The danger of a little knowledge (and a little dogma)

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There’s been a great deal written and debated in recent times about the importance of teacher quality and the role this plays in improving learner outcomes.  Few would disagree, I think that teacher quality plays an important part in the overall mix with respect to student engagement and learning, though how much, of course is difficult to define and measure.

I had pause for thought this week, though, about the importance of “teacher quality” when so-called experts, be they academics (like me) or practitioners, are invited to take the podium at a conference and address an audience of teachers about current scientific understandings and so-called “best-practice”.

As an academic who is a former practitioner, I always value opportunities to talk to people who are at the coalface, whether in education, justice, health, welfare, or policy. When your work requires you to deal with the messy business of people’s everyday real concerns and distress, you gain knowledge, insight, and humility that no amount of data trawling and analysis could ever confer.  When presenting to such audiences, I always try to be conscious, therefore, of using language that is somewhat conditional and qualified. As an academic, part of my role is to “channel evidence” to people who don’t have the same access to primary research sources as I do, and are in many cases not equipped to critique its quality. As other academics will know, “knowledge” is fluid, testable, debatable, and modifiable. It needs to be handled with great care.

When my father told me (when I was about 10) that “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” I remember being perplexed about the notion that there could be any danger in knowledge. Older and wiser, I now understand the truth of these words and am reminded of them when I listen to (some) education “experts” present as facts, their particular dogma, ideology, or anecdotal experience. 

I witnessed this earlier this week, when listening to a fellow invited speaker at an education conference attended by about 150 teachers and other practitioners who work with young people who are either disengaged from education or are at risk of such disengagement. These teachers all appeared to be highly motivated and eager to improve their knowledge and skills. They listened with what seemed like great focus and engagement to a speaker who told them that

• MRI studies show that “dyslexics[1]” use the right side of their brain when attempting to read, not the left
• It’s important to understand the “learning style” of a “dyslexic”
• Many dyslexics have so-called “Irlen Syndrome” and benefit from the use of coloured overlays.

I seemed to be the only academic in the room, which meant I felt like the proverbial wet-blanket at question time when I pointed out (politely!) that there is no scientific basis for the notion of learning styles, and nor for the use of coloured overlays.  I mentioned that teachers in the audience might find the MUSEC Briefings a useful resource for evaluating the claims made by proponents of such approaches but was met with only a very lukewarm response. I didn’t know where to start on the MRI issue so left that one right alone. I also have an intense dislike of disability-based descriptors for people – I doubt that anyone who has a reading problem would be happy to be defined in such a mono-dimensional way as “a dyslexic”- as if the term conveys all we would ever need to know about them. It’s about as unifying a term as calling someone “an asthmatic”.

I am sure you can see the problem – an engaging speaker has over-simplified a complex construct and offered charmingly straight-forward and accessible responses that seem to have good face validity, so of course well-intentioned teachers are keen to “buy”. 

However, just as we expect teachers in classrooms to be accountable for what and how they teach, we need to hold “experts” at conferences accountable for what they present as facts to those who operate at the coalface. I often say to audiences of teachers that I think what they do is no less significant for society than what medical practitioners do (in fact, in some respects……..yes, you know what I’m thinking….). As a community, though, we expect medical practitioners to think and behave according to scientific principles, not according to their particular belief-system, regardless of how well they seem to be able to package and present it to an audience. 

My dad was right – a little knowledge is most certainly a dangerous thing. 

 

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[1] I have blogged on the problems with this term previously - http://pamelasnow.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/dyselxia-we-need-to-talk-its-not-me-its.html

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The first year of school: To succeed or not to succeed, that is the question

Let me open this post by asking you what might seem like an odd question: In what way are young children and avocados alike?

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The similarities are probably not leaping at you….. Colour? Shape? Taste??!! Surely not…..

However, there are some important analogies that can be drawn between the ripening of an avocado and the developmental readiness of a child to transition to school and deal with the enormous cognitive, linguistic, social, and physical demands of life in and out of the classroom.

People who are familiar with my work will know that for over a decade, I have been carrying out research on the language and social skills of young people in the youth justice system.  I have blogged about this research previously and copies of relevant papers can be found on my La Trobe University homepage.

