Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
What could the future of primary education look like? How we can take things from where they are now and improve them to make the situation better for the pupils, for the teachers and for everybody involved in primary education?
In each episode, Ed Finch will be talking to guests within the educational field to talk about how things are, how we want them to be and the actions we can take to get them from here to there.
[00:00:00] Ed Finch: You're listening to the Primary Futures podcast from Hamilton Brookes, a podcast about the big ideas and bigger questions in primary education, brought to you in partnership with Oxford Brookes University.
How can we inspire the next generation of readers? My guest Mat Tobin explores this big question in this Primary Futures episode. Mat teaches English and children's literature in the primary bachelor and PGCE initial teacher training courses. He also leads postgraduate courses in children's literature and reading for pleasure, and he's passionate about engaging children in the reading and writing process. Let's join the conversation where I asked Mat what he sees in schools today.
[00:00:46] Mat Tobin: I would love to see in that classroom a range of texts that are of interest to the children. So by that I mean it doesn't have to be high quality literature, which I'm sure we'll get onto at some point and why that's important, but I think I'd like to see that environment where children are eager to pick up that book that's on their desk and read it and even better, want to share what they're reading with their peers and their teachers around us. So when we're thinking about seeing the students in there as well on that, I'm going to want to see them being interested and engaged in the children's reading too. Chambers refers to it as the enabling adult, the person that kind of opens the gates to that literature, so that's something I'd like to see. Another thing I'd like to see is agency. Agency for the students in there and that teacher as well, mentoring them so that ability and space and place for them to get creative and maybe follow things that they're interested in when they're going in. One of the things I've noticed a lot, we're noticing a lot at Brookes with students and with the teachers that they're going with is that hesitancy over certain key elements of the teaching of literacy, so grammar in particular and so on that note, what I'd like to see in that regard is teachers and students being excited about teaching those elements and Deb Myhill, talks a lot about to contextualize grammar
[00:02:17] Ed Finch: are you saying that you think that the teaching staff, maybe not just students, maybe the staff who are hosting them as well, are a bit nervous about the grammar or they're letting it pull their focus?
[00:02:26] Mat Tobin: In my experience of going in, the reliance is often on a pre prepared worksheet or something printed out from somewhere to explore that grammatical term, let's say. You know, Deb Myhill speaks about contextualised grammar as the way that we learn. So within the meaning of something, if it's embedded in something that has some meaning, purpose, even if it's said in a science lesson or a history lesson, you know, Oh, we were looking at this, let's see if we can apply it here. It's the same with phonics really, you just want to see them kind of drawing up on it, consistently at appropriate times, but through text.
[00:03:04] Ed Finch: Yeah, I mean, it seems clear that children can use, say for example, a perfect tense. We know one with the auxiliary verb to have, you know, I have been to the seaside or I will have finished my dinner. They pick it up and they use it instinctively and they talk it and they understand it. As soon as you start to study on a worksheet, that is a sort of knowledge that falls to pieces.
[00:03:27] Mat Tobin: It does and I think that's a lovely segue into what else I'd like to see in there. So there's this high quality text, isn't there? So this is, you and I have talked about this online a lot in the past, about the craft of the writer and it's when someone has mastered the craft of writing really well. You know that I'm on this big Jo Nakin readathon where I'm trying to read all her work from start to finish and then go on to Diana Wynne Jones and then go on to Ursula Le Guin and this is...
[00:03:59] Ed Finch: There's quite a lot to read, isn't it?
[00:04:01] Mat Tobin: Well, luckily Ursula's not written too much, but Diana Wynne Jones is blooming prolific. But the reason they appeal to me is because they write writerly kind of text. So they write books that ask more of the reader and that's because they know the craft of the writing well. So let's go back to your auxiliary verbs or let's choose kind of anything, you know, subordinate clauses or whatever. It's only when you see why the author has chosen to use them in the way that they have, that I think you get an understanding of why you're learning this and that the power you can have over it and actually what I do with the students back in Brookes is we may look at a text together, but what we've done is we do a lot of modeling of writing, pretending we are the teacher. So that kind of direct teaching kind of approach and we might do things with grammar where we say, let's take out all the auxiliary verbs and replace them with something else, how does that affect the writing? So why do you think the author made that choice then? You know, what happens if we maybe add in some adverbials or what happens if we add some adjectives? How does it change the writing? How does it make it feel? And I think going back to Twitter again, back in the day when I used to talk about the Iron Man being great and you used to get those chaps that would teach year six endlessly and get fed up about the Ted Hughes book and then get it. However, you can't knock the fact that his writing's fantastic. So I think it's important, isn't it? In that classroom, going back to that student in there with that mentor, that there's that balance between texts you can enjoy just for the sheer pleasure and then texts you look at to understand the craft that's gone into it and I think in understanding that craft, maybe those children will want to mimic that craft in their own writing. That's what's going to make them a better writer, really. So those are some of the things I would be looking for.
