Zooming In on Rich Literacy Intervention with Leah Crawford

Melissa chats with Leah Crawford who discusses the "Think in English" program, a cognitive acceleration initiative developed at King's College, London. The program, which has been adapted for English language teaching, aims to enhance children's critical thinking and schema development through engaging lessons. Crawford explains the program's origins, its focus on Piagetian and Vygotskian theories, and its application in teaching children to classify texts and understand allegory. The discussion includes practical examples and the importance of collaborative learning in fostering intellectual growth.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Welcome to the Teacher Ads Podcast. I'm your host, Melissa Milner, a teacher who is painfully curious and very easily inspired. This podcast is ever-changing, and I hope with each season, you find episodes that speak to you in your work as an educator. This is the seventh season of the Teacher Ad, and it's exciting to see the growth in how many educators are listening. Episodes are released every other week. If you enjoy the Teacher Ad, please rate it on Apple Podcasts and leave a review. It helps the podcast reach more educators. I'm happy to share that the career mentorship program, Major Choice, is now sponsoring the Teacher Ads Podcast. I'm thrilled about the partnership. You can learn more about becoming a mentor at majorchoice.com slash mentor. Thanks for listening. It's great to have Leah Crawford back on the podcast. Leah, I really I'm gonna kind of let you run with this because this was your idea to have this amazing second run with another, uh would you call it a program or another?

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Yes, this is, I mean, opening doors was a kind of it it's an approach. Yes, that is very flexible, which as you said, you know, you can you can integrate it a bit and teach in other ways. But yeah, this is something quite special. So shall I shall I introduce you? Yeah, it's all yours. Uh I'm really standing on the shoulders of giants, even just sort of talking and and sharing uh this. So let's what we're gonna particularly talk about is Let's Think in English, which is one of the cognitive acceleration programs that was developed initially. We're talking over almost sort of 40 years ago, they began at King's College in London, so part of London University, one of the colleges there. And amazing, I'll sort of go almost like once upon a time. Okay, there were two cognitive psychologists who were working at that. What was actually the teacher training part of the college? Okay. They had been no both science specialists, had been science teachers as well. Um, and at the time they had been part of running kind of science, almost like benchmarking tests, I suppose, for the population in England. How clever are they in science? What kind of science um concepts can they understand? And they'd been they'd been running these for several years, seeing whether the profile was kind of going up or down.

SPEAKER_02 4:09

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Um, late 1980s. And at that time, England, before 1988, England didn't have a um a national curriculum, you know, not even by kind of area or state teachers and particular schools could just choose what they wanted to teach and at what time, you know, and and use their professionalism. But it was about to come in. So they had these benchmarking tests, and then the drafts came out for so this is going to be what children have to learn in a secondary school in science, and with new, newly kind of benchmarks at age 16 examinations.

SPEAKER_02 4:44

Okay, so we we call them standards. Standards, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

Thank you. You you often need the American translation for what I'm talking about. And um, so this was Michael Scheyer and Philip AD, the two gentlemen who I'm particularly standing on the shoulders of, although there are many, many, many. They they started the whole program. And what they said is um, uh, excuse me, Mr. Government, excuse me, our population of children won't be able to manage that curriculum and won't be able to sit those tests. That's too hard. That's not where their intelligence is.

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

So you've got two choices. You either make the curriculum simpler and make the test simpler, or we make the children more intelligent. They said, What? Ha ha. Yeah, we can't, we just you can't sit there because you'll just have too many children failing that test. You know, that's no good to that's no good to anybody. So they said, Will you tell us a little bit more about this making the children more intelligent? Oh, yes, we will. Yeah, we've been working on that in the back boiler room, yeah, for quite some time. So, yes, as as cognitive psychologists that had been thinking for a while of is like a combination really of Vygotsky that we talked about last time, the socialization of intelligence, how do we learn how to think by being together, by talking and hearing how others think. Um, and the but the progression of what it means to become more intelligent, having a really uh strategized description of that, they got more from Piaget's work and Piaget's uh research. So the fact that it can be misinterpreted, Piaget, of saying you must not teach a child, you know, concepts at the wrong stage, they won't be able to understand it. Right. Um saying, no, these are you know, these are periods, these are stages through which children they cannot advance without going through each stage. So children who are aged sort of four to seven, three to seven, will be piaged pre-operational, as in they won't be able to think silently alone in their own heads. By an operation, we mean a mental operation. Yeah, that's really hard for them. They will be egocentric in their thinking, they will see the world from their own perspective, and that's not selfishness or stupidity, it's just where they are.

SPEAKER_02 7:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

They will you'll present them with a problem, read them a story, and they'll get fixated on certain features of it, yeah, or the problem centered on just one aspect of that problem, and it'd be very hard for them to diversify their attention. Yeah, so there's a they're very specific scientific ways of describing this is where in children's intelligence is. But they knew from researchers like actually uh Feuerstein, it was back in you know the new state of Israel, we could go down that route if you want to, that intelligence is malleable, it is plastic. So both Piaget and Vygotsky can be true at the same time. We can say this is where children's intelligence is, but actually, if we bring in this idea that the brain is plastic, it is open to stimulation, it is open to growth.

SPEAKER_03 8:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

I've got these young children, yes, who are sub to five, six, seven, and they will naturally fall into thinking egocentrically, seeing single aspects of a problem, not being able to reverse an action that have irreversibility as well. But what we can do when we are in a group of thinkers, and when we have the Vygotskyan, you know, adult who is more knowledgeable, yeah, the more knowledgeable other in the room, we steer the group towards those more complex ways of thinking, and they get flashes of insight into what it feels to be that more advanced thinking being. And this is this is how we stimulate uh intelligence. Is that just building schema? Do you mean in exactly that, exactly that? But you know, and we can we can build what what what Michael and uh Philip particularly believed in was let's deliberately provoke the building of that schema. Yeah, and they started in science, you know, so it'll be okay, let's look at classification, and even with little ones, you know, we'll give them classification exercises where it isn't simple, it isn't just here are just three groups, but there will be Vendigram crossover groups that create a particular problem for those children. They go, Oh, hang on, we've got mommy animals and baby animals, but they also we've got colours. So do I put this with the mommies or the babies, or do I put them with the yellow?

