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Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning
Welcome to Bedrock Talks, a podcast from the team at Bedrock Learning that delves deep into the heart of literacy in education. Hosted by the insightful and experienced educator Andy Sammons, this podcast stands as a beacon for anyone passionate about enhancing literacy skills and understanding its pivotal role in education.
Each episode is a journey into the world of literacy education. Andy brings together a diverse array of voices from across the education sector, from seasoned teachers to renowned academics, policy makers to literacy advocates. All of our guests share a common goal: to explore and expand the horizons of literacy education.
We go beyond surface-level conversations. Our discussions are in-depth, nuanced, and filled with insights that only years of experience and expertise can bring. We tackle a wide range of topics, from innovative teaching methods to the latest research in literacy, the impact of technology on reading and writing, to strategies for engaging diverse learners. Our aim is to provide a platform where the complexities of literacy are unpacked and understood in a way that is both accessible and enlightening.
Join Andy and his guests as they illuminate the multifaceted world of literacy. Subscribe to Bedrock Talks and be part of a community that believes in the transformative power of literacy. Together, let's shape a more literate, informed, and connected world.
Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning
36. What does literacy utopia look like, and how can we get there? with Jennie Shearer
What if every secondary school teacher knew how to teach a child to read? What if we stopped treating literacy as simply spelling and grammar exercises and instead recognised it as the foundation of all learning? In this thought-provoking conversation with English teacher and literacy lead Jennie Shearer, we explore the troubling reality that most teachers have never been taught how to support struggling readers.
Jennie shares her frustration with CPD sessions that fail to address this fundamental gap in teacher knowledge. "If students don't understand what we're asking them—not because they don't understand the question but because they don't understand the words—it's irrelevant," she explains, highlighting why the traditional approach to literacy instruction falls short for our most vulnerable learners.
Drawing from her extensive experience as both a literacy lead and classroom teacher, Jennie offers practical strategies that any teacher can implement. We discuss the power of grounding new concepts in familiar contexts, exploring etymology and word roots, and reconceptualising literacy as more than just technical accuracy. The conversation moves beyond the mechanics of reading to consider how vocabulary instruction opens doorways to deeper conceptual understanding across all subjects.
The discussion takes a powerful turn when we consider the broader implications of literacy beyond school walls. With approximately 15-18% of adults lacking functional literacy, the stakes couldn't be higher. As Jennie poignantly notes, the difference between survival and thriving often comes down to whether students can access information independently.
Whether you're an English teacher, science specialist, or school leader, this conversation challenges you to see reading instruction as everyone's responsibility. How might our schools transform if literacy were treated not as a policy mandate but as a fundamental aspect of school culture? Listen now to join this essential conversation about reimagining literacy education for all learners.
Hi everyone and welcome to the Bedrock Talks podcast. With myself, andy Sammons, I'm the head of teaching and learning here at Bedrock Learning. Today we have a really interesting guest. We have Jenny Shearer, who is currently an English teacher and has had a whole plethora of roles in her time a similar time to me in the classroom, actually Literacy lead, teaching and learning team lead, head of department the whole spectrum there, um, and it's a. It's lovely to have her on. She has a book coming out soon on which I'm sure we'll touch upon um. But I actually came across an article that jenny jenny wrote um about cpd and and some of her thoughts and feelings around teacher, cpd and and it. It mirrored some a couple of other podcasts we've done recently and some of my own reading and research. So it's lovely to have you on, jenny. Thank you for giving you your time up this morning on the in the easter holidays thank you and it was lovely.
Speaker 1:Actually, I think one thing that I really picked up in this morning is how how much we have in common. We have two kids, the same age, I think. They're going to football and various of the camps this week and you know, um, I always feel guilty about sending my kids off to stuff in in the holidays, but then I realize, actually it's, it's not for the full day, is it? It's it's, you know, nine to three or whatever, and then they get time outside running about. It's okay, isn't it?
Speaker 2:I don't mind mixing with some different people running around around. It's exactly what they need. They'll go mad if they're in the house with me the whole time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100% agree. So, yeah, the article that you wrote recently, give us a sense of kind of where that came from. You've told me briefly off air, but give a sense of where that came from and just for those people who may not have come across it online or whatever, what were you writing about?