[00:05:59] Ed Finch: So looking at the adult role of being someone who is passionate about reading, able to talk to the children about their choices, able to celebrate those choices and maybe to able to provoke them to, you know, so well if you love that, why don't you try this? At the moment, I'm not convinced that a great number of my colleagues have the knowledge to do that, you know, and so there's a lot of falling back on texts that I liked when I was a child. There's a lot of reliance on Dahl and Harry Potter, you know, and we really want those colleagues to go, Oh my goodness, there's this fantastic book. It's just come out, it's brilliant, it's called I Am Rebel, you're going to love it, it's got this dog in it. He's really cute and funny and it's really adventurous and it's quite important that it's new. I think that the kids are going, you know, books don't live in a museum, they live in our hands, also in bookshops and things. Yeah, so how do you suggest that we get colleagues on this train?
[00:06:52] Mat Tobin: That's such a lovely question to ask actually, because it leads into so much around the role of the teacher as that enabling adult again. This is where Professor Theresa Kremen comes in, isn't it? And all her work and the rest around that, I'm sure she won't mind me saying, who set up these UKLA kind of teaching reading groups, so Imogen Maund, I'm sure she'd love a shout out, she's doing wonderful work, Johnny Biddle, you know...
[00:07:16] Ed Finch: Of course.
[00:07:17] Mat Tobin: So you've got these communities of reading teachers, who read, as a teacher. I remember Teresa telling me off for only mentioning one half of that, but before we get to that point where we talk about how do we set up these teachers readers group, I do want to talk a little bit about my time training to be a teacher at Westminster College. So I was there for four years, it's now Oxford Brookes and when I was there, Aidan Chambers was the lecturer there and of course, Aidan hired Philip Pullman to come and work there as well and then my favourite lecturer, Mary Sutcliffe and Mary had been a head at a nursery school and Mary and Aidan really came up with the premise that for the four years we were training to be teachers, so four years Ed, 30 sessions per module. So 50 hours per module, four years and the first year was in your specialism, so mine was literature. But over those four years, Aidan and Mary made every student read 100 children's books to pass the year. You failed if you didn't read 100. Now, it sounds daunting to people listening, but you were allowed to read poetry, picture books, information booklets. It wasn't, and this is it, isn't it, Ed? Because we immediately think chunky novels and I do think that's a little bit of a problem in children's literature at the moment. The old chunky novel for children between nine and eleven and some kids are eleven, but for some people that's a long old journey to get through. So I do think there's a call for shorter novels in children's literature and shout out for that thing to maybe happen. But after four years, you can imagine 400 books under your belt, you're going to be able to do the thing you said, which is what do you do when a child says, I finished reading this book? And on a learning walk I did as a literacy coordinator, my two form entry, I can remember going into year five and a nice teacher in there, but one of my kids from year three, I had her in year two and year three, and she'd just finished reading a book and she was really proud. She saw me coming in and she was obviously trying to show that she'd finished a book because she knew my passion and she went up to the teacher, bearing in mind this is a learning walk, so they knew I was coming and the teacher said, well done, go and get another book from the reading corner and for me, coming back to this, what the role of the teacher? I thought that was so sad because I thought the teacher could have said, what did you like about the book? What was interesting? Shall we go to the book corner together and look if there's something based on his interest that you might like again? I mean, the thing I used to do was say, let's go into the reading corner together. Here's three together that I think you might like and then they have them on their desk for a couple of days and they might look at the front, look at the blurb, read the first page, see if they like the feel and the tone of it and then they'll choose from that, but they'll keep those other two books for a little bit longer and of course, that goes back to Aiden Chambers, who writes a really good chapter in Tell Me, on the importance of teaching children to browse. I just think that would be a good thing for teachers to be able to do with children.
[00:10:20] Ed Finch: So when you've got schools who are running a system, you know, I think I can use a name for example, accelerated reader, which encourages children to read from a very limited set, it worries me that, you know, this child is going to struggle a little bit with that text over there, cause it's a 5. 4, but it's dead right for him in terms of his interest. I find that really worrying and I think the way out of it is a teacher who really gets the kids and goes, well, I know what they need to do in terms of their reading in terms of fluency and ability, but I also know that I need to balance that against what they might enjoy reading.
[00:10:57] Mat Tobin: So Dominic Wise and Charlotte Hacking have just had a book come out called The Balancing Act.
[00:11:02] Ed Finch: They have, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:03] Mat Tobin: And they argue for this too, which is great because it would take someone like Dominic and Charlotte to say, hold hold on a moment, we do want to question these sort of things and you know, the second iteration of the reading framework, which we all have to read and adhere to, was interesting around decodable text. That's where we're partly going. Now, I've got a story around that, which I realise I could get roasted for this story. But when I was teaching year two, when we were using the Oxford Reading Tree, the Biff and Chip books, which I actually quite like them.