SPEAKER_03 9:35

Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

Oh, hang on. Yeah. And then you can even introduce some of these cards, show the front of the animal and the back of the animal. Oh my goodness, we've got four dimensions with it to classify, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:46

Right. So but I'm assuming the gift of it, the the thing that propels it is the talking.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 9:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Absolutely that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:55

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

So it's a very uh lessons are very carefully staged so that it's whole class, yeah. And we hit we start, like we were talking last time, at a I wouldn't say a low level, but it's an accessible and engaging and intriguing level of let's look at what have we got here in front of us? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

What's these apparatus or I'm gonna take you into a minute? What's this text we've got in front of? We've read anything like this before. So there's an entry point that everyone's feeling fairly assimilated, I suppose, in Pyagitan terms, fairly comfortable. And we're gradually through the lesson raising the bar until we get to that stage of yeah, uh uh uh cognitive acceleration, Prague would say, a stage of cognitive conflict where it's not just a single child hasn't got the schema to cope with that problem, but most of the group are now kind of a bit destabilized and going, hang on, we don't normally deal with problems like this. We're a little bit on the edge here, we're a bit destabilized, we haven't quite got it. But actually, if we reach back for each other, the inklings of the solution will start to come to fruition. And the teacher, it's really clever teaching. The teacher is listening out for those few children, those perhaps two groups out of eight, let's say, who start to get the yeah, start to get an inkling of the answer. Hang on, there's something happening in this group. Let's let's hear. What is it that you've started to emerge? What is it you've discovered? That's interesting. Is that anybody else thought that? Let's sort of take that group's idea and have a play with it. Go back to your story, yeah, or go back to your classification, go back to your grouping.

SPEAKER_03 11:34

Does that help us?

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Yeah, and then yes, absolutely. And if it's got to key and sense, they begin to kind of socially construct, reconstruct um an understanding that they would never have been able to have if we hadn't had this gradual staging towards the problem, if we hadn't had the group really well knitted, feeling safe, used to working together, yeah, having really good routines and rituals about how we work together safely, equitably, comfortable with discomfort.

SPEAKER_02 12:09

That's the biggie.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Absolutely. It's not a given, is it, Melissa?

SPEAKER_02 12:14

Yeah, that anxiety and yeah, the struggle, like being able to have grit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

Right. There is so there that there's a layer of how do we learn well together? How are we when we think well together? We're unafraid to say we don't know or we're not sure, or maybe, or perhaps. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

And that's our uh that exploratory court talk is becoming our natural way of being rather than performing, yeah, and trying to get the right answer and trying to try to get praise for that. Yeah. So we it's absolutely about culture, yeah, it's about the teacher expertise, it's about the nature of the task. Yeah. And the teachers belief actually in that plasticity of the mind of saying, you know, I've got perhaps mixed prior retainment class, they can all be at different stages, but actually, we all need each other to get through this problem. And it uh just yesterday I was in the classroom, so the child who had ASD, not entirely diagnosed what kind of autistic spectrum disorder, but was really kind of struggling to self-regulate and to focus and was in and out a little bit of the you know, the kind of agenda of the classroom. But in the moments when she was, there were these brilliant flashes of insight. And actually, it was one of her insights that just unlocked this. They were they were developing the understanding of symbolism in a short animated film, and her thought just unlocked the group. And so this beautiful That's a nice moment. Yes, this we we you know, everybody is becomes valuable over time because you never know who's gonna get something in the moment that helps everybody's thinking to suddenly unlock. And yeah, the teacher then bringing that again, going, hang on, this is really new, isn't it? That's a new thought. None of us have gone there before. Let's all go break back to your groups and have a think about that. Has that helped us? Yeah, now we think now we were on the wrong track with yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:13

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

So have you have you got uh an idea emerging of the overall lessons might go?

SPEAKER_02 14:20

The the overall philosophy, and yes, but again, our mind is gonna be better with some schema if you could give us indeed.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

So let's let and I'm and I'm not you know, I'm not a science teacher, I'm an English teacher. So I mean, I was gonna say English is kind of the newest kid on the block, but it's not quite, it's probably about 13, 14 years old. The other shoulders upon which I'm standing are um Michael Walsh and Lori Smith. Laurie Smith was at King's College, and um Michael was uh a teacher advisor, I suppose you would call, yeah, who worked in that borough of London, and they got together and began just almost as a hobby. Nobody was paying them to see if they could transfer this pedagogy into English.

SPEAKER_02 15:07

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

They've been doing that for several years, developing lessons, trialing them with um kids. Uh yes, and I kind of found them on the internet one night, kind of see what you do, and then wouldn't like refuse to leave. I love this so much. I'm gonna now kind of, yeah, what are we like 10 years on? I'm part of the team and I'm one of their tutors. That's so yeah, what what does this look like in English? So this is a lesson that would sit with uh kids between kind of seven and nine years old. Does that sound okay?

SPEAKER_02 15:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

If we go there. And it's so the schema is classification. What kind of text have I got in front of me? Um, and the idea if it we we do read different genres differently. We approach them, don't we? And our expectations change the way that we respond to a text, the way that we read it, yeah, the way that we come in and build meaning from it. But you say all of that to a seven-year-old, that's like gobbledygook, isn't it? We need to build it from where they are. So we would say, okay, we're in our let's think groups, you know the rules, we've rehearsed how we are together, how we think. We might have a few kind of guidelines for group talk on the wall. I say, first off, I've got a text for you, and I need you, you're gonna need you're gonna decide if it's a piece of prose, you know, and you might hold up their class novel or something. Yeah, that's prose, or if it's a poem. Okay. So we're gonna develop a classification system. Yeah. So I'm gonna split the class in two. This half, uh, you're gonna give me top five. If I put down a piece of story prose in front of you, what are the top five things you would expect it to have? Right. And this half of the class is a is a poem. What are the top five things? So do you do you mind if I'm you ought to be a group, Melissa? It's not very fair teaching you this on your own, but do you mind do you mind giving that a quick go after your hard day of teaching?

SPEAKER_02 17:05

As a seven-year-old would answer.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, and I'll I'll write your classification in the chat.

SPEAKER_02 17:11

So, prose would be let's see, what would a seven-year-old say? Um, there are characters, there are people in the story.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Great. That's good. We'd say happy, everyone. Yeah, yeah, we'd have a character.

