Episode 7: 20 years of Sounds-Write with John Walker

In the seventh episode of The Sounds-Write Podcast, John Walker talks about the past 20 years of Sounds-Write. He discusses some of the highs and lows and talks about the future of Sounds-Write. Enjoy!

Some helpful links:
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Sounds-Write's Facebook
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What is Sounds-Write podcast episode
Pamela Snow and Tanya Terry's op-ed
Pamela Snow's blog
The Teaching Delusion book series

Transcript

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Laura:  00.34
Hello and welcome to Episode 7 of the Sounds-Write Podcast. Today we're celebrating 20 years of Sounds-Write. That's right, we've been teaching children to read and write for two whole decades. In this episode, I asked John Walker about Sounds-Write's beginnings, the key standout moments from the past 20 years, and the exciting things to come in Sounds-Write's future. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy the episode. Hi, John, how are you? It's good to have you back on the podcast.

John:  00:36
It's great to be back, Laura, thank you so much for inviting me again. You know, I'm sure we've got lots and lots to talk about today.

Laura:  00:44
We do. And in fact, I have to say a huge congratulations to you because it was just, well, when we're recording this, it was yesterday that it's 20 years since Sounds-Write was started. So, congratulations. What a milestone to reach.

John:  01:02
Oh, well, thank you very much. I know everybody in the Sounds-Write team is immensely excited and proud about the work we've been doing over the past 20 years, and, well, we'll see what the next 20 brings, shall we?

Laura:  01:16
Absolutely. So, Sounds-Write was started 20 years ago this month, as I said, and actually just a little note for our listeners. We've got lots of things going on this month. We're running a competition with around 2000 pounds worth of prizes in training. We're doing all sorts of giveaways and things like that. So if you want to have a look at those, you can go to our social media links and I'll put those in the show notes below. So, you've talked a bit about how you came to start Sounds-Write in a previous podcast, which again, I'll link in the show notes if anyone wants to catch up and has missed the 'What is Sounds-Write' episode. But could you give us a bit of background on how you came up with the idea, particularly in relation to the context at the time, what experts were thinking about phonics? What were the trends in reading instruction at the time?

John:  02:13
Well, I think it's very difficult for people who are teaching right now just come into teaching over the past 10 or even 15 years to even imagine what the landscape was like over 20 years ago. Because over 20 years ago, we had the National Literacy Strategy. And the last National Literacy Strategy was an absolute dog's breakfast, a hodgepodge of approaches to teaching children to read. Mainly it was based on what was called the Searchlights approach. Some people these days, Professor Pamela Snow at La Trobe University, and people in the United States of America, they refer to it as balanced literacy. But basically, what teachers were being encouraged to tell children was that they needed to look at the pictures, to look at the first letter in a word when they were reading and have a go, which actually really know, have a guess, tell me what you think it is and see if the word made sense in the sentence. And this sort of thing is going on still today. In fact, in the United States of America, of course, this is a really big problem. Although all over the English-speaking world, children who are being taught to read are being asked to do this kind of thing.

Laura:  03:41
Yeah, absolutely. I've seen, in fact, there's a few kind of viral videos, if you will, that go around on social media of young children spelling out a word with letter names and then saying a totally different word that they see from the image. I think there's one of a child spelling out < n > < u > < t > < e > < l > < l > < a > and then saying 'peanut butter' because they see a little jar of some kind of spread. And although the videos are very cute, I think they really are indicative of this approach, aren't they. You know, look at the picture and say what the picture says, but it's actually totally incorrect. And it's the sort of thing that Emily Hanford talks about in 'Sold a Story', which is a fantastic podcast. I'd highly recommend that to any listeners.

John:  04:36
Yeah, my heart sinks when I see videos such as the one that you were just referring to before. But, I think, you know, we can't say enough about Emily Hanford. Emily Hanford has done such a magnificent job in bringing to light the sorts of practices that people are using to teach children and which are not succeeding. So, anybody who has the time to go and have a look at 'Sold a Story', there are six episodes, I think, altogether and I know you're going to put a link in afterwards to them, aren't you?

Laura:  05:12
Yeah, of course.