Speaker 2:So I was asked to write a piece quite quickly sort of a Monday afternoon, can you write a piece for Teachwire? And I asked what it should be on, and it was an open letter on whatever you want, literacy based go for it. Open letter on whatever you want, literacy based, go for it. Um, and I sort of pondered it a little while and decided that the main thing that I find that really sort of irritates me and that I feel is an easy fix is the fact that so many teachers, particularly secondary teachers, um, don't know how to teach a child to read unless they're a parent and they've gone through, you know the, the phonics of of reception and year one and year two and things like that. They don't know. They've got a child in front of them and they're struggling to read and what? How can you help while you're busy trying to get the curriculum into their brains, ready for a GCSE and however many years?
Speaker 2:Um, and I also reflected on the fact that I've sat in so many CPD meetings twilights, things, where one person is super excited because they've organised it. But actually I know all of this, I do all of this. What you're asking is just to regurgitate what we do already. Why are we wasting this time? And so the article is sort of that plea, almost to leadership teams to allow every teacher, from primary up to secondary beyond, to teach us how to teach reading effectively and have that at different levels, because it's not part of teacher training but will be taught how to get feedback or how to question. But if those students don't understand what we're asking them not because they don't understand the question but because they don't understand the words it's irrelevant. So we need to start at the foundations.
Speaker 1:I wonder if this is more prevalent now, given the SENDnd what can only be described as an scnd crisis in the country. Um, and I've got personal experience of this um, my son is uh. For anyone who's ever heard, this is the 50 millionth time I mentioned this on the podcast. He's dyslexic, um, and you know he's got an extremely spiky profile, so so he's, I think his verbal reasoning, et cetera, et cetera, is really high, but his literacy and numeracy is really quite low and it's such a struggle to get him anything towards what his dyslexia assessment actually says.
Speaker 1:It's real, a real struggle, struggle, and it and I think that's emblematic of a much wider issue around the fact that I think we talk about quality first teaching. We talk about wave one teaching, wave one interventions, but it has to go beyond giving them a different pen, giving them an overlay. It has to go beyond that, doesn doesn't it? Yeah, so I suppose really are some of your frustrations rooted from your time as a literacy lead. Do you feel like that's where the problem lies in terms of that conceptualisation of literacy?
Speaker 2:I think it can do. I think when you say literacy, most people will go with it's spelling and punctuation. It's your SPAG check. It's it's spelling and punctuation. It's your spag check. It's it's going back through and correcting your spellings, and that's one. It's one tiny, tiny part. And because it's one tiny, tiny part, a lot of subjects again from a secondary point of view, don't see that it's relevant to them because, well, they don't get marks for that in their GCSE paper. It's only worth this many marks and so it gets pushed to one side.
Speaker 2:And actually the fact that it is about those foundations and opening up the scope for everything else, for those quality discussions, for that understanding, for that communication, for that low bringing down any behavior issues, for that empathy making them, you know, whole people, that's the point, that's the point of our jobs. Um, we're missing that. If people don't understand that that's what it is and that that is their role, whether they think they are just a history teacher or a geography teacher or a science teacher or not, they're in charge of those students, they're in charge of those young people who we have to give every possible opportunity to, and we're really limiting them if they can't access the basic conversations or the basic learning, the basic reading, and something has happened along the way. We can't change the past, but what can we do to enhance what they can do in the future? And it's? It can be really simple.
Speaker 2:So it can be as simple as saying you know, sound out the word that you want to spell. If that's the the issue, by just using those words instead of you know what does it, you know what does it sound like in terms of what you do, you know where? Have you seen it before? That might work. But in primary, sounding is exactly how they learn how to read and spell. So why not follow that language through into secondary? But you know, secondary teachers aren't taught how to do that. They don't know those sounds, they don't know those that key vocabulary to use to make sure they're learning yeah, I didn't.
Speaker 1:Before I went to a couple of as you mentioned, off air a couple of phonics workshops that the school put on for my kids when they started school and it was really really useful, actually really useful. Um, but then you have again.