In a nutshell, this research shows that some 50% of young people in the youth justice system (whether on community-based or custodial orders) have clinically significant expressive and receptive language difficulties. I am not keen on using the term “specific language impairment” for this population, because in all likelihood, their difficulties are anything but “specific”, reflecting a broad range of biopsychosocial risks in early life. Regardless of the terminology, however language and learning difficulties are strikingly evident in this population (though often misunderstood by others).

An almost universal feature of the early histories of these young people is their disaffection with school, their histories of suspension and exclusion, their very poor levels of academic achievement, and of course, their early departure from school, invariably with no marketable employment skills.

Early language exposure sits on a social gradient with respect to the quantity and quality of child-focussed talk experienced in the early years. Unfortunately, at a population level, this means that children from different suburbs of the same city will arrive at school with very different levels of expressive and receptive language skills (vocabulary, phonemic awareness, syntactic sophistication, narrative abilities). Readers in Australia may be interested to have a look at how children in their own areas are faring on some key domains relevant to school commencement and can do so by accessing the Australian Early Development Index (AEDI) website. 

Image courtesy of olovedog / Free Digital Photos

Classrooms are very verbal environments, so if you arrive at school with inadequately developed expressive and receptive language skills, chances are you will not only find the auditory-verbal demands of the classroom pretty challenging, but you’ll also struggle to make the transition to literacy – in itself a fundamentally linguistic skill-set.

These inequalities in readiness to meet the demands of school-life have serious and long-reaching implications. In the short-term, they create very wide developmental discrepancies in ability level that must somehow be accommodated and catered to by early years teachers. Like it or not, benchmarking begins in the first year of school, and teachers are charged with the sometimes formidable task of moving a highly variable group of learners towards (and ideally beyond) minimum benchmarks in key curriculum areas such as literacy and numeracy.

Returning then to avocados. Have you ever tried to mash up an unripe one because you wanted to make guacamole? If so, you will know that an unripe avocado, perfect in all as it may well be, is not going to give you guacamole. Not today, not tomorrow and maybe not for quite a few days. If it’s allowed to have those extra days, however, it will get there, and your guacamole will be delicious.

As the diagram below shows, avocados progress through developmental stages, ranging from “1” – not at all ready to use, to “5” – ready for a range of uses. 

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In reality, children in early years classrooms display the same (or even greater) variability with respect to their readiness to commence formal learning.

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While it would be great if we could “even out” the effects of early life experience, (e.g. through community-based programs such as Sure Start and Head Start), in reality this remains an elusive goal and the gulf between the ready-for-school and the not-quite-ready-for-school opens up more and more over the primary school years. With respect to early reading achievement, this has been referred to as the Matthew Effect and is described here by Professor Keith Stanovich.

When an avocado isn’t ready to use, the best thing is probably just to put it to one side for a while, knowing it will mature with time. Here the analogy with children breaks down, because children who are not quite ready for the formal demands of a classroom do of course need a wide range of developmentally appropriate, play-based, language-rich experiences. Such experiences will foster readiness for the cognitive and linguistic demands of more formal learning.

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So - instead of thinking about school readiness in terms of children’s readiness for school, perhaps we could re-configure this to be about schools’ readiness for children? I suspect we have more chance of success if we re-think what goes on in early years classrooms, than if we try to socially engineer large-scale change in disadvantaged communities. I’m not saying, of course, that quality pre-school experiences are not valuable, but I am arguing that school is a population-based (i.e. universal) intervention with very high participation rates (at least in the early years). As a universal intervention though, it is not currently conferring equal levels of advantage and opportunity across the community. 

In my fantasy-if-they-made -me-education-minister-for-a-day world, the first year of school would be all about consolidating the early expressive and receptive oral language skills that underpin both social competence and the transition to literacy, to strengthen the tail of the developmental curve and create genuine readiness for the life-changing experience of learning to read and write. 

(c) Pamela Snow 2014

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The simple matter of saying sorry: Language skills and restorative conferencing

 

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I recall some years ago reading a newspaper column by Australian social psychologist Hugh McKay, about what matters when righting wrongs in relationships. What stayed with me from this column was the importance for the wronged party of being heard in order for the healing and forgiveness process to begin.

In recent years, this principle of assisting victims (and indeed perpetrators) to feel heard has been reflected in the move towards Restorative Justice Conferencing for young offenders who plead guilty in court to an alleged offence. The move away from traditional adversarial and punitive approaches to justice administration is pleasing. Although punishment has good face validity and broad appeal to the readers of tabloid media, its record in actually turning around problem behaviour is chequered at best.