John:  05:16
Yeah. Going back to 20 years ago, just over 20 years ago, prior to this time, I'd been working for the British Council, and this was where I was teaching foreign students to learn to speak English and write English as well. And for them, it was very difficult, of course. Although they could learn to speak English and they learn to hear the sounds and hear the words in English and so on, learning to read and write English was a major challenge for them. Especially since lots of European languages are very much easier to learn to read and spell, because there's so much of a one-to-one correspondence, you know, one letter, one sound. I mean, okay, in the case of some languages, Spanish, for instance, you can spell a sound with two letters, but in the main it's pretty easy to learn to read and write in those languages. So, they're really horrified when they saw what the English spelling system was like. And a frequent question I was asked is, how on earth is it that English kids learn to read and write? And, of course, my answer was that many of them don't learn to read and write very well, certainly using the kinds of methods that were in operation at that time. So, yeah, I learnt an awful lot at the British Council. I certainly learned how the writing system worked, and for ages and ages I was really puzzling about how we might do something about that. How we might do something about, for instance, learning how to teach the complexities of the writing system.

Laura:  07:05
Right. So, jumping ahead a few years, you've had time to think about how one might teach the complexities of the writing system. So, you came up with the Sounds-Write programme, or the kind of first prototype of the programme, and you trialled it right at the beginning. I bet those first few years were a real learning curve. Does anything stand out in particular as being especially important in how the programme changed since those early days or anything you learned in those first few years of Sounds-Write?

John:  07:46
Well, yes. How long have you got? There were lots and lots and lots of things that really stand out. I mean, on the negative side, one of the things that I was really puzzled about, was how much time and effort some people within the old local authorities, many of which have disappeared now, were prepared to spend in trying to shut us down. And that was based really on the fact that many of the people working in those local authorities had set themselves up to be experts, so-called experts, in the teaching of reading and writing. And what they were prepared to offer later on, of course, was they were prepared to offer half an hour or half a day's course on teaching teachers how to approach the teaching of reading and spelling in school. Of course, that was nowhere near enough. So many children were failing to learn to read and write all over the country that, of course, what we decided to do was we decided to roll Sounds-Write out. And many schools, especially those schools in areas of greatest need, had teachers in them who were passionate about doing something for all of these children who weren't succeeding. And they were prepared to put their metaphorical toes in the water, so to say, and to give us a hearing. But I tell you, it was hard work right at the beginning and for a number of years, I think we found it quite difficult to spread the word. I think a lot of times, especially the sorts of word we got from training institutions was that phonics was just a quick fix and people dismissed it like that. Of course, they weren't prepared to argue the case. But one thing that we learned very quickly was how important training is. Training is absolutely of paramount importance and teachers need to learn how the alphabet code works, how to teach it, from, my mantra, 'simple to complex', and this takes quite a long time. I think just about everybody engaged in this field now recognises that it takes about three years to learn how to read and spell really well in English. But the sad truth is that many teachers tell us when they come onto our courses that they were taught virtually nothing of any practical value about how to teach when they got into the classroom and it was up to them really to find out for themselves. So, yeah, it's been very difficult. One little amusing story I will tell you, actually, is that in one of our pilot schools, I'll name the school, actually, because they're still doing Sounds-Write. They still love Sounds-Write all these years later, 20 years later. We found right at the beginning that we were teaching all these children in what we call in the UK, Reception and Year 1, we were teaching them phonics. And then parents started to come into the school and ask why it was that children in Year 1 were able to read and write better than their siblings in Years 3 and 4. Which, of course, encouraged the school to adopt Sounds-Write in Years 3 and 4 as well.

Laura:  11:18
Yeah. It is a wonder that teachers don't receive more training. And in fact, we get that a lot in our feedback, is, where's this been all my life? Why didn't I get this sort of training at university, for example, or at training college? And in fact, Pamela Snow and one of her colleagues recently wrote something in Australia very much along the similar lines in the Australian context. You know, talking about how little training there was for teachers in phonics and really using bringing those evidence based teaching methods into teachers training from the very beginning of their careers.

John:  12:06
Yeah, that's right. In fact, in our pilot school, the teacher that I was given to work with, she was just coming to the end of her teaching career and she did warn me right at the beginning, she said, I want you to know that when I shut that classroom door, that's it. This is my classroom. And I say what goes, sort of thing. But she was prepared to give me the time of day. And you know what? By the end she said to me, this is the most wonderful thing I've ever seen, and I'm so sorry that I didn't have this when I began teaching.