Speaker 2:You look at dyslexic people's phonics doesn't always work no, they know maybe the sound and they'll use one sound. They don't necessarily know. There are five other ways to make that sound. Yeah, and that's the important part that I recognize as a parent and as an english teacher and, as you know, a literacy lead previously, that that I make sense of that, but other teachers won't, they won't recognize that, and so that's a lost skill and it's a lost key to unlock all that learning, and that's really important so you mentioned before um about the, the age-old thing.
Speaker 1:You know other departments, other subjects, other disciplines that aren't marked for spag in their answers and I understand that I kind of. That's not what the discussion is where we're moving to here, but it, as you said, it's really about reconceptualizing what literacy means for those subjects and we're looking at the disciplinary literacy piece here. I think the idea that in a way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's important yeah.
Speaker 1:Um well, you said in a way why not, why not?
Speaker 2:because I think also it's opening it up to all of that idea of that reading not just in order to write the thing for that subject or to understand that specific sort it's reading. It goes down to reading for pleasure. And again, you can't read for pleasure if you can't access it. If it's another thing that you're failing at, you're not going to enjoy it. And so I think all of those things overlap. They're not separate things, and that's the risk that we have is that again those discrete subjects think discreetly rather than bringing everything together to then enhance their own ideas.
Speaker 1:I see, and this is actually what when we spoke to Natalie Wexler on this, she said something a little bit similar. Actually, she said that disciplinary literacy is probably really powerful for your potentially older students, but when you're looking at kind of pupils who are fundamentally in primary school or struggling to read, who may be in secondary school, what we have to break down is that distinction that, um, once you've got your phonics, you can now read, and um, reading is separate to learning. They are two sides of the same coin. And I suppose that leads me on to what I was going to ask you about, um, really, in that, if we're looking at kind of immediate, what sorts of immediate things can teachers do to be addressing that? So you're a, you've got a history class in front of you of year nine pupils, some of whom are really struggling to engage with the content that you're teaching them. What sorts of things can teachers be doing to teach reading? Do you think what advice would you give to teachers in these scenarios?
Speaker 2:I think the first thing is is using things that those students might recognize so verbally, so they're listening and then looking at it on on a page. So, whether there's patterns in language or there's a story or an idea that they might have seen somewhere else, and not just in another subject in a school, but in their lives they watch things. They they might have seen somewhere else, and not just in another subject in a school, but in their lives they watch things. They they might, you know, play games. They might be talking to other people. Where do they recognize some of these ideas? And if they, if they can't, they can't make that link it's your job to pull that in, so make analogy so grounding it in some sense of familiarity.
Speaker 1:And and I, what we know I was reading something from daniel willingham last night spoke about how knowledge, knowledge begets knowledge. Almost the idea that it's sticky, it's like velcro. It helps you think more leanly. It helps you process what's on the page more leanly. It helps you, it helps you acquire new concepts more. Is it all that sort of thing? So familiarity, to give the pupils a foothold into what what they're dealing with? And it's funny, you know, the one I always give an example of is my dad loves the historic fiction novel, the shard lake series, and I saw it on amazon kindle for 99p ages ago now and I thought, well, I'll give it a go.
Speaker 1:I didn't really get past the first few pages because I had no familiarity, no grounding, no background knowledge, no comfort whatsoever with that text and I probably could have stuck at it. But I thought I don't feel like I've got any skin in the game here. I'm not enjoying this. This is not something for me, so all right. So strategy number one would be around grounding it in familiarity. I agree with you wholeheartedly. I'm sure that other english colleagues have written about this before around the power of analogy, um, I use analogy.
Speaker 2:It's not just with the text that's in front of you. It can be, you know, you're giving an instruction of how to do something and if they don't understand what the end game is, what the point is, how to do that, you've got to find an alternative way, and that might be using something that they recognize. It might be using a story. It might be using, you know, uh, linking it to someone or something that they recognize. You know sports are always pulled in for some of those things. You know, if you're talking particularly to those disengaged boys and I know it's that stereotypical cliche, but for a huge amount of students it works linking it to football or rugby or something, just to make them understand, they get it yeah, I was teaching in a school the other day, I was leading a master class for a school and I was, um, I mean, they gave me.