In Australia, all states and territories have enshrined approaches to the processing of young offenders that embed three core principles:

• adolescents are not “miniature adults” and should therefore be treated in accordance with their developmental needs;
• wherever possible, it is desirable to divert young people away from formal convictions, whether community-based or custodial, and accordingly, 
• detention is an option of last resort.

It is notable too, that the principles of restorative conferencing are also finding their way into schools, both primary and secondary, in an effort to equip young people with the skills required to negotiate conflict and interpersonal harm in prosocial and respectful ways. This is particularly important to young people whose families are unable, for a variety of reasons to model and teach these skills.

Restorative conferencing sits well alongside the above principles. It is a process whereby the young offender comes face-to-face with his /her victim and others who have been affected by the “tear in the social fabric” created by their wrong-doing, in an effort to ensure that all parties can tell their story, express their pain, hear and understand the perspectives of others, and offer and receive an apology. 

 

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Before having a closer look at the verbal demands of restorative justice conferencing, however, let’s have a look at what we know about young people who wind up in the justice system. Overwhelming, they are from low socio-economic status (SES) families, often single-parent households characterised by inter-generational problems such as un/under-employment, unstable housing, mental health problems, learning difficulties, and erratic and coercive parenting styles. A very high proportion of young people in the justice system (around 40%) have also passed through the child protection system, due to maltreatment (abuse and/or neglect) of various forms. Behaviour difficulties and school exclusion are common in their educational histories, as are patterns of academic under-achievement. None of these factors bodes well for well-developed verbal skills. Put several of them together, and it’s reasonable to expect that expressive and receptive vocabulary, narrative skills, and ability to deal with figurative language (e.g. idioms, metaphors, analogies) will be compromised, as will the ability to read and respond to emotional cues.  

Research from Australia, the UK, and the USA has indeed clearly identified young offenders as a group whose language skills will fall below expected levels, based on age and IQ. Whether we refer to these young people has having language disorders, impairments, handicaps, or simply “problems” is academic in this context. What matters is that around 50% of them perform in a clinical range on a wide variety of expressive and receptive language tasks, though have rarely been identified as having anything other than “learning problems” and/or “behaviour problems”. Language problems, though pervasive, are invisible, and when undiagnosed in young offenders, tend to masquerade as behaviours such as rudeness, disinterest, and poor motivation.

What then, does this evidence mean for restorative justice conferencing?

Though we lack hard data with which to answer this question, it is the subject of speculation in this 2013 paper by Hennessey Hayes (Griffith University) and me. In this paper, we argue that because restorative conferencing is fundamentally a conversational process, the evidence on language difficulties needs to be closely considered with respect to conference planning and convening. It is usual in a restorative conference for the young person to be asked to listen to and understand the victim’s account of how the offence affected them, and to use social cognition skills to process a range of subtle emotions, such as apprehension, doubt, fear, resentment, and skepticism. In real time, the young person must also formulate their own ideas, thoughts, and experiences into sentences and narratives that are sufficiently detailed to be judged as genuine and enable the young person to display authenticity in the eyes of victims.

Of course, in the hands of a skilled facilitator, it is to be hoped that sufficient scaffolding is provided to ensure that communication success is promoted and the conversation that ensues is one that contributes to healing for victims and new insights for offenders. However, the lack of research evidence to date that specifically takes account of the verbal requirements of restorative conferencing means that we currently lack standard triaging approaches. We also do not know to what extent victim satisfaction with the conference process is influenced by the young person’s verbal skills. I have written further about these concerns here.

Because young people in the justice system embody the notion of developmental vulnerability, every effort needs to be made to foster the development of prosocial skills and offer opportunities to be part of the mainstream. Punitive approaches that promote social alienation and limit opportunities for skill development do not service the needs of young offenders, nor of the communities of which they are part.

Restorative approaches promote respect and healing, but are fundamentally verbal in their transaction, and so pose important questions that cannot be readily answered at the present time.  There is an important role for speech-language pathology here - in conducting and collaborating on research to develop clinical tools that justice and education colleagues can employ to refine the conference preparation and convening process.

Saying sorry is of course no simple matter, as it requires a flexible and responsive verbal and social cognition toolkit. However, current evidence indicates that we should assume that one in two young offenders will struggle with many of the receptive and/or expressive language demands of these important, and high-stakes restorative conversations. 

(c) Pamela Snow 2014

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