SPEAKER_02 17:27

See, I'm I'm thinking of this as an adult. Uh the next one's too adult, but like maybe they'd say the character wants something or there's a problem.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

There's a problem. So, and then might that problem be solved? So we've got a kind of shape to this story, yeah? Yeah. We say, and what might we call that? Yeah. So you're trying to get their language. So this system, this classification system, is quite crucially written in their language, not you don't translate it and make it more fancy. Yeah. But it is it's hard to go back, isn't it, when your schema is always like get out your story plots, you know, like indeed.

SPEAKER_02 18:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

So we might have like a beginning and a problem and a solution. That was the way that you often they actually say just beginning, middle, end.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

Or they start going like this for sort of story mounting it, that sort of thing. And they're up then, you know, what's the start of the hump? What's in the middle? Right. You know, but it's it you would it's genuinely like assessment for learning. You just want to go, what have you got?

SPEAKER_02 18:30

Yeah. Um, do they do they? I mean, I don't know, I don't know if it's in seven-year-olds learn about setting, but there's a setting to a story.

SPEAKER_00 18:39

Absolutely. We need to know where we are. We've got characters in a setting, we've got this little shape to the story. They tend then to talk about, I say, like, you know, what would it look like on the page?

SPEAKER_02 18:50

Like dialogue or it looks it, you know, it's uh indentation and paragraphs. Paragraphs. Yeah, as opposed to stanzas.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

And what's within the paragraphs?

SPEAKER_02 19:04

Words. Punctuation, words, yeah, sentences.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

And what's the punctuation? Yeah, tell me about the punctuation.

SPEAKER_02 19:13

Sentences, yeah. Sentences ending with ending punctuation like periods and exclamation points, points, punctuation, period. Yeah, and capitals at the beginning of the sentence.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

Right. Yeah. I think that's kind of that's that's pretty good. Let's move to our classification system for poetry. So if then you go, no, no, no, this is a poem, Mrs. Crawford, why would you say it's a poem? What would be?

SPEAKER_02 19:37

Well, there are poems that have no capitalization or punctuation.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

Ah it might not have the same punctuation. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:48

Or capitalization, yeah. They're in stanzas, usually in stanzas, not um paragraphs.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Paragraphs.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

Some can rhyme, some don't.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Yeah. Might have some can have generally in that phase they tend to latch on to the rhyme.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

It'll rhyme, it'll rhyme, it'll rhyme. That's like quite it tends to be not always, but tends to be more dominant, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:13

Yeah. Um they can have just one word on a line, or it could be sounds. Like they're not gonna know the name of it, but onomatopoeia, you have it there's senses, sensory stuff in prose, too. But for I think it's a lot more prominent.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

Okay. We've got kind of sound features or sound effects, yeah, repeated.

SPEAKER_02 20:41

Repeating for effect, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

Might have repetition. Yeah. Sometimes you get rhyme, yeah, sometimes you get alliteration, and we tend to say, okay, so we've got more soundy features, have we?

unknown 20:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

But again, we're going back into, and we've got kind of, you know, sort of four groups of four who are dealing with this. So between them, you go, You give me your top of your top five. Did other people have that? Are we happy that's in our system?

SPEAKER_02 21:04

And uh you would hope they'd say, Well, there can be characters in a poem. Okay. But it's it feels different, but there can be characters in a poem. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

Yes, absolutely. At times it depends if you know, you the kids could be kind of just seven when you're teaching this. If they're closer to nine, they might go, hang on, there's some crossovers here. Yeah, we've read poems that are like stories like ballads. Do you remember that? What okay? So it could be. So we're saying there's a little bit, can't be a little bit of crossover, but what we're saying on the whole, you know? Yeah, we're trying to develop our classification system in only about five minutes or so.

SPEAKER_02 21:40

And what you say to me is even just this is awesome.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

Oh, great.

SPEAKER_02 21:45

Just this is great.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

You know, and you go, this is just our starting point. So as we journey through and we look at some text, you guys can change this. If you're not happy with the classification system, you go, oh, we missed this, or that's not complex enough. It's okay.

SPEAKER_03 21:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

But let's just get down what most of us think at this point off the top of our heads. Yeah, so there we go. We've got we've got a system to play with now. We'll have to make sure that we keep our um podcast uh listeners included, even though I'm going to show you something visibly. So can you see that little text?

SPEAKER_02 22:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

So we've got our classification system. You've got the chat box open, you can still see that. Because it's in, you know, that would be on the whiteboard or on a flip chart in front of the kids so they can refer to it.

SPEAKER_02 22:30

Right.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

We go, okay, we'll read this for your listeners. Capital A. An old silent pond people stop.

SPEAKER_01 22:40

A frog jumps into the pond and people stop. Splash exclamation mark. Silence again, people stop. And we're laid out left to right.

SPEAKER_02 22:57

That's the big because it certainly sounds like a poem, but it's not set up like a poem. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

So you imagine, yeah, we've got our here in England lower key stage group uh key stage two group here, the kids are seven, eight, or they're eighty-nine, and we say, Okay, no, no, hands up, go to your group of four, and you've got to decide using the classification system have we got a poem or a piece of prose in front of us, and decide which one, yeah, you think is is most likely which one most fits. So you're you're saying to me, you're initially already a bit destabilized.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

I don't like it. I don't like it because it reads so much. Like a poem, I want to like hit enter and move it down and have it be separate lines. I want with a splash, I want like a cute little picture with it or something. Like I want it needs to be very yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Okay, so if I summarize what I think I'm hearing from you, the the layout is is suggesting it's a prose story.

SPEAKER_02 23:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

But the sound effect when I read it out was leading your mind to say not even poems.

SPEAKER_02 24:04

Not even just the sound effect, the the silence again. You know, it's very it's not in full sense it's in full sentences, but it's the subjects are like an old silent pond. That sounds like it's a line in a poem.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Oh, what makes that sound like it's a line in a poem then rather than prose?

SPEAKER_02 24:24

Because it's not a full sentence.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Oh what are we missing? An old silent pond.

SPEAKER_02 24:32

Does what?

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 24:34

Yeah. So that to me, but I mean, I've seen prose, I've seen authors do that in novels too. So Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

Is that most novels?