Speaker 1:They said I said what would you like me to talk to you at year 11s about? And I've done loads of these types of things before. And they said unseen poetry and transactional writing. I thought, yep, if I was at a department at this point of the exam season, that's what I would want, that's what I'd be laying up for this poor chap. But anyway, they were, the kids were a mate. I loved it. It was just brilliant.
Speaker 1:And the way I started transactional writing was I wanted to. I wanted to give them a sense of ethos, pathos and logos. I wanted them to not say you know, not the dreadful thing of a paragraph on logos, a paragraph? No, obviously not. But I wanted to. I started by grounding it in. I put a picture of Donald Trump on on the, on the, on the board. I put a picture of TikTok, the TikTok logo. I put a picture of the Fortnite logo and I put a picture of various things that I thought they would react to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I just said which of these gives you the strongest reaction in terms of, just emotionally, how do you react to it? Like, does it excite you or annoy you? And I said all of these things, whether it's through logic, whether it's through emotion, whether it's through um, um, authenticity and trust, they all excite something in you, and I, and I, and I think you're right in terms of grounding it in something that they can grapple onto, and so that's how, how you've got to make your reader feel is the idea that you're exciting. Logic, authenticity or emotion in them. That's what you have to try and do. So, grounding it in something real. Okay, that's, that's really cool. What? What other advice would you give?
Speaker 2:I think once you've done that, you've opened the door, and so then you are able to work out where any issues might be. So is it a vocabulary? Is it just context? Is it understanding what's been given? But they don't understand then how to communicate what's in their minds, and so it's again. It's having those.
Speaker 2:Once you've got your sort of path, you know which direction you're taking. You've got your strategies that you can implement. You can have word lists with definitions and putting it into context in your subject or the topic. You can have mind maps ready and knowledge organizers that they can fill in or that are already there, show them where they are on that path already, giving them a whiteboard and a pen and just asking them to make sense of stuff. You know brain dump everything as a starting point.
Speaker 2:We're so keen to, and because of pressure everywhere else to get through everything so quickly. Those students are not going to understand everything if we're doing it that way. But if we take a moment and we slow down and give them their time to access it and for them to access it rather than just hearing it and hoping something seeps in, then they're going to have so much more of a quality education and understanding of what they need to do and they can actually sort of, they can make sure that they can experience and express what's in their mind, rather than it just regurgitating whatever we've told them, because I'm fed up of saying all the same things about these poems. You know 15 poems in an anthology. These are my ideas and so actually these are my ideas, but what are your ideas? Why do you think that? That might be where I've come from? Can you deviate is far more impressive than regurgitate what Mrs Shearer says and hope that you write it well enough to get some marks. That's not. That's not the point.
Speaker 1:You know that's not going to serve them well yeah, I always think that um vocabulary is so important here in the, in the sense of it could be vocabulary and like, for example, taking your, your example, there inside the poems, inside the topic, the actual vocabulary is fine.
Speaker 1:But I also think it's really important to have that really well chosen, potentially tier two, but tier three as well, vocabulary, that kind of the academic vocabulary, to help them unlock the understanding of it. So, for example, um, you know, um, when you're reading um my last duchess, I think it's really important to teach the word narcissistic or narcissist, teach the root of that word, teach, teach what the where that comes from. Then also use that as the opportunity to teach the antonym of narcissistic as well and understand the full breadth of the concept. I know that one of the things that when I, funnily enough, when I brought bedrock into my school just as an example I mean I'm sure you've seen this because you've used bedrock before synonyms, antonym exercises, it's that kind of teasing apart of the whole concept, right? Um, what, what's?