[00:11:35] Ed Finch: They're all right.
[00:11:36] Mat Tobin: They're all right. But there was one child who was coming up from year one, and the mum came to me and said, if you make me read Biff and Chip to my child, I'm not going to get on with you this year and I said, I need to know where they are. So please, will you let me just read with this child a little bit and then I'll make a decision and And she wasn't ready to move off actually. She still did need some support. However, the mum said, if you trust me to read with her every night and we read together and we'll get through that fluency and we'll go through all the things that you want and we write in the reading journal every night about what we're reading, would you let us have a go? And I said, I'll tell you what, I'll give you till Christmas, so this is September and the child had chosen Casper the Prince of Cats by Michael Morpurgo. Honestly, I think it was the making is the making of not only her reading and her reading identity, and she just asked Casper for World Book Day, which she knows many months later on, but it was the making of the relationship between me and her mum and her and her reading journey. So I know it's a nice little thing for me to jump into here about reading records and reading journals, cause I'm that staunch defender much to I think every teacher's despair. I love reading journals and I'm calling them reading journals rather than reading records because how I use them is different to what you're hearing people complain about on Facebook and Twitter. I used to have it as a three way conversation, this journal. So I might ask the child, let's call her Lucy, to write something about what she's been reading in a book. Something she liked, something she didn't like, something, a sentence she liked, a word she liked that she wants to find out about more and then she might write that note down in the classroom and then when she comes home, her mum might want to write in her book after she's read with Lucy and it's fine for mum to read with Lucy if she wants to for a bit, and then Lucy can read for a bit and then I'll read what they've written and I'll write back to them. So you have this incredible three way conversation about a reading journey going through with the three of us and what happens there is the child sees that you acknowledge their thoughts and ideas on what they're reading, the parent sees you're engaging with their child and you start to just build up this incredible bond that you kind of can't do at the beginning and end of the day or in that parent's minute evening, 10 minute snapshot that you get. So I felt through those reading journals and this, let's go back to that teacher and that student being in there, that reader identity. I felt that through the journal and through book talk, that not only do you help the child gain a sense of their own self worth as a reader, but also because you start talking about books and books are intrinsically about culture and society and who we are and who we are not and other and self, that you just build up this relationship that you can't in any other subject. Sorry, every other subject, you just, you can't, that's what reading does, and that goes beyond literacy. Let's say it's more about kind of English and it's more about understanding one another.
[00:14:39] Ed Finch: But goes right into areas that people might lazily want to pigeonhole into a PHSCE, doesn't it? And you go, actually, no, this isn't PHSCE, this is the real business of becoming a human if the child feels seen in that moment, then it is very much worth the two or three minutes is going to take you to flicker through their journal.
[00:14:58] Mat Tobin: Oh, so much so and in that conversation when you were opening the journal with him and that, what you've said there then touches on the work of Professor Karen Sanz O'Connor and now Dr. Darren Chetty. Congrats Darren on that, around their work on diversity and seeing. That idea of finding books where children can see themselves and see their value of who they are, no matter race, culture, family dynamics, sex, gender. I think that's really important and actually with support from Karen, I wrote several sessions for the second years at Brookes on inclusion and diversity through children's literature based on the work of Anne Dolan, Professor Anne Dolan, I think, in an incredible work called You Mean Diversity, where she looks at things from racism to bullying. But what Anne does, which is what I'd love those teachers to do in that classroom, is they're very, she's very critical of literature that's out there. Now, you and I have had a conversation about this before this meeting about, I don't like the idea of saying, to an extent, these books shouldn't be in a classroom. I think more powerful is giving children the autonomy and power to say, actually, I think this book is racist, or it paints the poor pictures of boys or girls, or, you know, it's kind of critical of native peoples and I don't like the way it does that.
[00:16:25] Ed Finch: What a richer place is our society, you know?
[00:16:28] Mat Tobin: Than in school.
[00:16:30] Ed Finch: So say, yeah, you know, I enjoyed the book, but there was this bit that was wrong. It's very different to saying we're going to hide this book in the cupboard, so none of the children can read it.
[00:16:38] Mat Tobin: Yeah, I think so and I think that leads on to another thing that I'd like to see in that classroom, and that is, you know, at the moment, I was speaking to some teachers working in Kent this morning and they were talking about why are some people calling whole class guided reading whole class guided reading, when actually it's shared reading, and guided is that small group. So thinking about that critical inquiry, critical discussion that you and I are talking about with problematic texts, let's say, because in time all texts are going to be problematic and I think that's something we've got to think about, you know, we might think one text is brilliant, but in 20 years time where we look at and go, what were we thinking then? So I think this is, I'm interested in two things here, that critical kind of inquiry that we give children, which I think can only happen really well in smaller groups because, well, it can happen in the whole class, but I think you're going to have a richer space for discussion and thinking if there's fewer of you to share your thoughts.