SPEAKER_02 24:46

No. Again, it it reads to me like a poem because of that. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

So let's keep going. Let's keep going. With the the the first term there, you're saying all we've got is a noun phrase, we haven't got a verb bit. So that's leaning more towards what you said of poetry not having the same kind of rules.

SPEAKER_02 25:06

And even silence, silence again. Like it's it is a full, is it a full sentence? Is it not, you know?

SPEAKER_00 25:16

One of those kind of minor sentence type.

SPEAKER_02 25:19

Yeah, and it paints a picture, which I find poetry usually in shorter bits paints a picture. Whereas prose, you know, the the author's going on for three paragraphs start describing something. Here, in like two sentences, two little phrases, you've got a whole image. Imagery.

SPEAKER_00 25:41

Oh, now there's things that didn't have in our classification system that you might want to add. Yeah. So you had kind of brevity there.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

Um, and also this kind of imagery.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

Yeah. But I mean, there's imagery in prose too, but it's the brevity of the imagery.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

That's what I heard from you, is like it's doing more with less word, with fewer words. Seems to be doing more, having more impact on you with fewer words. Yes. Everything with the imagery. Okay. So you've got that in the silence again. Okay. Yep. A frog jumps into a pond?

SPEAKER_02 26:20

That's a full. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

Are we full proper sentence with punctuation rules and capitals and we're all good. Follows the rules. Have we got a character? The frog. You could say. Yeah. Yeah. Have we got like beginning, middle, end? You could say. Silent pond. Frog jumps in, splash. Back to silence again. Not really a problem.

SPEAKER_01 26:44

No.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

But but we we've got a little arc to it there. So which way would you go, Melissa? If you had to say we found a few features of both, but which way are you leaning?

SPEAKER_02 26:57

Because of the setup, because of the formatting, I have to say it's prose. Ah, okay. That's stopping me from, even though everything is screaming poetry to me, the way it's set up, I follow rules, and to me that looks like prose.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Okay. Okay. Thank you. Now, of course, we would be, you know, we'd be hearing that from the groups. Which of you decided? We might even have like a talk in your groups, you've got three minutes, we might do a blind vote. Yeah. Say, before we talk about this, let's capture it's like a metacognition moment, yeah, where they kind of commit, but it's blind, so it's safe. You put the hand in the air, who thinks it's poetry, who thinks it's prose, open your eyes, right? This is kind of the ratio we've got at the moment in the class.

SPEAKER_02 27:41

Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

And because this is why you need like this sense of safety and lack of judgment, it doesn't matter what you say at this point, because now you're gonna you say, okay, we've actually got a total split, we've got 50-50. Crazy, how fascinating is that. Go to your groups, talk about it, test out with your classification system, and now really try to agree as a group which way you're gonna go and why. And you can talk about all the difficulties like you were, just yeah, like this is messing with my brain. Right, it's deliberate. So, this is you know, I've chosen this one because we haven't got a lot to read. We can get into the conflict quite quickly, but yes, we are on that Piagetian destabilized seesaw of I can assimilate most texts and I can decide if I'm in a poem or prose. And now Mrs. Crawford's given me this. Whoa, it's yeah, not difficult to read, but it's I'm wobbling all over the place. Yeah. But what the children are doing is becoming metacognitive as a group. Yeah. What do we know about those two genres and what are the differences and how do we feel about those? And it's becoming the classification system is becoming more complex the more that we talk about this one tiny little text. Yeah. And the point isn't we get the answer right. The point is the reasoning, the point is developing the complexity of their reasoning. So we'd have it, and then we might so let's who's decided which groups have changed their minds listening to other groups. Now, where are we land? Should we have another blind boat? Oh my goodness, we've had a shift, you know. And I'll be honest, the shift tends to move more towards it being poemy. Yeah, I believe that.

SPEAKER_02 29:28

I believe that.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

That's it. They go instantly, you know, like you were saying, the layout is telling me story, their hunch goes story, and then the more they look at it, they go, This is not like stories that we read, and you know, these are the troubling features.

SPEAKER_02 29:41

And I thought poetry from the moment you read it, but indeed. But my visual is saying no. Yeah, yeah. I mean, unless someone decides to like if there's a stanza after this of this short stuff, then it's a poem.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

Ah, that's a fascinating. So if I said to you this is the whole text.

SPEAKER_02 30:02

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 30:03

There's nothing before, there's nothing after this, it's the whole text. Would that sway you?

SPEAKER_02 30:07

It's just a poem with a weird setup, then.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

Poem with a weird laugh. So Or it's a really, really, really short story.

SPEAKER_00 30:14

If I laid it out like that for you, would it change your That's the way I was thinking of it the whole time.

SPEAKER_02 30:20

I'm like, please put it in the lines. I wouldn't have put Splash and Silence again in the same line, but that's just me. Ah, okay. I want Splash to be all in capitals on its own line.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Okay. What we do after the children have played with that and they're starting to lean into poetry, we then say to them, make it more poetic.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

And we hand them their version and say, We don't want load added. Can we change it? Yeah, you can change the layout. Can we make any additions? Just little ones, but literally you've got like two, three minutes to do that and decide. But what you're gonna argue is you've made it more like a poem. Right. That's the key. Yeah?

SPEAKER_01 31:03

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 31:03

So again, they're using they are, it's almost like a moment of application that they've started to realise, even though it l looks visually story, more prose and story-like, can you now lean into that poetry schema, right? Classification and showing show each other how much more you know now that we've discussed this much more in detail. Yeah. Right. So actually, we look at the kids' versions of layout first, and they show each other's, and the rest of the group, you know, you'd hold one up and go, is this more poetic? How have they made it poetic? So you get into talk about each other's. Right. And they go, Oh, yeah, I like the way that you have, yeah. So again, it's really collaborative and involved, and there's different choices. And then eventually, yes, if you wanted to right.

