every stage are vast, as described by Victorian principal Sue Knight in her “sliding doors moment” blog-post concerning the journey away from Balanced Literacy. 

PRE-CONTEMPLATION – Change is not on our agenda or the radar. We’re happy as we are.

What's happening / challenges

Opportunities

The key risk for schools here is no upward growth in student achievement over time, regardless of the starting point. This risk applies to all schools, irrespective of their overall data, because all schools can improve.     Students’ outcomes are accepted as largely a result of postcode lotto, rather than being a consequence of instructional quality in the classroom. This risk is not symmetrical though; it applies more conspicuously at the under-performing end of the school spectrum. In the pre-contemplation stage, teacher knowledge concerning the nature of reading as a cognitive and linguistic process, as well as the patterns and intricacies found in the English writing system, will remain low and static, reflecting the unstated assumption that this information is neither necessary nor helpful. There may be a vague awareness that there's a vast "other world" of knowledge out there about reading, and some moments of disquiet. In some cases, it probably just feels too overwhelming and any rocks that have been tentatively turned over are carefully replaced.   I have referred in a 2016 blog post to the evidence on low teacher knowledge on how the writing system works in English, due to the devaluing of this knowledge currency in initial teacher education programs. This has shifted marginally, if at all in Australia since that blog-post was written. Most worryingly of all, when schools stay in this space, they can unwittingly sustain a pernicious parent-blame meme that goes something like this:   If parents in this community cared more about their children’s education, they would buy more books and spend more time reading to them in the pre-school years. Its parents’ job to instil a love of reading, so when they get to school, children can catch on in the classroom. This position has unfortunately been reassuringly propped up by views expressed by some children's authors.

The pre-contemplative space is ripe for the entrance of a disruptor: a teacher, school leader, parent, or allied health professional who asks questions and initiates discussions (neither of which are always welcome) about student data and performance. This person suggests that other approaches exist that should be explored, but they may be initially ignored, ridiculed and/or frozen out.  An important strategy here is to "roll with resistance" rather than locking horns with it directly. Stay connected, keep the conversation going, and listen for clues as to what the real concerns are with respect to the prospect of change.

 PREPARATION / CONTEMPLATION – We’ve heard some other schools are making changes. We’re interested but a bit anxious too.

What's happening / challenges

Opportunities

The naysayers can be quite vocal at this stage and by resisting change, can ensure that the school slots back into its pre-contemplative, all-is-well / we-can-live-with-our-data comfort zone.         Sometimes schools dip their toe in the change waters and then quickly remove it, having managed to reassure themselves that they are actually OK.   Sometimes schools don’t move beyond contemplation and early preparation because the general conclusion is “this will be too hard”, or they fall back on “parents in this school won’t like it”.     Another risk that arises is the sunk-cost fallacy. “We’ve just spent a 5-figure sum on leveled predictable readers, so we can’t change tack now”. Sometimes teachers buy the rhetoric around explicit and structured teaching of the code being a sure way to kill children’s love of reading. Sadly, nothing kills children’s love of reading more efficiently than being unable to read. A dominant belief that systematic and explicit literacy instruction is only for “Tier 2 children” can be an obstacle here. This view is espoused by some teachers, literacy leaders and in some corridors of power in policy circles.  It flies in the face of the principles of Response to Intervention however, which is premised upon a strong Tier 1 and higher dose (duration, frequency, intensity) at Tiers 2 and 3, not different approaches.

Sometimes someone attends some particularly impactful professional learning and brings that back to colleagues for discussion.  Being in this phase opens up new opportunities for discussions about pedagogy and also about student monitoring tools and processes.   Teachers and schools in this stage become open to myth-busting conversations e.g., busting the myth that explicit and systematic phonics teaching means that this is the only approach to early reading instruction that is used.   In the contemplation phase, teachers and school leaders become open to conversations with critical friends and take opportunities to join communities of practice that promote structured, explicit literacy teaching.           These barriers to change are readily countered through fact-checking, which is increasingly easy for disruptors and change champions to do, because of ready access to communities of practice through Twitter and closed Facebook groups.

ACTION. We’re doing this. We are sick of the status quo and believe our students deserve better. We are going to make it happen.

What's happening / challenges

Opportunities

Sometimes, there is a temptation to move too quickly; to want it all happening tomorrow. This is understandable but hastening slowly is the name of the game.           Teachers and literacy leaders will potentially receive conflicting advice at this stage and have to make some judgement calls for themselves, e.g., on whether or not to discard those sets of predictable leveled texts or to find a way of re-purposing them.   Some staff may say “yes” to change but in their hearts, they mean “no, not really, but I’ll do the minimum I need to do, to look like I’m on board”.               Some staff are at risk of change fatigue, because they have been teaching for decades and seen countless changes come and go. Why should they feel energised about this one?    Staff turnover can be a threat to sustained change.