[00:17:38] Ed Finch: Well, I think if there's 30 children and they're taking turns to speak by putting their hands up and some of them are shy and not bringing their thoughts, cause they don't like talking in front of lots of other people, it's just not gonna work in the same way that again, if you're sitting, there's five children and me around a table, we don't take turns and put our hands up, we have a conversation and we're modeling real conversation that we're going to have for the rest of our lives. Whereas the 30 children putting their hands up one after the other is not something that is going to happen again, unless they go on BBC Question Time, you know, that's about the only other place I can think of that being a, an authentic way of being. So what are we modeling in, you know, in the guided reading, you know, with five or six children around the table with one adult, we're modeling an awful lot more than approaches to a text, which is why it's a terrible shame when you see that and they have got the worksheet in front of them and they're trying to find the word out of the text that goes in the hole.
[00:18:29] Mat Tobin: Yeah.
[00:18:29] Ed Finch: You know what I mean? It's a really powerful time. I think people moved away from it.
[00:18:34] Mat Tobin: Yeah, they have.
[00:18:35] Ed Finch: And they've moved away from it largely because of class management. They go, I don't know what the other 25 can meaningfully be doing while I'm working with this five. Well, I always felt I don't really mind.
[00:18:44] Mat Tobin: I never had that problem either, Ed. You know, sometimes I used to do it as the carousel. I realise now a word I'm not allowed to say anymore. But I came into teaching in 99. So when the literacy hour first kind of landed and you had that, you know, during literacy hour, you might have 20 minutes where you're working with a group in the same way that I did in math sessions, I might have to work with a group and I found possibly like you, Ed, you know, it took the children some training to know that they had to do their own. I mean, I'm talking year two here where they had to get on and do their own thing while I was working with a group and it might take several weeks, but they got it because they just got it. The pain was when it didn't then carry on with the next teacher. So they unlearned that learning, but going back to what does the discussion look like in a guided read? And how might it differ to shared reading? I think it can happen in shared whole class discussion, but that dialogic element. So for me, Fiona Main, by the way, has written a brilliant book on this called Dialogic Readers, and she talks about interthinking. Actually, it's Alexander that talks about it, but this idea of building meaning together. So let's go back to, I don't know, the final year by Matt which is absolutely amazing first novel and you're trying to understand what's gone on in the story, something that's happened and you've got six children around the table and you're there facilitating. Now, Mary Roach talks about this, wayne Tennant talks about this. We have a habit as primary school teachers and probably secondary school teachers to say, I'm going to do the talking and I want you to give the answer to what's in my head and dialogic talk. says that's pretty poor practice, what we should do is, in the nicest possible way, shut up and let the children do the talking together and think together about what they think the meaning or the answer could be behind that meaning and the thing is about literature, it's all subjective anyway and I think any author, I remember Michael Rosen saying this on Twitter a long time ago, in conversation with me about meaning making, is the author sometimes doesn't even know what they meant. So the idea that there's a right answer is really blooming annoying when it comes to reading.
[00:21:00] Ed Finch: I think that comes from, it comes from a sort of general thing of we're the grown ups and they're the children, you know, and that's the dynamic, but I also think it comes from a place of insecurity in teachers who might not, you know, they probably haven't studied English to degree level and even if they have, you know, how much use that would have been to them. So I think that thing of like, well, I'll ask the question that I know the answer to and then the kid will give me the answer. I do think it comes from a place of insecurity and if you look across the curriculum, there's lots of places where it is a pub quiz, you know, but if you're reading a verse novel, like you weren't the bookish kid and that's not your thing, you're in a quite a risky place as an adult, aren't you? Which you have to embrace, but you can understand why people might not.