Speaker 2:what are your feelings on word play, the idea that you pull words apart and roots and all that sort of stuff so I I created a whole scheme of work for year sevens on myths and legends and tales, and we start with Greek myths as our way in something exciting stories. I mean, I loved them growing up and the first parts. After your initial images and excitement, there is here are a list of words, uh, that have come from the greek root. Think of many words that you can include, those root words that we use today, you know, and it's competition. And then it's handed over and that's for the same style for the first two weeks with different root words that we can then have that conversation with and we can call back all the way through the schemes and later on in the, you know, in the years, we can call back to it and say, do you remember? You did this and it linked to that subject and this idea. And you know, and they love it. And again, you know, we used to do it just in our, in our books, but putting that on a whiteboard and then it disappearing, but it's, it's somewhere in their mind. Yeah, it's far more powerful. They're going to remember those, yeah, more than perhaps what they then wrote about their own hero going on a quest, which is absolutely fine. I would rather they remembered that quality that they could then apply as and when they needed it. You know, if they're going to go off and be a scientist, brilliant. They've now got all of those beautiful root words ready that they can break down those polysyllabic words. They can make a guess. They can make an educated guess rather than just plucking it out. Yeah, um, and that's. I love playing with it. I.
Speaker 2:I remember doing, um, a little placement as part of my degree and I went into a classroom and it must have been towards the end of term because these were all fun game lessons. One of them was dictionaries on a table and you've got to try and find this word and you've got to give me the etymology, you've got to give me a synonym, you've got to give me an antonym. And those students were just in competition with each other, trying to use dictionary but being able to then voice oh, it's come from Latin, it's come from the Greek, it's come from Middle. That was then a conversation they had, and again, those students, if I can remember that sort of from 16 years ago. I'm hoping those students will remember that as well and they can recognise the need to understand that they probably didn't at the time, but now, hopefully, they've gone on to being able to do that.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting. I was actually laying with my little boy last night in bed and we were we actually were reading, reading a book together and he said why is it that, for example, a, why at the end of the word can sometimes be a short e and sometimes it's a long, like you know, happy versus spry, like why is that what? Why is English so? So basically, why is English such an atrocious language for me to learn? Yes, and I said and that's where I kind of said to him that it's because it's a global language that's borrowed so many different words into it. It's a, it's a language that's gone all around the world and it's it's basically borrowed and stolen lots of concepts and words from around the world. So that's why we've got this sort of frankenstein's monster of a language now, which is beautiful and but also quirky and frustrating.
Speaker 1:And I I wholeheartedly agree with you and I think that when this first became a thing around vocabulary and alex quigley wrote the vocabulary gap and that type of thing he's a fantastic guy um, I didn't really get the whole tier two thing. It took me a little while to kind of understand where we were getting that. Surely, just teach the subject words. Why do you need those tier two words? But the more and more I waded into it, the more and more I realized that it was about really, not really about vocab, but concepts. It was about the idea that you know by the end I completely embraced it and we were doing year 11 rotations, mini rotations for me on, we had Macbeth in Spectacles, christmas Carol and the poetry, and we would rotate for five weeks on the theme by the end of year 11, on the theme of vulnerability. Vulnerability meaning to wound, your ability to be wounded, your ability so then you could talk about. Macbeth was completely unwilling to be wounded, which enabled which basically was was the awakening of his Hamasha.
Speaker 1:Scrooge learns to become vulnerable, whilst the younger generation are able to be vulnerable, the old generation aren't, and that actually vulnerability is a sign of strength yeah if you're willing to face it and, um, and I think all of that you know, if your, your ability to feel wounded, your ability to be brave, is actually a it's brave, it's not weak, um, to be vulnerable and I agree with you and understand that word in all those contexts.
Speaker 2:So you might be lucky and have a student that understands what that word is brilliant, but their understanding is. It means that you're weak.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so actually opening it up to every other context is important to understand in those different contexts that there's a slightly different meaning and to be able to articulate that. That's where you sort of lose a huge amount of students if you haven't had all those foundations built up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally agree. Had all those foundations built up? Yeah, totally agree. Um, we've kind of touched on the some of the complexities and difficulties of a literacy leads role in terms of grounding it in the reality for other subjects who were starved for time. Actually, often english literacy leads can be english teachers who have more curriculum time than other. So I think there's a real empathy piece there to think about.