Laura:  12:45
Yeah. And I think you've said this before as well. You were a teacher for many years and you feel, you know, a sense of, I wish I'd come up with this sooner, I wish I'd started using this sooner, so that you could have had an impact on all of those students that you taught as well.

John:  13:03
Yeah, that's absolutely right. As I said in that previous podcast, I think, and I never forget this, I remember a particular group of six boys in secondary school that I was teaching using a whole-language approach, in my ignorance, of course. And all of those six students left school without really being able to read and write. I mean, they were still virtually illiterate, and I imagine that their illiteracy got worse once they went into the outside world, because they weren't being encouraged to practise reading and writing at all. So, I often think about those.

Laura:  13:42
Yeah. So, going back to the Sounds-Write journey, if there's one book that has influenced Sounds-Write the most and influenced your thinking the most, what would that be?

John:  13:57
Well, absolutely without doubt, the book by Professor Diane McGuinness called 'Why Children Can't Read'. In it, she lays out a sound-to-print approach. And this made absolute perfect sense to me, having worked at the British Council, it gelled perfectly. And what she pointed out, of course, as so many people have realised subsequently, is that children learn all the sounds of their language naturally, in their spoken speech. All children, with very, very few exceptions, learn to speak and listen perfectly naturally. The problem is, what they don't do, is that they don't learn to read and write naturally. Writing systems need to be taught. They're invented systems and they're complex, so they need teaching explicitly. In English there are a limited number of the sounds, and experts agree that this is the case. I mean, somewhere between 43 and 45. If you're Scottish, you'll have an extra sound in the language, the sound in 'Loch', which of course, I can't say as well as a Scott can, but they've got 45 sounds in their language, and those 45 sounds contain multiple different ways of spelling them. So, of course, it's an incredibly complex written script to learn, unlike many of the European alphabetic languages which I mentioned previously. But later on, I think even more importantly, Diane McGuinness produced another book called 'Early Reading Instruction', which is much more detailed and had very much more research evidence to support it, and that was a really ground-breaking moment for many people, as well. Of course, McGuinness wasn't the only influence. There have been other people along the way as well. It sounds really as if I've only been influenced by McGuinness. But in fact, there are people like Keith Stanovich, a Canadian researcher, who still stands out as one of the absolute greats and I think that he's nothing like as read as he should be. But then there are people like Connie Juel and Isabel Beck. In fact, they published a paper in 1992, this is going back now 40 years, is it 40 years, 30 years, maybe. It was called 'The Role of Decoding In Learning to Read'. It's an absolutely brilliant piece and it's readily available to download online. So many researchers who produce great work in this area are from North America, or were from North America, and it's amazing, really, that their ideas haven't been taken up as well as they might have been. Of course, that's starting to be rectified now, but for many years their work was neglected. I think, on the subject of cognitive psychology, I'd also like to mention that there have been many powerful influences on our work, too. So the Dutch cognitive psychologist Paul Kirschner has been very influential. John Sweller from Australia who first formulated cognitive load theory, and the evolutionary psychologist David Geary are other people who've had an enormous influence on us as well. And I do want to give a shout out as well, because, of course, you've got to keep reading all the time. You've got to keep up with the debate, you've got to keep up with the research. And at a more practical level, I've recently been reading a chap called Bruce Robertson's three books, the Teaching Delusion, and he's produced three of those books, 1, 2 and 3, and I think they align perfectly with our approach in Sounds-Write, and I'd like to heartily recommend them now. Finally, you did ask me about one book, I'm really sorry to go on like this, but I would like to also mention the fantastic work done by Pie Corbett and his team and the work that they've done on writing over the years. Absolutely great stuff.

Laura:  18:24
Great. Thank you. We'll have to write up a little John Walker's suggested reading, and especially I'll put a link to 'The Teaching Delusion' because everyone on the Sounds-Write team, if I've heard anything in the past month or two, it's been everyone talk about how much they love 'The Teaching Delusion'. So, yeah, fantastic, thank you for that.

John:  18:51
No, it's all right. Good. Yes, I hope people will get hold of a copy and read those books.