[00:21:43] Mat Tobin: Yeah, absolutely. So that goes, let's go back to that classroom again, Ed, then and there's, as you say, that knowledge that a dialogic classroom where children are going to talk and think far more than if you're doing all the talking and thinking for them, they're going to grow, as human beings, as thinkers, thinking about the oracy push at the moment, the idea of debate, discussion, reflection, having, generating lots of ideas and then narrowing it down saying, I think this is the best idea and this is why I think this is the best idea. I think that should be liberating, but I agree. In fact, I would say, I'm quite happy to say, I thought I was teaching guided reading when I was in my first few years of teaching, and then Mary Sutcliffe, who I've mentioned before, came and observed me, and she watched the lessons because it was a really nice book talk lesson, Mat, but it wasn't guided reading and it was all because I wasn't modeling with them any kind of comprehension strategies. So I think one of the things, going back to that nervousness that teachers might have, one of the strategies I think is quite powerful for them when it comes to reading is thinking aloud. So that idea of, you know, you read a passage of Matz, you know, I've just read this passage. This is what I'm thinking at the moment about why I think the author has written it, or this is how I think someone's feeling and this is how I've come to that conclusion and I think you then offer the floor to the children. You tell me what you're thinking as well, and why you're thinking what you're thinking. I just found that if the children have got some time, a bit like us today, some time to think about the questions that might come up and then come to it with their ideas for discussion, that really is closer to what guided reading is, whereas I have been guilty at the very start of doing the whole, you've all got the book in front of you, you read the first page, you read the second page, and that just simply, I wonder if that's what people have guided reading because they thought that's what it was, but it isn't. It's more about very little reading of the text and more, when they're fluent and more about let's talk about the text.
[00:23:52] Ed Finch: So how would Mary have contrasted that against book talk, actually? So that's a great book talk lesson, but it's not a guided reading. So what's the distinction there?
[00:24:01] Mat Tobin: So the distinction there is all to do with, I wasn't really teaching any comprehension strategies to help the children explicitly. I think I was probably modeling an awful lot of it without knowing that I was modeling and that's what she'd cottened on to.
[00:24:15] Ed Finch: Yeah.
[00:24:15] Mat Tobin: What I was doing was having a formal book discussion about a text, but not using any of the strategies like thinking aloud, like summarising, like clarification.
[00:24:27] Ed Finch: So in a book talk session, when I'm in my head, I've got a lovely book, a lovely text, I'm enjoying it with the class. I've probably got them all come and sit on the carpet so we can enjoy this lovely book together and we'll talk about it and it's quite a free form discussion. We're going to enjoy the story, hopefully we'll go through without interrupting it too much because we don't want to lose the storyiness of the story. But then we'll go back and look at our favorite bits of talk and it might open up some discussion and we're really enriching our lives with lovely stories and lovely images and it's a good thing. A little bit later in the day, I've got my guided reading. I'm in charge, I'm driving that train and I'm focusing on a skill and helping the children to build specific strategies and doing it in that smaller setting. So part of this is The teacher loving the text that they're working with, isn't it? I sort of raise an eyebrow a little bit. I see more and more schools taking on reading spines and defining half term by half term what the texts are and I think you might have chosen terrific texts. I might think they're terrific texts as well, but I don't know that the teacher in the classroom necessarily does. On the other hand, I also know that choosing a great text is an art. It's got to be a good book, but it's got to be the right book. It can't be too long, I like chapters that I can read in a session, you know, there's a lot there. So there's an interplay between the school saying, listen, we've really done the work on this. These are the texts we want to use and the teacher being able to say, listen, I never got on with that book, . I never liked it, I don't know why.
[00:25:49] Mat Tobin: And being allowed to say it.
[00:25:51] Ed Finch: Being allowed to say it, I'm allowed to say I'm not gonna use that one because for whatever reason that book doesn't sing to me and I don't think it'll sing to the kids that I'm teaching either.
[00:26:00] Mat Tobin: That's the difference, isn't it? That little bit there. Because I can imagine some teachers going, it doesn't seem to me I want to use the same book I've been using for 25 years. So there's that problem, so what do we do? Let's go back to those teacher groups that we talked about where groups of teachers all around England that I know of so far, and there'll be some in Scotland and Wales for sure, but they get together once every X amount of weeks and they simply just come with books they recommend to each other. They might have a focus text that they've been working on, and they just share what they think about the text and this is a good plug actually, Ed, for the Open University Reading for Pleasure website, which is a phenomenal free resource. I'll emphasise that again, phenomenal free resource that looks at every element of teachers as readers, building reading communities, involving parents in reading, where they've got tried and tested approaches to building that reading environment from teachers who are reluctant readers themselves, to children who are reluctant, to children who aren't reluctant, to graphic novels. But one story I've got that I want to share that was done by a student and put up on the website was one way that she wanted families to read more of the children, it was in year two, I believe and what she did is in one class, she funded it so that a little sachet of two sachets of hot chocolate with marshmallows, you know, this is great, went home with a book every week, a picture book and a sticky note and the idea was that the parent and the child would take the hot chocolate and they would sit together and they would read that book, and in a sticky note, they'd write their names and what they thought of the story and of course, in that book would be all the other sticky notes from all the other families and then that book would get passed on the following Friday and they'd get a new hot chocolate with some and I think that's such a simple but deeply clever idea.
[00:27:57] Ed Finch: And lots of classes have a traveling bear that goes over the weekend and comes back having been to the swimming lesson or whatever, but it's, I'm not quite sure why, but you put in that hot choc and the reading thing, you're celebrating something that's really, important.
