WHY don't some teachers teach pure phonics? And what impact does it have on how teachers are viewed?

[TeenPlusTwenties]

As seen on this board by a current thread (which I decided not to hijack) and another one this week on AIBU, there still seems to be a chunk of current teachers not attempting to teach decoding via phonics but preferring mixed methods (phonics, plus whole words, plus guessing).

Do you think the fact so many teachers are failing to teach phonics properly impacts on how the profession as a whole is viewed?

If the main thing that parents of young children understand is important (reading) is not being taught in the way deemed most effective from research, that is also mandated in the NC, doesn't that undermine trust and respect massively?

I'm trying to think of a good analogy, but in medicine there is NICE which looks at data on effectiveness of medicines and then says what can / can't be used.

Is this because teachers are so overworked they don't read the research? Or are primary teachers not maths-literate enough to understand data, and so prefer their own sample-of-one instead?

Do parents end up 'not trusting' teachers because they can see such a blatant example of not following good practice /not knowing what they are doing

I am a secondary school teacher and also a former research scientist. I am interested in this discussion from the point of view of teachers using research in their teaching. From my own point of view:

1. We were never taught how to review research literature from a statistics or social science aspect - ever, at all. It was not a part of my PGCE. Yet, we are expected to engage with it? And interpret and apply it correctly? That explains why management and teachers can come up with 50 different analyses of the same research. Proper analysis of statistics is pretty specialised subject in itself - not for the lay person with a GCSE in maths.

1. I went to a lecture in which the previously feted (by my school) John Hattie was torn apart as his research (apparently, I can't remember the details) was carried out mostly in the US on adult learners. A quick glance at the literature (e.g., 95% of students do better) isn't sufficient.

1. I don't have time to read the research. I work over 60 hours a week at a very high intensity. I am up-skilling to teach a new subject. I want to spend time with my family. I dedicate my work time to lesson preparation, marking, admin and pastoral. There is NO time to read research that may be useful. Pay my school more, so that I have less teaching time and then I can.

1. Every class is different. Every teacher knows that you can't use exactly the same lesson with two different classes (e.g., two year 9 classes). Therefore, how can research be directly applicable if carried out in a different country/town, with different kids and different factors that may not seem important, e.g., classroom layout, availability of teaching assistants, time of day/week/term?

Basically, when I carried out scientific research, if all factors were kept the same the results should be repeatable. Educational research is a completely different.

As ever, to people who have very specific ideas about teaching, I say: please give it a go and report back after your PGCE, NQT and 2 further years of teaching. Then we can have a more equal discussion. (I am not being glib, but I wouldn't dispute how an accountant does their job just because I spend money).

I'm a teacher and I say it's very much my job to be aware of current research and it's implications.
There's a huge movement where teachers are taking control of their own professional development. Last weekend there were a number of teacher led events. ResearchEd Reading Rocks etc.

https://www.teachermagazine.com.au/articles/learning-to-read-and-explicit-teaching?utmsource=CM&utmmedium=Bulletin&utm_content=May7

I'm a teacher and I say it's very much my job to be aware of current research and it's implications.
There's a huge movement where teachers are taking control of their own professional development. Last weekend there were a number of teacher led events. ResearchEd Reading Rocks etc.

I don't wish to be rude but my job doesn't give me the time to pursue research. Also like I said reading research and using it to inform your teaching are not the same thing.

Is this the latest thing - using evidence-based research to inform classroom practice? Do they give professional development on statistics and analysis or these more buzzwords? I speak as a jaded teacher and trained scientist in a physical science (not involving stats, but awareness of complexity).

No it's been around for decades

Evidence based practice is pretty standard in schools nowadays. Locally we have a research school hub, they organise training both in research methods and evidence based practice. The Education Endowment fund is a common source of research based material, most school improvement projects are based on evidence-based research, local schools run their own research projects and share results through the research school hub. You would be hard pushed NOT to engage in evidence based practice in my area!

Same here.

But if we weren't, I can't imagine settling for this:
'I can't find out how best to teach reading, because I am too busy and some children are always going to struggle, so as long as we hit national standards(82% Y1 phonics, 73% ARE at Y6) that's good enough for me. And Ofsted.'

Surely you don't teach reading, Rosie?

No I don't. Do you? I didn't write that.

See what I mean, though? If you did, would you be happy enough with that excuse? Lots of schools and teachers are. But teaching reading is too important for that to wash.

No it's been around for decades

Not where I trained and worked.

Locally we have a research school hub, they organise training both in research methods and evidence based practice.

Honestly, that sounds great. Although I struggle to see how most teachers will find the time. I know I can't.

As a ta I spent some of a half term researching the best way to teach children to read online - It wasn’t hard to find. The EEF is a good place to start. I also read blogs, borrowed a few up to date books and even rung up a reading expert. At the time I wasn’t convinced that phonics was the best and I was running a non-phonic intervention programme. I was completely convinced by the end of the research. Frankly, if I can do it in a non professional role, with no support at all and on minimum wage, I don’t see why teachers can’t. I was motivated by the fact that I was given these children who couldn’t really read at age 7 and no one seemed to have much of an idea why or what to do with them.

EEF link for phonics:

here

I can't remember whether it was on this or the other thread that the point in the EEF summary about older learners may not necessarily be about phonics being less effctive for these learners, more that the upper KS2 / KS3 teachers involved in teaching these children may be less fully versed / less expert in phonics teaching than those teaching the youngest children in schools.

My school uses the EEF toolkit very actively as a source for evidence / research based practice.