Laura:  18:57
Yeah. So, you talked earlier about some of the instances in which you kind of wish you had known all of this sooner and you wish you could have had an impact on children's lives sooner. On the flip side, Sounds-Write has made a huge difference to a lot of children's lives. Is there a particular classroom moment that stands out in a positive way for being particularly special?

John:  19:24
Yeah, it's difficult when you've been at it for so long and there are so many different examples. I think one of the things that amused me very much, actually, was that we had a school in Wigan and they were following the Sounds-Write approach for quite a number of years. Until, so, from 2003 until the time, more or less, when Letters and Sounds came out. They decided, because it was free of charge, they decided to switch. They were told, this is the best thing since sliced bread and you've got to switch. Well, anyway, they did switch to Letters and Sounds, and I might add, actually, that their reading and spelling results over the next two, three, four years really started to fall off a cliff. This was very interesting for me because the headteacher decided to call us back in and to ask us if we would train some of their new teachers and retrain some of the teachers that had had the training initially, which, of course, we agreed to do. But what I did as well, is I took in a set of all their spelling results that we'd collected and we were very keen on collecting spelling results from the schools, collecting evidence as we went along. And I'd got copies of all their spelling results over the past, over the four or five years that they've been doing Sounds-Write until the time when they switched and adopted something else. And I showed this headteacher what the spelling results were like in Years 3, 4 and 5. Goodness gracious, what a shock she had that I was able to confront her with the evidence. And, of course, she was amazed and very keen, really, to start training her teachers again. And, of course, from that moment, things were on the up and up again. But it also reminds me, too, that people can be very fickle. And the person who really kicked off the reading revolution in her book of that name was the late Jeanne Chall, and she is lionised in America and in many places as well, for the contribution she made. She wrote this book in the 60s called 'The Reading Revolution'. I think it went through two or three reprints after that. But I remember one thing that she did write in her book. She said, in any cohort of people that you train, there are going to be 25% who practise whatever it is that you're rolling out to them with absolute fidelity. As long as, of course, you persuade them that this is the way to go, they'll do it all. 50% of the cohort will do most of it, but they won't be able to resist the temptation to bring in stuff that they've always done and which may, in fact, run counter to what you've suggested to them. And, of course, there are always the 25%, or maybe fewer, I don't know, but something like 25% who won't do it for one reason or another, maybe because they change schools or because they change classrooms or whatever. And I've always found that that's a pretty good sort of marker, really, for how things go. Although I will say that the culture has changed enormously over the last, say, particularly ten years since the science of learning became more available to people.

Laura:  23:10
Fantastic. And on that note, what do you think has been your proudest achievement in the past 20 years of Sounds-Write? If you can name just one.

John:  23:23
Well, at a personal level, I've taught many students on a one-to-one basis. And one of the things I always notice when the parents bring the particular student in to see me and I tell them, I will teach your son or your daughter to read. And there's a look I get, their heads are down usually, they feel very miserable about themselves. These kids who can't read and write, boy, do they feel miserable about themselves. And the head comes up and looks at me as if to say, 'yeah, you and whose army, they've tried it before and it hasn't worked'. And then after just two or three sessions, that head comes up again and the student's eyes, normally they meet mine and it's that magical moment when they realise that they can do it. And that's because, using what we do, we take them from the exact point at which they've broken down and we take them forward from that, so we don't start them off with stuff that they can do easily, so that they're thinking, 'oh, this teacher thinks that I'm stupid or something', but we take them from the point at which they break down, and that is enormously powerful, really. And we take them forward, as I say, and they see that they can do it straight away. To tell you the truth, I believe, really very strongly that if a student can hear, if they can hear, then they can learn to read. But actually, teaching students in the classroom as small groups and as a whole class, is equally fulfilling and equally rewarding. I suppose it's also the moment when you think about what you're training people to do on courses, because it's against students in the classroom that your ideas are tested to the absolute limit. And I think one of the many irritating things I've found over the years has been academics who purport to know about how to teach reading and writing, when actually they haven't been in a classroom for years. And they certainly haven't tested their ideas against the students in the classroom. And they would come up against a brick wall, I'm pretty sure. Yes, in regard to teaching students one-to-one, I'd like to say, actually that I think that I'm very proud to be continuing what I think is Diane McGuinness's legacy. I have an enormous number of people who write to me all the time to say how Sounds-Write has changed the lives of their children. Where their children have been struggling, then it's made such an enormous difference to them and made an enormous difference to their whole attitude towards school. So I think that we have had an enormous influence on both individual parents and carers, all over the world  - I know that our free courses online 'Help your child to read and write', which have been accessed by well over 40,000 people now worldwide, have had some influence - but I know that we've really influenced teachers in the United Kingdom, in Australia, and of course, latterly, just recently, we've begun to have some influence on the United States as well.