SPEAKER_02 31:48

So it says layout, it says, it says, here's another way to present the text. An old silent pond, dot dot dot. Next line, a frog jumps into the pond, comma, and then it says splash, all lowercase with an exclamation, and on the same line with splash, it said silence again, period. And also it's centered. The text is centered, right? Which I it makes it look flowy. And what type of text do you think this is now? So obviously it's poetry, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:19

But you know, you say to them it's exactly the same words, kids. And now you've all gone, it's absolutely a poem. Is it just layout that makes something a poem then? No, okay. What is it, you know? Yeah. So we're still pushing on that accelerator pedal.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

Right, because you'll have stories that have a layout where like someone, a character writes a letter and they do the letter layout, and then it goes back to the regular layout. Yeah, that doesn't all of a sudden make it a poem. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:47

Beautiful verse novels now as well, aren't they? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:51

I think I told you about maybe that book may be. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:55

So yeah, is that so then do you call that is that a novel? Is that prose or is that poetry? Does that matter? Does it change the way that you read it? Does it change the way that you respond to it? We're getting them ready for those, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:05

I could just see the kids who need it black and white are gonna be like, just tell me what they're I could see.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

I actually don't like to tell them. I know at the end. If I'm feeling it, I can't imagine what they feel. This is almost like what we're trying to recreate their vision of what knowledge is gradually through. So this program, if I kind of we draw back from this, this is one lesson. They have these lessons once a fortnight.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

Yeah. Not all of their lessons look like this. There's not this much uncertainty, you know, and um instability, if you like, in all of those lessons. But we move into this zone where we know things are gonna be hard and uncertain, and we've got to be comfortable with discomfort, and we may we might have more questions than answers.

SPEAKER_02 33:55

It's so good for them though. It it it spurs on like that curiosity, all that stuff that you need. Yeah, I love it.

SPEAKER_00 34:05

What we're gonna do when I'm on the edge of my understanding, and I'm you know, I'm gonna uh make suggestions, be happy to change my mind, look for more solutions, look for more evidence, reach for others, reach for others, yeah, hear other viewpoints, you know. So it's what are the behaviors of a good thinking mind? Yeah, yeah, and use the schema you've but you've got, but be prepared to develop that flexible and change that over time, you know.

SPEAKER_02 34:37

We have kids that aren't flexible, yeah. This is totally that's great.

SPEAKER_00 34:42

So you get it. It's got you know, it's got men if you think like a curriculum is being kind of layers in a river. The deep, deep, deep river bed is we need your thinking schema to develop over time and become more complex, yeah. You know, so you could just go, it's a cognitive intervention, but actually it's deeply social and emotional as well. How are we together? How do we think well together? How do we behave with each other as thinkers? And you know, like I was saying, uh you know, like you responded there, actually, it's kids who've done best at school who struggle absolutely with these lessons because they're always certain.

SPEAKER_02 35:23

It's everything's easy for them, they're always certain, they always know the answer, and then it's like, wait, what?

SPEAKER_00 35:28

Indeed, and it they keep putting that no, put your hands down, put your hands down, share your idea with your group, develop an idea with a group, be a present. You don't want to talk to them. I want you to talk to them, and I want I'm listening, I'm interested in what your home group thinks and what you think matters, but it matters most to your home group, and you feed it in through them. Yeah, it might be your turn to Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:51

It might be your turn to feed back your group's idea, it might not next time. You've got to deal with it. Yeah. Because do you know what they matter just as much as you do, you know? So it's it's democratic.

SPEAKER_03 36:04

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

It's a democratic process, but it you know, all ideas matter, but some become more valued than others through time. And it's you sort of it's that separation of not who said that thought, who was the most, but who is the best thinker, is what was the best idea today, and it becomes the group's idea. Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_02 36:28

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

Yeah, that that particularly as we get older and we're into more kids of like 10, 11, and then into secondary school here, you know, 12 and beyond, is absolutely vital that they don't see this as a competitive process. But what we're trying to do is develop the best ideas around this text. Yep. And we'll really test them out and try them out. And we maybe there are several ideas that can all coexist, and we're we're fine with that, you know. Yeah. So there's the first little taste, Melissa.

SPEAKER_02 36:58

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 36:59

Where we might go, it matters that they kind of go somewhere with this thinking as well. So they've done that little bit of application of seeing it laid out in a line. Can you make it more poem-y, you know, bit jokey, poetic? Uh, then revealing how do we think about this? Why are you responding so differently? And then there's always a moment of that metacognitive reflection at the end, is like, have you realized anything today about the differences between stories and poems that maybe you didn't think at the start of the lesson? Or has somebody said something in the room that really kind of changed your mind and made you think deeply? Have you still got questions? Do you think perhaps there are that there are features that are really shared between those two genres that we haven't thought about? We might even start to bridge and think about let's think about the text that we're reading. Is there anything poetic about the novel that we're reading?

SPEAKER_02 37:50

Oh, I love that.

SPEAKER_00 37:51

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it moves from I'm just gonna give you a kind of cold text. Every two weeks is a brand new text. You don't know what I'm gonna put in front of you. Um, we will complete the lesson within the hour. Yeah. So it's quite it's quite short in a way, it's quite intense. We'll go through this moment of conflict, testing out their schema, making it stretch, applying it, reflecting on it, and then bridging beyond that lesson. So actually, what the teacher does with these lessons, where they're placed, it will go somewhere. We make suggestions, but it's almost like actually our schools come up with much better suggestions because they're thinking about where this could put its feelers out into the the rest of the curriculum. Right. So this could be a launch lesson into a poetry unit, you know? Where uh a teacher of seven, eight-year-olds is going, What what are you carrying with you about poetry from your previous you know, years of experience and of teaching? And how do I need to develop that now with the poems that I put in front of you? And how much more are you gonna notice just from this lesson? From yeah, now I put some new poems in front of you. Yeah. It could be that you lean more into the story and say, okay, there's there is a kind of story there. I want you to rewrite the story of the frog and make it make it fascinating prose.

SPEAKER_03 39:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:15

There's not enough of a story, but what do you how could we make it so?

SPEAKER_03 39:19

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 39:20

Or it's prose because that was just to set the setting for the reader. And then you can go into another character comes into that setting, and that's the stuff. Yeah, you could do anything with that.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

Absolutely that. Yes, yeah. Both of those are schema building, aren't they? Yeah, in different ways. Or we actually some classes get this, some don't, but this is actually a haiku. Okay, I was gonna say it and I was going like this, but I didn't have time to finish it.

SPEAKER_02 39:50

I was counting on my fingers, the syllables.