[00:28:11] Mat Tobin: That closeness as well, isn't it? That physical closeness of what's what I used to love about reading to that whole class text, where they'd all come together on the carpet area. It's why I had a carpet area in year six, because I just think that togetherness, that kind of bond that you can get is really powerful.
[00:28:26] Ed Finch: I think it's hugely important if colleagues can manage to do that by hook or by crook to get their year sixes onto the carpet to enjoy a story together, you're doing something really important.
[00:28:36] Mat Tobin: Yeah.
[00:28:37] Ed Finch: For the tribe of the class and for the humanity of the class.
[00:28:40] Mat Tobin: Yeah, sure.
[00:28:41] Ed Finch: Mat, you've given us so much to think about what's going on in our classrooms right now. After the break, we're gonna do some blue skies thinking and imagine a brighter, beautiful future. But right now, let's take a little break and recharge, we'll be back right after this.
So welcome back. Before our break, we were talking about what things look like in our primary education classrooms at the moment, but now we're going to go on a flight of imagination and we're going to imagine how could it be if everything went right? And if we all got our shoulders, the wheel and pushed on the right doors, we do know there's probably not an infinite amount of money in the world and that even the new government aren't going to shower us, but you know, it's not really about money, is it? It's about attitudes and what we're gonna do. So what would you like to see change? What's a big thing for you?
[00:29:29] Mat Tobin: I think the big thing for me would have to start at the DfE and opening the door. I mean, I'm not casting aspersions here, but I don't have the knowledge, but thinking about the reading framework paper, I think the reading framework is good. I do think it's good, but I want to know who's written it. So I think transparency would be great and I also think, you know, when I wrote my book with James Clements, we made sure that the first three chapters, considering this is a book about primary education, we wanted to make sure that the first three chapters were about the foundation stage. So I would want to see Primary education built upon the foundation of what good practice is the foundation that's what I want to see. Not top down thinking, I want to see bottom up thinking, you know, it's tied in, you know, it's a tired statement, but it's called the foundation stage for a reason. So I think getting in experts around the foundation stage would be good. I've been having conversations with my wife about this, about Labour coming in, and her role at school is safeguarding lead, but also pastoral lead and she talks a lot now, Ed, about parenting is falling behind, children are coming to school with even more needs than ever, you know, that kind of growth in support is growing and I think I've mentioned to you that at the moment, it feels like when I'm training teachers at university, I'm saying to them, you're almost partly a social worker before you're a teacher.
[00:31:10] Ed Finch: Because it's a limiting factor, isn't it? That we can do whatever we want to do with our English curriculum and we can do whatever we want to do with our pedagogy. But if you've got young people who are struggling to engage with education in any form and you've got schools which are socially falling to pieces and at odds with their communities, none of it will land.
[00:31:31] Mat Tobin: Absolutely, yeah and if the focus is consistently on standardized testing, thinking about year one, you know, the phonics, the screening there and you know, they've all got their place, but if teachers are so worried that's the thing they have to focus on, then I guess to an extent, what's the real learning that's taking place and where are we taking it back to English? Where are we offering spaces and oracy for children to talk about who they are, how they feel, what they think about the world, where their space is in the world. So another blue sky thinking might be around can we really consider the literature that children encounter in school? They don't get a lot of time to look at books anyway, quality texts, so can we rethink that too? You know, one of the things I've kind of got a bugbear about is this idea of the simple view of reading and language comprehension and word recognition and the focus on phonics first and fast and I'm all for phonics being fast, by the way, Ed, and I'm even for phonics being first, but maybe there's a joint first and it's comprehension. So this idea of talk, oracy, talking about books, understanding the world around us, visual literacy, reading the world around us outside of the book, I think is really powerful and I think that's what Dominic and Charlotte's book argues and advocates for too. This idea that, and in fact, even I believe that the reading framework and the EEF certainly say maybe comprehension and phonics should be more hand in hand than it has been.
[00:33:10] Ed Finch: I think that all voices say it, I think it's the point of delivery where that gets really pinched because people know that up against the phonics check at the end of year one, which we repeat in year two if necessary and you can have a document somewhere on the school's network or somewhere at government that says that we think that high quality book talks are really important. But I'm not testing that, I'm testing on the phonics. So there is, you know, I certainly don't disagree, I think that I want children to be able to use the phonics code to decode books and read. I'm not sure I want them to read about a dog that sat on a log and met a frog, and the only reason those characters ever met was because they shared a phoneme. That's my issue, it's like, I remember a reasonably well regarded commissioning editor telling me that she was putting together a series of phonically decodable books, which were actually had some literary worth and I'm like, I think you're going to find that difficult, I'll look forward to seeing them. This was some years ago and I haven't seen them. It's a really tricky thing to do, isn't it? You know, I can think of a few people who could have a go. I think people like, Barrington Stoke show you can do something akin to that a little bit further up, once you're in a level of reading of a boundary, a year, typically a five or six, brilliant, you can do wonderful things without language.
