The Messy Middle.

 Last week I wrote a long post about Language-Learning and the arguments between Knowledge and Skills. I looked at the lovely idea that Skills are not just a result of some people being "skillful". Their skills can be broken down into steps (knowledge and concepts) that can be taught explicitly to all pupils. These steps can be practised until pupils are fluent in them and become "skillful".

This lovely and useful idea has been taken up by the Knowledge Rich Curriculum project and broken. Instead of focusing on analysing and then building up skills, they have taken a different starting point. They started from Knowledge. From the expert's overall view of how the complete system works and can be conceptualised. Instead of breaking down the Skills into Knowledge, they have broken down Knowledge. And then concentrated on force feeding the Knowledge to pupils. And they haven't even been surprised that this doesn't add up to acquiring Skills. Because they have forgotten that part entirely. Or maybe they were never actually interested in it at all.

This post is now going to be much shorter and sweeter. And from now on, entirely focused on Language-Learning.

In fact, here's the whole post in one table:

Where do you see yourself and your teaching for each of these aspects?

In Language-Teaching, the Knowledge/Skills debate is also framed around Learning/Acquisition. You will remember from my post last week, that I am not in favour of neat binary extremes. It turns out lots of the "Research Based" ideology is about judging conformity to an idea of how learning should be. Not looking at the reality of learning in the classroom.

I have tried to look at different aspects of language-learning and find "The Messy Middle" for each of them.

This is how I try to teach. In every case it's messy, it's real, and it's focused on the learners. It builds up their knowledge and their skills in tandem. I monitor their knowledge through what they can do with the language. And I deliver the knowledge that they need in order to do more with their language. I work on the increasing independence, accuracy, fluency and coherence with which they can deploy their language.

Instead of splitting into camps and looking for simplistic doctrines and magic pyramids, can we start to get stuck into the Messy Middle? That's the question I posed in the following snippet right at the start of my previous post. Let's enjoy the Messy Middle. This is us:

Nitty Gritty Teaching

 Time to reflect on some of the things we put in place in the light of the Ofsted "Research Review". One idea was that we had been pulling the wrong levers in order to engage young people with learning languages. We always thought that communication, meaning, interesting content, culture and authentic material would engage. Whereas grammar and accuracy would confuse, frustrate and demotivate.

We were asked to think about this the other way round.

What if our focus on communication and culture put cognitive demands on pupils that pushed language learning further out of reach? What if authentic texts were full of little words and grammar that we told the pupils to gloss over in search of meaning from context, leaving pupils frustrated and confused that no-one ever told them what all the little words meant? What if we taught them whole phrases without telling them what the individual words meant and how the grammar worked? Was this the true obstacle to making language-learning accessible?

One thing we brought in was our Fluent in 5 lesson starters. At first to recycle language from previous units, but then increasingly in order to focus on the little words that we might skip over.

The lesson starters were a first step to all teachers tweaking the focus away from the "big words" of topic content, to the "little words" that make sentences work in all topics.

So this is where I find myself with Year 7. All year we have come at it from both angles. We learned "je n'ai pas de" by looking at how Mr Apostrophe ate the e of je and ne. But we also chanted it to a video of a steam train puffing up a hill:  "je n'ai pas de  je n'ai pas de  je n'ai pas de  je n'ai pas de."

And now we are doing rooms in the house. They have learned the rooms using dual coding. They learned the furniture by watching a house tour video in French. And we are focusing on recycling all the words we have done in Year 7 like il y a, j'ai, nous avons, est... All seems to be going well.

Then I got to this exercise in the booklet:

You can see what it is trying to do. It is giving the pupils the "big words" and asking them to focus on the "little words."

Of course it didn't work. Firstly, most pupils just read the English sentences and put in the words they thought made most sense: a bed, my desk... Not a problem. We often talk about the idea of getting things wrong and then sorting it out, and how powerful this is in learning. Because you remember your mistakes. And because you focused on the detail.

So next step was to ask the pupils to circle in the French the exact words that were meant to go in the gaps. They could do this. We checked the difference between un/une/le/la/des. Here we started to find the problem. The pupils who knew it, knew it perfectly and easily. The pupils who didn't know it, knew the concept and knew they were supposed to know it. But they just didn't care. They were not interested.

I'm not sure what to say to them about it. When I was learning French, getting un/une right mattered so much that when I went to France on my own, I ordered two of everything I bought, rather than get it wrong. Or I avoided saying things. I'm not entirely sure that was a good thing. With my own pupils, I have seen that the time masculine/feminine really starts to matter is when the exchange pupils are here, and all of a sudden it's important to get the gender right when telling a boy what you think of him!