SPEAKER_00 39:53

Um, it's not essential that you mention that, you know, within the hour within the lesson. It's it's more that they've used their schema. It's not this is the answer, you know. So, yeah, you have got the five, seven, five rhythm pattern. Sometimes they get that.

SPEAKER_02 40:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:07

I tend not to bring that in, and the fact that this is a basho, 17th century, um, you know, one of the most famous Japanese haiku writers there's been on the globe. Because then some kids it that can bring the competitives back in, you know, kids go, yes, got it right. Oh, oh yeah. But actually, once they've lived with it, you know, and you come back to it possibly in a week's time and go, do you know it it is a really old poem and it's got this quite funky pattern. Have you come across haikis before? Let's have a go at writing some. What kind of things do they do? What are they good at? What are they not good at? Let's look at some others, yeah? So it it can be that you you take it in that direction. So we've how are we doing for time? Would you like another example? Let's do another one. Who so your kids, how old are your grade four kids?

SPEAKER_02 40:54

Fourth grade, so um nine turning ten.

SPEAKER_00 40:58

Okay, yes, this could this would be nine, ten, or ten, eleven. This next tech, this next lesson that I would take you into. So you could see, I put these side by side so you could see how things develop. How things get that bit harder because you I don't know, you tell me, would I be right? Actually, your children largely are fairly good at perspective taking. Yes. In grade four. Yeah. Now, and they can kind of stand in a character's shoes and talk about the characters' choices and wants and needs and don't confuse that with their own. Absolutely. Okay. They're beginning to diversify their attention across a text, they don't get fixated on a certain feature.

SPEAKER_02 41:40

Most are like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:42

There we go. Most. It's it's it's never everybody, but yeah. The majority, you'd ask them for some inference, and they might they might be able to give you two, even three bits of evidence to back.

SPEAKER_02 41:51

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

There we go. Reversibility as well. They might they'd be happy to say, This is what I thought about the character here, and now we're five chapters in. I'm happy to say my view has changed.

unknown 42:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

But I can go back to what it used to be like. Yeah. So we're actually we can be in quite a different place to when we're seven. Yeah. Where those things are really quite different. You know, we've still we Piaget is still live, absolutely. So we've got different thinking human beings here, but as you say, it is still most, and we might have some who are still tagging behind a bit, who is still struggling with that for whatever reason. Perhaps not been read to very much, perhaps not been spoken with very much. Yeah, it can be perhaps with learning difficulties, we never know. So, okay, we'd say actually we say very little about this little sliver of text. We just read it and then I'll give you the opening question. So hello again, listeners. Sliver of text. The clearing in the woods was home to the small forest creatures. The birds and squirrels shared the trees. The rabbits and the porcupines shared the shade beneath the trees, and the frogs and the fish shared the cool brown waters of the forest pond. They were content. And our first question is to say, what kind of attack do you think we're in from that little sliver, from the evidence we've got so far?

SPEAKER_02 43:23

My brain, I have this flexible thinking, which is not always helpful. So first I'm like, well, clearly we're setting up, you know, a forest story. This could be the beginning of a Disney, you know. But then I thought to myself, or this is an informational book about the forest, and they've started with a narrative piece to get the attention of the reader.

SPEAKER_00 43:48

But you said it sounds more narrative than it does non-fiction-y. It sounds more narrative, yes. So what is it that is story-like rather than more non-fiction-like?

SPEAKER_02 43:59

It's not um listing specific names of birds, specific species of squirrel. It's saying it's home to many creatures. It's the way it's worded. Um the rabbits and the porcupines shared, it's more whimsical sounding.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Okay. Does that kind of link to the Disney?

SPEAKER_02 44:20

Yeah. I when I read that, I'm like, that's very um, I'm waiting for her to come out and have the birds all around her. What's her name? Uh, the one with the Snow White. Is she the one with the birds all around her? I think it was the first one, Snow White. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:34

Yeah, it's yeah, definitely Snow White.

SPEAKER_02 44:36

And they were content, you know, and um, you know, having almost almost personification. Like, are they really sharing? Like, you know, they happen to be in the same place at the same time. But that personification of their sharing the shade, you know, all that.

SPEAKER_00 44:52

But do you think animals like porcupies and rabbits don't really share?

SPEAKER_02 44:55

I think they could.

SPEAKER_00 44:57

Yeah, they could say that they're in the same place.

SPEAKER_02 44:59

You know, except they're they're in the same place and they're like, oh, you're here, yeah, I'm here. Like the word share just seems a little more human.

SPEAKER_00 45:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 45:09

But share could be that's not true. Like share could just be they're sharing the same space. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 45:14

But there's something about the home.

SPEAKER_02 45:16

It's the wording, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:18

The word, yeah, the choice of language of home and sharing is making you lean into these animals seem to be acting not like animals.

SPEAKER_02 45:25

And they were content, it makes you think something's gonna come that's gonna make them not content. Okay, that's the next question. Where are we going? Yeah. Like, okay, what's going to happen now?

SPEAKER_00 45:36

But let's just let's just pause. So if you imagine, yeah, we probably have like five to seven minutes discussion just on that question of what does this what does this remind you of? What kind of text is this? And we absolutely get Disney and we get princesses and we get Woodland stories. Yeah. And we sometimes get that bit of, is it non-fiction y and like how do we know it is?

SPEAKER_02 45:57

Yeah, because there are there are a lot of there are a lot of informational books that start with a narrative piece, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:02

Indeed, yeah. But yeah, where you were leaning into there is like these seem a bit more human than they seem animal. Yeah, it's a little personification. Very subtle, but it's there. But it is there. Okay. So what kind of text would that be if we've got animals whom are almost like standing in for humans? So fantasy. It'd be a fantasy tale.

SPEAKER_02 46:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

Okay. Any others?

SPEAKER_02 46:29

Uh science fiction. Which is a which is a part of fantasy.

SPEAKER_00 46:34

Maybe we'll go there when we you because you're about to start to say they were content. Yeah. They're happy. The next question is so what's gonna happen next in the next few sentences?

SPEAKER_02 46:45

Something's gonna stop them from being content suddenly.

SPEAKER_00 46:50

Okay. So what kind of story would that be if this happy sharing forest home is gonna be disrupted in some way?