Speaker 1:But I think it's about what we've just talked about. There is that this everyone's got skin in the game here. For you know, look at the amount of scientific words in, or you know words with Greek and Latin roots across the whole curriculum and history. Everything is you can be pulled apart and it's a way in, as you say so, even if you look at mark schemes, it's a way in to you say so, even if you look at mark schemes, it's a way in to help the pupils to ground and understand what you're asking of them. For you, what, what do, what would utopia look like for you in terms of if you're thinking, you know, if educational policy, whatever, what, what does perfect look like for you?
Speaker 2:perfect, perfect. Every child is able to access everything freely, willingly, fully engaged with, and have their own views and their own ideas and be able to to push it further. That would be the ideal. You use the word policy and that's the word that sort of makes my cool a little bit. I think as soon as something becomes a policy, right it's, you sort of lose them the moral compass to it almost. This is a huge reason why teachers teach it's. It's not because you know and this is almost me quoting, um, a friend and colleague of mine, you know, it's not because of the pay and it's not because of the you know the big sort of fame fortune that comes with it. It's because we are good people that want to do good, we're kind people, we want to be able to push others, um, and if we put it into policy it becomes a tick box exercise a lot of the time and waters down. So I'd rather it not need to be a policy. It is a culture.
Speaker 1:It's what happens do you think it's more about? It's something that can be probably more likely broached and broken down at the school level. In terms of the expectations around instruction and vocabulary, in terms of the frameworks that are used in schools, I get the sense that you feel like it's something that the school has a lot of, can potentially have a lot of control over, right?
Speaker 2:school has a lot of, can potentially have a lot of control over, right? I think, yeah, bearing in mind I understand it's not just the school's job at all. That's because, yeah, we are as people who work in schools. We have a huge amount of responsibilities, officially and unofficially. From you know, those basic needs, right up to the gcse grades, a level grades, whatever it might be, and it's a lot of pressure. We cannot be everything, but at the same time we are in a prime position to make sure we can fill the gaps for those children who don't get the same things elsewhere. Um, my children are exceptionally lucky. You know, we've got we've always had a huge amount of books, and you would expect nothing less from an English teacher.
Speaker 2:As a parent, I am also very well aware, from a long time working in quite deprived areas, that that's not the case for a huge amount of children and actually survival is their primary concern, and it's really sad that the survival isn't then seen in terms of what things like literacy can provide. And that's the bit that I want to overthrow. I want it to be that all those children, because they are children, have the opportunity to thrive and not just survive, because they have access to all of these things and as a school, as teachers, as leaders, as support staff, we have that opportunity for that part of the day to make sure we can do as much as possible to enrich those children's lives in every possible way. And it isn't just down to an English teacher, it isn't just down to a literacy lead, it isn't just down to classroom teachers. You know, think about everyone that works in a school.
Speaker 2:We have an opportunity to make a difference and it could just be that simple thing of unlocking that door. That means those children can then go and thrive, they can have the options, they can make those choices, they can be informed, they can avoid being scammed or, you know, taken advantage of. You know, at the, you know you can think of the extremes, of the possibilities there. You know, I saw I was thinking about this yesterday, years and years and years ago, like a weekday morning while I was a student, we had reruns of er on channel four and I never was really one for er anyway, but I remember one part where there was a hispanic family who were there and someone had taken too many of the pills that they had been prescribed because on it it said once a day, but in spanish on fe is 11 so it's that simple difference.
Speaker 2:I know that's going into sort of eal, but it it could be anything. That slight difference in a word that they don't see could be, in the most extreme cases, the matter of life or death. And I know that some people would say that I'm exaggerating, but to me it's not an exaggeration.
Speaker 1:Well, I, I did read something. I quote it on a lot of my, on a lot of my cpd slides. Fundamentally it's adult literacy is a renalist elo that I think it's something. I think it's around. 15 of adults don't have basic, functional what you might call health literacy yeah, I saw that 18 on functional illiteracy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and so I I agree with all of that. Um, obviously, I mean there's a moral, there's a moral imperative. There, isn't there. The other thing I wanted to just touch on before we finish was around teacher training. It seems to me like with the SEND crisis in the country and it's not necessarily just an SEND thing, but just the proliferation of screens, media, et cetera, et cetera, and the complete war on our attention the entire time we in modern civilization, that it seems like there needs to be a slight adjustment to teacher training around how to teach reading and the fact that reading and learning are the same thing. There's no distinction there. You don't teach. It's not useful always to teach generic comprehension activities like summarize this text or find the main idea. You can't do it unless you've got access through the language right. So would you, would you agree with that in terms of the point of departure in teacher training?