Laura:  26:53
And that's what it's all about, isn't it, really, for I think the whole team at Sounds-Write, is having an impact on as many children's lives as we possibly can. We had a strategy meeting recently in which we all discussed what our favourite things about working for Sounds-Write are. And most people said it's fantastic to work somewhere that has this real clear mission that everyone is so passionate about and can get on board with to improve children's futures.

John:  27:28
Yes, that's right. There can't be many places where you work and you realise that the work that you're doing every day is making a huge difference to the lives of children and to young people and even to some adults out there. Yes, I mean, it's very fulfilling, of course.

Laura:  27:46
Yeah. So, we've talked about Sounds-Write's past. What are you most excited about in Sounds-Write's future?

John:  27:55
Well, I think it's a very difficult question, really. You never know which way the wind is going to blow. But I think probably having the opportunity to really extend our influence. And I think also, I think the fact that the culture in regard to the science of learning has changed so much and is still learning. And I think the organisation researchED, run by Tom Bennett has made a fantastic contribution to that. But I do think that teachers all over the English-speaking world, people teaching students to read and write, are beginning to listen to the arguments and they're beginning to change their practice. I think, sadly, it's still the case that in many institutions responsible for training teachers that change is being very, very slow to happen, although there are many senior academics now who are beginning to add their voices to the need for wholesale change in the ways in which we educate children. And one of the foremost I'd like to mention is Professor Pamela Snow at La Trobe University, whom you mentioned before. She's in Australia and she's having an amazing influence on the classroom practise in Australia and beyond. And I hope you're going to put a link in the podcast to her blog, which is absolutely superb.

Laura:  29:30
Yes, I will do.

John:  29:32
Okay, but let me ask you what you are most excited about, Laura?

Laura:  29:39
[laughter] Well, one of the things that I'm most excited about, and I don't know if I should be saying this because actually I think our official announcement date is still a week away, so our marketing manager might be a little annoyed by this, but go on, I'll spoiler it anyway. So, we're currently working on the Sounds-Write Practitioners Portal, which is going to be an online hub for all of our practitioners. They will get access to it for free when they train with Sounds-Write and it's going to have loads of resources, videos, professional development opportunities and ultimately I think it has the potential to grow into a lot more. But I'm really excited about how that is going to provide so much extra support to Sounds-Write practitioners. So that's something that I'm working on and I'm just so excited to be working on that this year.

John:  30:44
I must say, I just can't wait for this to come out. And I know that you've been working on this for some time now and it's going to make an enormous difference, actually, to the practice, I hope, of teachers working in the classroom and tutors working with students. So, I mean, hats off to you. You've done a really great job in this, thank you.

Laura:  31:07
Thank you. We'll have more information to come on that we're hoping to launch it in May, so we'll give you more info in due course.

John:  31:16
You do realise, don't you, that we're going to be absolutely inundated now that you've said that.

Laura:  31:24
Good. So you were a teacher for many, many years as we talked about earlier. What's the one bit of advice you'd give to teachers that want to give their students the best start in life?

John:  31:36
Well, of course, as you'd expect, the most important advice, I think, is teach them to read. Learning to read is not a skill that's acquired naturally. And yet everything that happens in schools, in colleges, in universities, and in the world at large depends on how well we can do that job. Making sure that every student leaves school, being able to read and write, being fully, functionally literate.

Laura:  32:06
Fantastic. Well, on that note, congratulations once again on 20 years of Sounds-Write. I think I was promised cake, and I haven't seen any of that yet.

John:  32:21
[laughter] Right. We'll have to do something about that.

Laura:  32:25
We will, I'm sure. Thank you so much for coming on here again, John. It's been great to speak to you, as it always is.

John:  32:34
Yeah. Thank you again for having me. I really appreciate it, thank you. Thanks, Laura, and bye.

Laura:  32:40
All right. Until next time, bye.

John:  32:42
Bye!