Here's the next exercise in the booklet:

Pupils can see it is to help them describe their house. They can see that it's helping reinforce different verb constructions so their sentences aren't repeating il y a all the time. They can see it's testing if they can spell the words they have learned or if not, to know to check the spelling.

Do they see it as an invitation to express themselves and talk about a real or imaginary house? 

Or do they see it as a grammatical exercise checking if they correctly use le/la/les/un/une/des?

How can we balance these two? Pupils tend to see it as an invitation to communicate. To think about their house, think of the French words, and build the sentence. And I don't think we would want it to be the other way round. A pupil who isn't fussed about what they are saying, but knows they have to get un/une/le/la correct. I don't seem to have a lot of those pupils in my class. And I think that's probably alright. As a teacher, I need to make sure they know how to use the right articles. And I will slowly try to encourage them to see the importance of using the right one. I don't want to make it something that becomes an obstacle, where a pupil panics so much about picking the article, that they lose their focus on communicating. But there seems very little risk of this. The pupils who get it have no problem with it. And the other pupils just aren't bothered.

I'm not sure where this leaves the idea that we were frustrating pupils by not focusing enough on these words. It's not turning out to be a magic bullet. And the answer seems to lie in the middle ground between the two extremes. Which sums up most educational debates! 

Planning the new GCSE: The Vision

An audio podcast summary of this post created by notebook LM AI is available here https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/b5b305aa-6a70-472b-8dec-fedae45e7588/audio May take a minute to load.

 As I start to plan and resource the new GCSE, my vision is this:

A lovely snowball of French. The pupils' French is compacted together into a big ball. It won't melt. It can roll around between topics. More and more French will stick to it. It belongs to them, and they can have fun with it.

I don't want an even covering. An even covering looks pretty, but you come back next lesson and your French has all melted.

Are textbooks good at building a snowball? Or are they designed to create an even covering? What if they cover everything once, ticking it off on a contents page? What if the language in one topic doesn't transfer to another?

In my teaching I want to recycle the same core of language in every unit. I want as much time as possible for the pupils to get good at using that core of language.  I want it to be the language they need in order to perform the exam tasks and to meet the exam criteria. And I want it to be of GCSE standard from the start.

There are plenty of other posts on this blog about the core of language I want my pupils to be confident using on any topic. Here's some examples of work - you can see the same language in every case.

Holidays

School

Shopping

So the first thing I am going to do is to write a Speaking/Writing booklet pulling together pupils' core repertoire from KS3, and using it across the exam topics. It will have GCSE tasks from the Speaking Exam and the Writing Exam. And it will show pupils, even before they start the course or open the textbook, that they have the French they need to tackle the tasks.

The message will be:

• You have the French. You need to get good at using it.
• You can do the exam. You may not be able to say exactly what you want to say. We will work on that.
• You can do the exam. You may not be getting the grade you want yet. We will work on that.
• You have a snowball of French. Don't let it melt, and more French will stick to it.

Then we will start the book.

I am not entirely sure we will work through the book in order.

Some topics are very similar and are a great opportunity for pupils to practise using their core of language and to practise transferring it across topics: Free Time, Holidays, House, Town and Region, School. As in the examples of work above, I want pupils to be able to deploy their language confidently on any of these topics.

Then topics like Jobs, the Environment, and Technology are slightly less familiar but use more or less the same core language. Pupils can still talk about what they want to do, can do, should do, hope to do, plan to do, usually do... Once they have the snowball of French from the familiar topics, the French from these topics will stick to it.

What topics are left? The ones which are less First Person. Both grammatically and in terms of content. Celebrities, and Culture. We will deliberately tackle the ways in which the language for these topics can be made to stick onto the same snowball. Not to form a separate snowball.

And then there's Self, Relationships, Family. Possibly the most melty topic. Irregular verbs, adjectival agreement. Ser and estar. Short descriptions that don't develop into the same sort of narrative answer. I would want to think about delaying this topic until the snowball is big enough for it to just stick. If it was the first topic, I would be afraid it wouldn't form a strong enough core. I will look very carefully at the role of description in the exams. There are a greater proportion of adjectives on the list than previously. And the sample role play questions (AQA) do ask for a description of someone.