Hmm, while in theory the EEF synthesis of available evidence sounds like a great idea and a boon to time-strapped teachers who haven’t the skills to evaluate the research for themselves (no, teachers, chances are you don’t have the skills to evaluate research findings, nothing to get defensive about, it’s quite a tricky thing to do well).
BUT from knowing how the EEF have misrepresented the research on mixed-ability teaching versus setting, and represented the research in a way that suits an ideological agenda rather than a strictly truthful one, I’m afraid I don’t trust them.

That said, while I have seen criticisms of the evidence an research for growth mindset, Hattie’s effect sizes, learning styles and whatnot all over the place, I’ve not seen any criticisms of the phonics research from the usual suspects - I thought it was case closed on that one.

Can't wait until the obsession with phonics is over.
English is not a phonetic language and the nonsense they come home with, asked to read fake words, it's like someone has made up a funny code for kids.

Thanks Noble, that's a really interesting perspective.

Do you have an article that deconstructs how the EEF represented evidence for setting vs mixed ability? I am adequately maths literate but I'm probably not up to evaluating different primary research papers, so if there were to be a summary article from a reputable peer-reviewed source / journal that would be great!

Anecdotally - you will possibly remember that I teach upper primary, our results have improved MASSIVELY since moving from setting to mixed ability teaching, but of course we did also re-write and re-think the planning at the same time, and it wasn't long after the change in primary curriculum etc etc, so it's not a case of non-setting being the only change.

Funky, what do you mean by 'it's not a phonetic language'?

The only truly non-phonetic languages are those which use pictorial symbols for words.

If you mean 'English has a more complex set of correspondences between phonemes and graphemes than some other languages', I would agree with you. It doesn't make it non-phonetic - sounds (phonemes) ARE represented by graphemes (single letters or groups of letters) in English.

This is a really interesting thread but I'm troubled by the reference to 'from research'. What research are you referring to? Could you be a bit more specific?

Funky, no child who is well-taught phonics needs to practice fake words. If that is what your school is doing, they are not confident in their phonic teaching.

The ONLY purpose of the fake words is to create a series of reasonably short 'test words' for phonic knowledge that HAVE to be decoded rather than 'remembered as wholes', in order for the test to do what it is supposed to - test the child's knowledge of the code and its use to decode words.

A child who is taught phonics well will not need to practice fake words. They can - and should be being asked to - apply their phonic skills every day in decoding carefully-graded phonic texts (ie reading phonic readers carefully matched to their stage of teaching).

(To make that point clearer: if you want to find real words that no child taking the test will have read before, then those words are likely to be very long. It is also hard to use them to test specific phonic sounds because there will be so many in each individual word.

However, if you create a nonsense word, e.g. sgrite, then you can test the child's knowledge of 5 phoneme / grapheme correspondences in a 'controlled' word of only 6 letters.)

so if there were to be a summary article from a reputable peer-reviewed source / journal

Sorry, cant I don’t have a decent summary of the research, but I do have a blog going through where the EEF have ballsed up their analysis.

teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/the-eef-were-even-more-wrong-about-ability-grouping-than-i-realised/

OldAndrew is a pain in the arse and awful to argue with but I’ve no reason to suspect that the errors he states he found with the EEF numbers aren’t true (he has a maths degree too). It seems their approach on that topic was slipshod and not entirely honest. What about the rest of it?

Thanks. We have found that it has not always been possible, in the EEF materials, to disentangle whether the research it is based on is from the primary or secondary phase (and therefore whether applicable to us).

But in a world that gave us Brain Gym, learning styles, Jo Boaler and whoever it is who mandates all that handshaking, who should we turn to for properly peer-researched, robust research summaries, as reading all base research in all areas we teach (as a primary teacher, I teach everything from maths to gymnastics, computing to music, and deal with everything from a snotty nose or show and tell to disclosures of child abuse)?

sorry, pressed post too soon...
'is impossible'

The first ResearchED I ever went to, Dylan Wiliam gave a talk called ‘Why teaching will never be a research-based profession’. He went through just how rubbish social science research can be, and how useless meta-analyses can be when lumping together different trials with different methodology testing different things.

He gave the example of ‘research shows homework isn’t very effective at primary school but more useful at secondary school’. Yet we know that reading with your kid, and getting them to practise their times tables is massively useful, so how did they end up with that conclusion? By lumping in anything that was considered ‘homework’ into a group. You know, your ‘creative’ projects that are done by the parents or very low quality tasks, then damning all homework on that basis. He said the basic conclusion is ‘crap homework is crap’.
The EEF seem to be doing similar. Lumping ‘ability tables in a class’ (primary?) with ‘strict setting’ and ‘streaming’ is just wrong. They’re very different approaches. That’s even before you get to them messing up the numbers.

People want education to be like medicine with clinical trials and rigorous testing. But medicine is massively funded and highly regulated by the FDA and EMA with ethical approval needed, regular audits and so on. So much paperwork and rules to follow. Education is nothing like that.

And Wiliam made the point that in education, everything will work somewhere for someone and not work somewhere else for someone else. A lot can change with the personality of the class, and the personality of the teacher.

I don’t think we should be slaves to research, especially when there’s plenty of dubious research out there (step forward Jo Boaler). I think a teacher thinking ‘does this make sense and does it match with what I observe in my classroom?’ can go a long way.

My DS was taught the old fashioned way, reading every night, bought the Peter and Jane books. As he got older he would read a page and I would read the next. Age 10 he was tested and had a reading age of 16.

Now my grandson 4 is learning phonics so his mum has bought the cards and is working hard to help him using this method. Please do not tell me she and other mums are wasting their time. The school is bilingual so he has less time with English than perhaps children in England have.