[00:34:29] Mat Tobin: Yeah and I think that they're worth plugging Barrington Stoke. You know, we talk about them being dyslexic friendly texts, but actually that's almost by the by to a degree, because actually I talked about this earlier, this idea of short novels and the quality of their presentation makes it feel like you're reading a real book and you are reading a real book.
[00:34:48] Ed Finch: They get great authors who are prize winning, fantastic leading authors writing beautiful books for those publishers, yeah.
[00:34:54] Mat Tobin: And I think, yeah, from Morpurgo to Rosen to Mallory Blackman, kind of all their writing, so they've thought carefully about voice and quality.
[00:35:05] Ed Finch: So if you had works that had some of that quality down in year one, you wouldn't be arguing about whether it's phonics versus comprehension, the problem is now is that a lot of the books that are alongside the phonics sequenced books have no literary quality. No child in the world wants to read those and I've taught them all a few times and I don't want to read them, you know, it's a real problem.
[00:35:27] Mat Tobin: It is. So that goes back to, doesn't it, more time for this idea of the teacher being the reader so they can bridge that gap between younger children not maybe being able to access the text because they can't read the words, the coding part, but they can enjoy the text because the teacher's reading it to them.
[00:35:46] Ed Finch: I think a lot of this is just getting joy back into the classroom, isn't it? And saying to that teacher, whether they're an early career teacher or someone who's been in for 20 years, we actually care about the joy. We actually care about the, you know, the humanity of the classroom, but that might need a change to some statutory assessment for that to land.
[00:36:05] Mat Tobin: Yeah, I think so and going back to joy Ed, I can't help thinking you about writing and you know, the writing for pleasure agenda, that's Ross and Felicity. They've written that great book on writing pleasure and you know, it's been endorsed by Michael Rosen. The thing that I remember, I don't know about you, Ed, but in school, I'm not saying it was better then, but I wanted to be a writer very early on in my life and I've still got all my books from infant school with my stories in because there was some agency that I was allowed to write what I wanted to write, no matter what. So I think when we're thinking about planning English in the future, getting teachers to have the skill and the confidence to be able to say this is the outcome, but how children maybe what the outcome looks like, I'm going to leave up to the child, but also I'm going to leave space for them to write what they want to write at times, too. You must have had your jotter where you were able to write your stories.
[00:37:02] Ed Finch: I loved stories and I like, cause like you, I have those books and I've reread them and let me tell you, they weren't great literature and that doesn't matter because I, my teacher would praise me, my parents would be pleased that I got a sticker in a book and I felt like writing was something I could do and you could say, you could look at them, you could say the quality of my work at that age was not as high as the quality that our year sixes today are capable of, definitely not, I wouldn't have got expected, I think, but I love doing it. I was motivated to do it. And I thought it was about me, not about satisfying a set of criteria, I think it's maybe you need a bit of both.
[00:37:39] Mat Tobin: I mean, once again, it goes back to that word. balance, doesn't it? And I think I mentioned the word balance to a friend in education a few years ago, and I was told they don't like that word balance, but I'm sorry, that's just the truth. It isn't one size fits all for every child as a reader and it will be the same when you're a writer. So it's about engaging in their interests, really and thinking about what they're interested in and trying to accommodate that, as well as you mentioned with reading, the things you're interested in.
[00:38:07] Ed Finch: And that's this isn't it, because if we're arguing for freedom for the children that say, there's a lesson a week when you can write what you want to write, you know, it's a 45 minute bit where nothing else is going to happen, but you can write a story or a poem or whatever it is you want to write and build the sense that you have agency. Great, could we have that for teaching staff? Not while the curriculum is as packed as it is, it's the answer, isn't it? So I think there's an argument to look at the curriculum.
[00:38:32] Mat Tobin: Going back to that blue sky, what is it that we want? We're talking about teachers that have a good knowledge of books and are passionate about reading, but maybe can be versatile in how they use the curriculum for them, rather than be slaves to the curriculum.
[00:38:47] Ed Finch: It's really worth saying that the National Curriculum, as it stands, allows that entirely. That some schools have felt pressured by an inspection regiment to go very domain specific, and like history and geography never meet, they're completely divorced from anything else.
[00:39:02] Mat Tobin: Crazy, doesn't it, when you say it like that!
[00:39:03] Ed Finch: It does seem crazy, but you see why colleagues have gone down that road, is that if we get a deep dive into history, I want to be able to tell a really clear story about history.
[00:39:12] Mat Tobin: And for them to understand that story.