SPEAKER_02 46:59

I mean, if it stays the way that the style is now, it would still be fantasy with personification going on.

SPEAKER_00 47:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 47:08

It could be just a picture book, you know, like a you know, a kid's picture book kind of a thing.

SPEAKER_00 47:14

It seems quite childlike. Yeah. In a way. These yeah, animals acting like humans and let's see what happened when their whole world is disrupted. Yeah. We're gonna play out. And where will it get to by the end? Do you think, Melissa? Content? Something's gonna come in and make them discontent and disrupt us. And by the end.

SPEAKER_02 47:34

Maybe they work together to to befriend the thing that was bad that was scaring them. Or maybe it's a storm and they all huddle together, and I mean there's so many different ways you could go.

SPEAKER_00 47:47

But that sounds like there's gonna be a kind of message to that. Or we both times you were like working together. They work together to defeat it, or they work together to be a storm.

SPEAKER_02 47:57

Right.

SPEAKER_00 47:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:58

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 47:59

Was that would that be fair? Was that what I was hearing?

unknown 48:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:02

Okay. So that's as much can you hear how strong your story schemas are? I would hope so. Absolutely. But you know, I didn't give you anything. Right. I I'm I've read the whole thing and you haven't, but from what we got, one, two, three, four sentences, you can imagine this whole story architecture.

SPEAKER_02 48:28

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:29

Yeah. How are you able to do that?

SPEAKER_02 48:32

I've read a lot. You know, I was read a lot too when I was a kid. I read a lot. I watch a lot of movies. You know, movies help a lot with that. I've been teaching for 34 years and read a lot of kids' fiction, stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 48:48

So this is just this is yeah, this is easy swimming in in warm water for you, isn't it? Yeah. I don't know. We'll see what the answer is. This is where I live and breathe, and you know, and it's even for some children, even this is quite hard.

SPEAKER_02 49:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:04

If they haven't been read to, yeah, if they haven't read a lot themselves, haven't even read a lot of movies, and that kids often just accessing digital text through YouTube and just watching little snippets of things, and almost seems to be coming more problematic that they haven't got a whole story architecture in their heads and can't see the shape of where we are. We're at the beginning of a text, we're opening, you know, this is setting up a situation and characters and and the relationships between them. So for those kids, this is almost already like an intervention to hear all their classmates talk about what kind of a text we're in and where it might go.

SPEAKER_02 49:42

That's a great point. It is very much a lesson for them in building their schema very nicely, actually. Yeah, in one hour.

SPEAKER_00 49:53

Indeed. Absolutely. That's why it's an intervention. That's why it's an intervention. It's not their idea that matters. It's so what we said as a group, we have said these animals seem to be more human-like, yeah. So we're imagining it's like, yeah, personification type, fable-like story.

SPEAKER_01 50:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:09

We think this is gonna be disrupted, it's gonna go wrong, something's gonna come in to disrupt them. So often they say humans are gonna come in and dig up the woods and they're gonna have to fight back.

SPEAKER_02 50:19

They must have seen Avatar.

SPEAKER_00 50:23

But yeah, they say the animals will win out in the end. Maybe they'll find a new home, they'll go somewhere else, or yeah, they'll find a way of scaring, scaring the monsters or the humans away. Yeah, and they have that that kind of framing. Okay, but so they've got this architecture in their heads, and then we read the the fable to them, which I I won't do in fullness, but what happens is the terrible things come. So the next sentence is until the terrible things came.

SPEAKER_03 50:50

Right.

SPEAKER_00 50:50

And the terrible things say we have come for the animals with the bushy tails. If we look back, it's like we've only got squirrels here with bushy tails.

SPEAKER_03 50:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:59

So on the other, the birds and the rabbits and the porcupines, trees, uh, and the frogs and the fish say, There, there, there's the squirrels, they've got the bushy tails.

SPEAKER_02 51:06

To save themselves, to save themselves, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:09

And then they settle back down until the terrible things came again. They say, We have come for the animals with spines. The porcupines, you'll find them everything, yeah. And so it happens again and again. And yet there is um, there's a big rabbit and a little rabbit, and each time the terrible things come, little rabbit is saying, Why are we letting this happen? I'm not happy. Shouldn't we be helping the porcupines? Is it and Big Rabbit's saying, Little rabbit, stay where you are, stay quiet, stay underneath that rock. No, no, no, we're okay. They're just coming for the things with spines. Yeah?

SPEAKER_01 51:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:41

Until it's pretty bleak. By the time we get to the end of this tale, there are only the rabbits left, and the terrible things come for the things with the fluffy tails and the long ears, and little rabbit is hiding behind a rock, and all the other rabbits have gone, and there is just little rabbit left at the end of the book, and he decides he needs to go and find a new wood and a new community and other animals, and he would tell them about the tale of the terrible things.

SPEAKER_03 52:10

Yikes.

SPEAKER_00 52:11

I know. Exactly. So there is a conflict already, in there's no way that the children expected that's the way that the you know the fable would go. Exactly. What on earth could the message be?

SPEAKER_02 52:25

Is it it's not Aesop, it's obviously something else, right?

SPEAKER_00 52:28

No, no, I'll reveal that in a minute.

SPEAKER_02 52:31

It's some like Scandinavian no or German. Sounds German, actually.

SPEAKER_00 52:37

Eve Bunting is her name.

SPEAKER_02 52:40

No, yes, Eve Bunting?

SPEAKER_00 52:43

Eve Bunting, yes. Stop it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:48

Oh, so she's doing it as an allegory.

SPEAKER_00 52:51

Right. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 52:53

I mean it reads, it screams allegory, but I thought it was old.

SPEAKER_00 52:57

Fairly old, but yeah, you know, she's still she's still alive and writing, isn't she? Yeah, yeah. No, but yeah, there is there is that there is that ten or two, it's absolutely the children then are asked to rank order. They've got the animals on little cards in each group, and who who is to blame for, who is most to blame for what happened. Oh, interesting. To the animals in the forest, yeah. So they've got little rabbit, big rabbit separately, and then they've got frogs, fish, porcupines. Terrible things as well, together. And they rank they say, yes, they're what and what is difficult, it's quite easy to go. All these animals who just dob the other animals in, you know, they're fairly high. Terrible things are at the top, but where the heck do we put Big and Little Rabbit?