Speaker 2:oh, absolutely so. I was um primary and secondary trained.
Speaker 2:I did the the 70 oh are you I wasn't taught how to teach a child how to read, even in that age range. At that time it it might be slightly different now, but having spoken to a couple of itt's that we've got in school, you know they. They say they get a couple of um lectures on. You know what phonics is or what looks like, but they don't ever get taught how to teach it. That's really attractive and, in my mind, if you're not taught how to teach a child to read, how can you expect to then use all of those other brilliant strategies that you've got? Because they're not going to work. If the car battery is not working, nothing else is going to happen. So so even just allowing that to be the primary, that that first thing is, but also explaining why.
Speaker 2:So I remember doing something on on language acquisition or language development. It was a couple of weeks of a of a module, but no one explained why that would be so important. And 18 or 19, you're not going to recognize why that's so important At 21,. If you're doing a PGCE, you've just done a degree. You're not going to recognise why you've got to go back to those basics and that is really important. Explicitly teaching the teachers has to happen, and I think you're right when you're saying you know it's learning and reading are one of the same. That's why so many people will separate that reading for pleasure from learning anything, and actually it's really dangerous. Just sitting and reading means you are learning, and I keep seeing something popping up about the idea that reading fiction is learning by imagination, while reading your nonfiction is learning by information and that's-fiction is reading by it's learning by information, and that's either way you're still learning. So why not push both of those things?
Speaker 1:I mean, it's just probably a different debate. I would love to debate it properly, with, with, with around reading for pleasure. I I've got some reservations around the notion of reading for pleasure, because I think that's an outcome of a lot of underlying components which have to be addressed first and foremost because if you can't do it, then it's not.
Speaker 2:It's never going to be a pleasure, it's always going to be resistance and that's going to turn into real frustration and anger and defiance on it. We don't want that. That's not the point. It goes back to that utopia idea of culture. There should be time. It shouldn't be seen as something that is a stress and a struggle and separate to other things that are more important. The culture should be opening every single thing up.
Speaker 2:That creativity, that time, that mental well-being yeah which isn't there for a huge amount of of people no, and it, it's the thing.
Speaker 1:It's not a thing. It's the thing. It's how you go in with your I mean, I move away from spag, move away from vocabulary. It's concept, it's the way in through which you know um, through which you teach the content. Look at it. Just take a moment to unpick words exposition, calibration, vulnerability. Take some time to. You've got chat gbt at your fingertips. Yeah, look at the search for the root of the word, search for the what, the what, the suffix and the prefixes mean. Do those things, because it's not for a tick box. What those things will do is they will be the gateways to the understanding and not just oracy, wise and receptive wise, but expressive vocabulary as well. It will start leaking into their work and I, you know, I think that's really, really important. And um, I'm aware that we're at time now. Um, it's been amazing. Jenny, please come back on when your book is released.
Speaker 2:Well, I absolutely will thank you so much.
Speaker 1:It's been a pleasure. I mean, it's just a shame we live so far apart. I'd love to work with you. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on um.
Speaker 2:Thank you and dealing with all the technical difficulties to get us here I think that was.
Speaker 1:I think that was massively, um massive resilience from you again. If anyone wants to go and look at the root word of resilience, go and do it. This lady has it in spades, um, okay, well, it's been lovely speaking to you. All the very best and hopefully speak to you again yeah, thank you so much again, bye, bye.
Speaker 1:Please continue to listen. Uh, like review. Subscribe to the pod everyone. It really helps keep us up there in in the rankings and other people to find these really important educational voices. Um, that's what we're here for, so please do continue to do that, everyone. Bye for now. That's all from me.