Remember the fable about The Hare and the Tortoise? It wasn’t the sprinter who won the race, it was the consistent, determined slogger, who stayed the course and crossed the line as the victor.   Confer with / visit others in similar settings that are a little further down the road than you and can be a brains trust (and don’t forget to pay this favour forward later on, when your school is further advanced and can support colleagues starting the journey).   This can be tricky to identify, but most leaders have a sense of who is truly on board and who is not. A culture of collaboration: team-teaching, classroom observations and discussion of video-recorded teaching segments helps to break down barriers to discussion of what is actually occurring in different classrooms (and may be aligning with patterns of inconsistency in student data). Agree on priorities for classroom change and then put professional learning, classroom coaching, and collaborative teaching arrangements in place around that. Remind yourselves at regular intervals what your strategic intent is so you can stay the course. Connecting with like-minded schools through communities of practice can be invaluable to guard against and early sense that this is all too hard. Others have walked this road before; walk in the footsteps to make your journey easier. In doing so, you help build the path for those who come behind you.   These concerns need to be validated and discussed; left unaddressed, they can become invisible but pervasive barriers to effective change.   Anecdotally, I hear of teachers deciding to stay in school because of the buzz created by the reading change journey; the stability that is afforded when turnover is reduced is invaluable.  Turnover is inevitable however and recruiting for the knowledge and skills required for your refreshed approach will be important, as will be the orientation and early support provided to new staff. It should not be assumed that new staff will just “catch on”.

MAINTENANCE: OK, we've made these big changes over the last couple of years; now we need to sustain them

What's happening / challenges

Opportunities

As schools move from Action to Maintenance, there is often a growing realisation that while reading performance (specifically the efficient acquisition of text decoding skills) may have been the trigger for change, it is not the only aspect of literacy that requires attention. Focus moves to deeper knowledge and extended practice with respect to oral language, fluency, writing, and spelling. Increasingly, there is interest in incorporating explicit teaching of morphology, to support students' abilities to identify word families, for both vocabulary-building and developing spelling skills.  There is also often a new-found appreciation for the concept of a content-rich curriculum, to support reading comprehension. In the Maintenance Phase, schools are often refining assessment and monitoring tools as they become more confident in their judgement concerning protocols that align with their new teaching methods. Many schools in this phase turn their attention too, to the teaching of numeracy and other core aspects of the curriculum

Here, staff become engaged with professional learning across the oral language and literacy spectrum, as well as professional learning concerning learning sciences and impactful pedagogies. Interest in cognitive load theory is common, as is interest in explicit instruction, classroom seating arrangements, and their relationship to pedagogical aims, and teaching a content-rich curriculum.   Maintenance is about maintaining the change process, not just about maintaining the changes that have been made.   And the fire in the belly that sustains this process is the quest to shift the needle on children's life trajectories and enable more students to complete school and have access to the social and economic mainstream. Improved data is a pleasing validation of this, but I have never worked with teachers who see data as anything more than confirmation and validation of their path. They have their eyes on the grander goal of better lives for their students; lives that they will not experience if they do not become fully literate citizens.

 LAPSES: We’ve dropped the ball in some classrooms / curriculum areas and we’re worried we will lose our gains.

What’s happening / challenges

Opportunities

A lapse is a short-term and possibly circumscribed “oops” in an area of reading instruction change that sees a reversion to old, Balanced Literacy ways, such as an early years teacher using Three Cueing (also known as Multi-Cueing, or in the UK, “Searchlights”), even though the teaching team has explicitly and unanimously agreed to leave this approach behind. Where a lapse is identified (e.g., by a literacy coordinator), it can be discussed with respect to the rationale for change and corrected via coaching and reminders about the importance of fidelity to the approach decided by the team.   A relapse, however, would be more generalised than a lapse, and might entail an entire teaching team reverting to Three Cuing, or to their abandonment of decodable (phonically controlled) texts in favour of a return to predictable, leveled texts for beginning readers. A relapse is a more serious threat to the sustainability of change and can entail some re-orienting conversations about the rationale for change and need for it to be fully sustained. These conversations need to be initiated by leaders.

Conversations about lapses need to be held in a “no blame, no shame” way. Everyone needs to bring curiosity and a solution-focus to the table, so that a lapse is just a pit-stop, and everyone is back on track again. The answer to a lapse generally lies in a weak-point in the Action Phase. Go back and look at the challenges you faced in implementing change and audit these to see where a crack has opened up to allow some slippage back to the old way(s) of doing things. Remember that for all of us, old ways of doing things are familiar and require less effort, even if we know they are not optimal and don’t produce the best outcomes.            Neither a lapse not a relapse need be a fatal threat to the change journey.

 

It’s been said that the price of peace is eternal vigilance, and the same could be said of sustaining change. “Set and forget” is never the order of the day, as it will subtly undermine all that you have set out to achieve and contribute to the cancerous discourse of “Oh, we tried that, and it didn’t work”.

I will leave you with the sage words of Professor Dianne McGuinness, who was writing nearly 20 years ago, about the late Jeanne Chall’s observations of classroom practice and instructional change in the 1960s (emphasis is mine):

“One of Chall’s most important discoveries was that teachers tend to be eclectic. If teachers are asked, or decide to change to a new program, they do not abandon old activities and lessons from programs they enjoyed teaching or felt was important. Nor do they abandon their philosophies. This can create a situation where elements from different programs with contradictory logics cancel each other out, such as an emphasis on decoding and an emphasis on memorizing the shapes of words. This has profound implications for classroom research, because it means there will always be an overlap of different methods, depending on the teachers’ training and on how many different methods they have been asked to teach”.

 McGuinness, D. (2004). Early reading instruction. What science really tells us about how to teach reading. Bradford (p. 84)

 

(C) Pamela Snow

(2022)