[00:39:14] Ed Finch: Exactly, but the national curriculum doesn't demand that and absolutely, you know, you're teaching your students that they can take a brilliant text and explore it in any direction and it can be a rich source. I don't think everybody gets that in their ITT. So there's something about what's happening in ITT at the moment, becoming restrictive, I think, I don't know whether there's a door opening
[00:39:37] Mat Tobin: The thing that the problem with ITT at the moment is teacher retention and student retention. So keeping students in wanting to be teachers. So another thing to think about is how do we make the role of a teacher seem appealing in the longer term, how do we keep them there? And I would hope, you know, when I interview, I just did it last week, you interview 17 year olds, sometimes much older students, if they're doing the PG, what makes you want to be a teacher? And you can imagine the most often, the comment that you get given is, I want to change children's lives, which is really a lovely kind of admirable thing to do. But then when you dig into what that is, it's generally down to, there's been an experience they've had in their teaching life or pupil student life where they haven't been inspired or engaged by a teacher. So then how do we get those students that want to inspire and want to engage and how can we show them that they are allowed to inspire and...
[00:40:35] Ed Finch: That our systems allow that, exactly. So a workforce who can have fun because they know that humans are good at having fun and they can learn through it, a workforce that know they're empowered to make some of the decisions, but are backed up by some rigorous resources, that means they're not making up on their tod.
[00:40:54] Mat Tobin: The research has got to be there.
[00:40:55] Ed Finch: Yeah, pupils that are making some choices and getting some agency in their learning.
[00:41:00] Mat Tobin: Seen.
[00:41:01] Ed Finch: Pupils who feel seen in the classroom. I think it's all about belonging, isn't it? So, that's what we want, and now we've got a very short time left. But all we need to do is solve how we're going to get there. So, we're going to ask, what is it that our colleagues can do in class tomorrow? Or, you know, starting from Monday next week, because maybe tomorrow's not the right day. But what can we do to get ourselves on the route to that?
[00:41:26] Mat Tobin: So I recommend joining a local OU, UKLA reading group. That is your road to changing the way you think about reading and every, that will open the doors because not only will that bring you with other teachers who are interested in the reading agenda from a pleasure perspective, but also you'll start to work with other teachers that might do guided reading, shared reading, reader agency so that would be a great start and this will sound very strange when it comes to reading or just general teaching in the classroom, but stop talking and think about questions that you want to ask the children that encourage them to do the talking and encourage interthinking where children talk across the classroom to each other about what they think might be going on, whether that's in science or geography or reading a text. So the teacher facilitating reading rather than explicitly, directly teaching all the time. Of course you need that direct teaching, but learn to try and be brave and step back.
[00:42:32] Ed Finch: Yeah. So if a colleague was nervous about that, a colleague said, I don't really get poetry myself and I'm required to teach you
Yeah. you know, we've heard this, haven't we? We've heard...
[00:42:41] Mat Tobin: James Carter's written about it in Let's Do
[00:42:43] Ed Finch: So
[00:42:43] Mat Tobin: Poetry.
[00:42:44] Ed Finch: What would you say to that colleague? You, know, a short conversation if you want to empower them?
[00:42:48] Mat Tobin: If I was allowed to, I'd probably do some team teaching, right? Bring them to my classroom, show them how I do it. I'd probably do a lot of that first and then maybe plan together, you people listening to this are subject coordinators. Maybe sit with them and model it because you, just, like with children, you need to see it first. But if you want kind of a source kind of guidebook, then Wayne Tenet et al's guiding readers Layers of Meaning book is an excellent guidebook for looking at the types of questions you can ask to promote those dialogic discussions, as is Fiona Mains, as is James's and my book, but Wayne et al's book is specifically about that. So start there really and at the back of that book, there's actually six staff meeting sessions that say start here in session one and end here with session six for staff meetings, which is a great resource.
[00:43:40] Ed Finch: Any reading coordinators or literacy coordinators in schools, if they can't know they've got some meeting time and they're not quite sure what to do with it, I would say that those sessions are really purposeful.
[00:43:51] Mat Tobin: Yeah, I think so too and they're really accessible.
[00:43:53] Ed Finch: Yeah. So, well, I think we've solved it. I think it's all right.
[00:43:57] Mat Tobin: I think we've scratched the surface, so to speak.
[00:44:00] Ed Finch: So listen, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast and we hope to speak again soon.
[00:44:05] Mat Tobin: Thanks very much for having me on.
[00:44:11] Ed Finch: So which ideas would you like to take away from this conversation? Download the Primary Pledge card in the show notes to continue the conversation and note actions that you'd like to take. Share your Primary Pledge card with us and fellow educators by tagging Hamilton Brooks on social media. At Primary Futures, we're on a mission to build a better future for primary education. You can help us to spread the word by leaving a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast, to help more educators discover us and the inspiring conversations we have with our guests.