But a short simple description is something I would want to pop into every unit, so it fuses. Rather than trying to build a whole unit out of short descriptions that have nothing to stick to. Reminds me of the rainy day on holiday when I tried to make a man and a dog out of wotsits. If you make the ends wet you can fuse them. But they have no structural integrity and when they dry out they all fall apart. Probably have a photo somewhere.

So I am thinking of re-ordering, combining or revisiting topics. With booklets that sit alongside the textbooks. I am going to deliberately rewrite variations on texts in the book, re-versioning them for a different topic. This will highlight the words that get kept across topics, and make sure they are deliberately revisited.

And in these booklets, I will want to tackle more of the things that perhaps a book can't do well. Things like Unexpected Questions. In the current GCSE there is one unexpected question in the Role Play. And if pupils say a random thing they may or may not get lucky. I have a fantastic example to share from this year once the exam results are all out. In the new GCSE there are 4 of this type of questions. And pupils have to think about giving a developed answer to them. This isn't going to happen without work.

Here are sample unexpected questions (AQA):

The pupil won't see these questions. They will hear them from the examiner. They have to process the question and give a developed answer immediately. What I am doing, is writing texts based on these questions.

We can work on the texts. Maybe for reading aloud or for comprehension, or as model texts. Then I will fire the unexpected questions at the pupils. They will have to process the question. And then the answer is located in the text. They can read it. So the focus is on processing the question. Then we can move on to the pupils giving their own version of the answer.

This kind of work on questions can be done across topics, including coming back to texts we saw in class in previous units. Or we could use texts from the coursebook, that we come back to in later lessons and the pupils have to answer quick fire questions using the text in the same way.

And the last thing that was worrying me was the pupils' snowball of homework vocabulary learning. It will need to:

• Revise words seen in lessons.
• Prepare them for the next lessons.
• Revisit words from previous units.
• Consolidate topic and non topic vocabulary and the highest frequency vocabulary that is in every topic.
• Practise the core repertoire.
• Cover the vocabulary list.

 But it's not worried me before, so I'm going to stop worrying about it now. If I can plan enough revisiting, recycling and crossing over of topics, then when I put together the vocabulary learning for each week, then it should all be taken care of. In a nice big snowball.

Language Teaching: Building knowledge into Skills

 Where does MFL sit in the current debate about knowledge and skills? We could be the perfect subject to see this play out and explore the rich and fruitful interplay of memory, conceptualisation, accuracy, fluency, expression, and creativity.

There is a lovely idea that skills can be broken down into knowledge. What appears to be a skill is in fact the accumulation and fluent practice of lots of bits of knowledge that can be learned. It's NOT that some people are magically "skillful" or "talented" with some ability that others can't attain. It's that they have learned and practised things that mean their knowledge can be deployed with fluency, confidence and... skill.

It's another way of expressing the idea of "growth mindset." When I was at school, the mindset was one of "talent." Some people were "good" at things and some people just weren't. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where a small headstart meant some people went on to excel. And other people gave up or saw themselves as doomed to failure. We've all experienced this narrative of talent (or lack of talent) whether it be in drawing, sport, music, maths, or languages. Growth mindset is the opposite of this. Find out what it is that the "talented" people are doing and practise doing it, in the confidence that you too can learn.

The "skills = knowledge you can learn" argument is currently in vogue, just as people are starting to sneer at the growth mindset. Which is odd. Because it's basically the same idea. I suppose it's a recognition that if we are serious about this, it needs real work and analysis of breaking skills down into micro skills, and won't just happen because of a mindset.

As an amusing aside, we can see how the "knowledge" fad is closely related to other previous fads which are now ridiculed. We used to be exhorted to look at Bloom's taxonomy as a nice pyramid and to beware of only teaching on the lower rungs (memorisation of knowledge) and to try to bring in more "higher order thinking." The knowledge fad is basically the Bloom's pyramid, but this time the exhortation is to spend more time on the lower rungs, working on memorisation. But it's still the same pyramid. It's the use of a neat diagram used to try to pretend teaching is neat and tidy. That knowledge and thinking and creativity can be separated out. 

Or the ridiculous "Learning Pyramid" showing that "You remember 5% of what you are told, 10% of what you read..." With its risible 5% increments, its familiar pyramidal structure and again with its neat segregation of learning. Rightly denounced by everyone. Except of course, it's exactly what the knowledge fad is promoting. They've turned it upside down and reversed the percentages so that being lectured is the most important and experiential discovery is the least effective. But it's still the same pyramid with all its neat simplified hierarchy. 