SPEAKER_03 53:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:41

Big Rabbit who said stay quiet, don't do anything. Little rabbit who kept piping up and saying we ought to do something, but didn't do anything. And that is just the most fascinating conversations come out there. And what they're constructing then is the message, yeah, and the meaning and quite how difficult it is. Well, should Little Rabbit should have done something, shouldn't he? He shouldn't have listened to his big ones, but he's only little. Yeah. What can he do when Big Rabbit tells him he's got to be quiet, he's gonna stay quiet. But he could see all the animals dissipate, you know. So we get this.

SPEAKER_02 54:12

Yeah, that's pretty disturbing.

SPEAKER_00 54:15

Absolutely. Uh and only only when they have then con socially constructed, thank you, Mr. Vygotsky, you're live in the room, what they feel to be the message, the meaning of this tale, and quite how dark and tricky it is. Yeah, but they do, you know, they do come out with they should have stayed, you know, stayed by side by side, they shouldn't have let this happen to each other. We then reveal, yes, Eve Bunting at the end of the book says this is a Holocaust tale.

SPEAKER_02 54:43

I figured either because literally you said coming for them. So I thought Holocaust, but I also just thought just bullying, like bystanders not doing anything.

SPEAKER_00 54:52

Some children who've never have no cognizance of the Holocaust go there. You know, they can construct at their own level with their own experience of what this what this means to them. Yeah, but there's nearly always enough knowledge in the room, even if they haven't kind of studied or gone into the history of the Holocaust, go, Oh yes, I've heard of that. Yeah, and it's not a history lesson, but it's a it's a deep lesson about allegory, the fact that a whole story can everything in the story can stand for something else.

SPEAKER_02 55:20

Something else. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 55:21

Yeah. Not just the animals are standing for humans, but the whole architecture of it.

SPEAKER_02 55:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:26

Yeah, it's one of our really, really successful lessons, really hard hitting. Kids go away really thinking differently about what stories do. So that that would be for kind of your age group. Yeah. And we talk allegory on whether they've come across other allegories, uh whether they would make changes. If they made changes, how that would change the message and the meaning in that. And then the idea we have would be to bridge to other stories where everything in the story carries carries meaning.

SPEAKER_02 55:55

Very cool.

SPEAKER_00 55:57

There we go.

SPEAKER_02 55:57

Enough examples. That's that's unbelievable. So you had those on slides. Like how do I get those slides? You s I think you sent me the slides for the um what is it, opening opening door? I don't remember the name of the other.

SPEAKER_00 56:13

I did for the lesson that we did together in in the last podcast. Yeah, so actually all of your listeners can go to um our website, which is letstthinkinglish.org. And I can send you the link and you can put those in the show notes. And there we have two free lessons available for every phase. So there's some there for infant stage where they're uh sort of five, six, seven, and then between seven to nine, and then between nine and eleven. And there's even if you've got kind of middle school, higher middle school and um high school students as well, it goes right up to our GCSE age, so they would be kids who are 16. And there's there's just two lesson, two sample lessons there for everybody. So that's probably the easiest way to um uh share with your listeners if they wanted to go to our site, see what we do.

SPEAKER_02 57:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:04

And we do, even though all as tutors we are England-based, not just UK based, but but England-based, we have trained many international schools. Um, and we've done that sometimes just with remote training. Okay. But it works best actually if there is at least kind of one visit with our feet in the school, because the very first day we teach a series of lessons and you watch us teach your kids, and it's it's the best way to see how it works is to get that concrete example. And they're your children as well, you know, they're your students, so you can go, well, they can do it. Yeah, they did really bad.

SPEAKER_02 57:39

I'm just gonna ask if you could zoom in and teach my kids one of these lessons. Is that hard to do?

SPEAKER_00 57:47

I've never, I have not done that before. The difficulty is I can't hear what they're talking about in their little groups.

SPEAKER_02 57:54

That's true, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 57:55

And that the pure Vygotsky is in the face, I ask the question, they talk, and I'm listening in and I'm planning the order of feedback. Yeah. And no, I'm gonna go to this group first, and then I and then I'm gonna go to this Humsinger and pull that in. So it might fall a bit flat.

SPEAKER_02 58:14

Yeah, I gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 58:15

Yeah, which is why kind of we like to train teachers and we like to work with kids live for this to work. But you're yeah, so if you had a kind of group of schools who was interested in the training, it would be accessible to you. You've got schools in the UAE, in Poland, um, in Latvia that we've that we've flown to and trained.

SPEAKER_02 58:33

But but yeah, the first the first port call would be I mean, I think I've been teaching long enough that I could just take it and run with it. Give it a go and and get it. But I would want it to be for more than just me, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:46

Yeah, growing well, our let's think an English guide book, which we haven't had one out before. Our first let's think in English guidebook is due out about halfway through this year. Oh. So I could get back to you and you could let your listeners know as well. We're hoping it'll be out by September. And that is absolutely designed as a CPD guide so that yeah, groups of teachers and departments could work through that and the lessons, and you get a kind of batch of lessons that comes with that we talk through in the chapters. There are lots of little transcripts of here are real children in real classrooms that have talked, and you kind of work through those as little CPD units. Cool. So, you know, we're hoping there's another way that yeah, teachers can grow into the program.

SPEAKER_02 59:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:33

Still not alone with a group of your cherished colleagues, but yeah, without necessarily the need for us to be to be alongside you. Amazing. Amazing.

SPEAKER_02 59:44

All right, Leah, what are you gonna come on next and talk about? I think you need a break from me for a while.

SPEAKER_00 59:51

But it's been a joy. Been lovely to I probably need to recommend somebody else, don't I? Another, another education list with some different ideas who could come on your podcast and then I can just listen and drink it all in. I know.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:05

No, this was really amazing. Okay. So lovely to talk with you again. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. For my blog, transcripts of this episode, and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.teteachure.com. You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram at Melissa B. Milner, and I hope you check out the Teacher As Facebook page for episode updates. This podcast is sponsored by the Career Mentorship Program Major Choice. You can learn more about becoming a mentor at majorchoice.comslash mentor. Thanks for listening, and that's a wrap.