And VAK learning styles. Learning styles only makes any sense at all if you are approaching from a knowledge perspective. Pupils self diagnose as weak at reading or auditory processing in a dubious test. Only if the teacher sees learning as the inculcation of important knowledge, would they then swerve those areas of perceived weakness (rather than seeking to develop them), in order to get the knowledge across. 

This is because the lovely idea that skills can be broken down into knowledge has been bowdlerised. In fact that's the bowdlerisation right there in that sentence. "Skills can be broken down into knowledge" is only half the deal. The full idea is: Skills can be broken down into knowledge, and that knowledge enables us to successfully and deliberately build up skills. With the second half being the most important: That knowledge enables us to successfully and deliberately build up skills.

And in the toxic mutation that we are seeing, it's that second half which is being neglected.

I will get on to Languages teaching, I promise, and I'm sure you can see that the idea of "knowledge enables us to build up skills" is a perfect fit for what we do.

It goes beyond bowdlerisation. There are toxic mutations. The idea that skills can be broken down into knowledge has been hijacked by the "Knowledge Curriculum" right wing political fad. You hear assertions such as "You can't think without knowledge" advanced to try to separate out memorisation first and thinking maybe later. Knowledge first. Skills... maybe later. Knowledge first, creativity maybe later. The problem with maybe later is that maybe it's always postponed. Clearly this is a problem because it stunts learning and curtails the paradigm of skills broken down into knowledge so it can be built back into skills. I'll come back to this. But first more toxic mutations.

This idea that you can't think, critique, create until a later stage has been corrupted by the right wing knowledge project in its view of children. There is a philosophy that education is about rescuing children from their ignorance, deplorable communities and degenerate behaviour. There are schools where compliance, conformity, repetition, rote-learning are pushed to exaggerated extremes. Learning is dictated, with an emphasis on authority and "the voices of the best."

The idea that pupils can develop their ability to express themselves, be creative, hear voices like their own, have agency and be empowered, is scorned.

This is all presented as the key to entry into the workforce and escape from deprivation and depravity.

Fortunately this deficit model is limited to a small number of schools. But worryingly, we are in a system of competition and targets where this view of education is incentivised and rewarded and seen as successful.

This political Knowledge Curriculum project likes to hide behind the cognitive science. But it's not the same thing. The Knowledge Curriculum is about what pupils "should be taught." It's political, not educational. And it is not ultimately compatible with the cognitive science. The cognitive science tells us that thinking and memorisation as aspects of learning, cannot be separated.

The mantra of knowledge first, thinking later, is bogus.

We learn by thinking about things. We fit new knowledge into the schemata we already have. Or we alter our schemata in the light of new knowledge. This is fundamental to the "science of learning." It's also born out by what we see. Those pupils who have the confidence to question, to make links, to think of implications, contradictions, associations and even personal leaps of imagination, are the ones who learn best. I'll say it again: the mantra of knowledge first, thinking later, is bogus.

It's the same as the other bogus fads. The Bloom's triangle, the Learning Pyramid. It's a simplistic neat answer by selecting one facet and rejecting the others. Instead of getting stuck in to examine the overlap, the feedback loops, the integration, the reality. It likes to say it's research based. But the "research" is about conforming to a neat model of learning. Not research on the reality of learning. It's an abdication of research. It's reaching for easy clear-cut answers. It is the Nigel Farage of the education debate.

And Languages is a great area to see where the ultimate problem lies.

The foundation of all this mistaken approach, is the way the Knowledge fad sees schemata. The network of knowledge and concepts that pupils are forming. The Knowledge fad thinks that it is transferring the intact conceptual framework along with the knowledge. That well presented diagrams and carefully sequenced teaching will transfer the network of logical links and patterns along with the knowledge. It thinks that the expert who is in possession of a conceptualisation of the whole system, can break it down into neat logical chunks and feed it into the brain of the pupil as if you are programming a robot. (Except we know that even with programming AI robots, you don't do it this way.)

This is familiar territory for us in Languages. This is the Scott Thornbury omelette idea.

Scott Thornbury talks about the synthetic grammar teaching approach that Ofsted were pushing in their "Research Review" and webinars, where someone has chopped up the linguist's overview of the grammar of the language into what seems like logical and organised pieces. He says it is as if you were to show pupils how to create an omelette by taking a cold dead omelette and chopping it into bits. Then you give it to the pupils and ask them to put it back together again. That's not how you make an omelette. You make an omelette from raw ingredients. And you cook them. It's messy, it's different in every case, it's a process.

What if chopping up the Knowledge is not the same as analysing the skills and building them up? What if chopping up the knowledge is just chopping up the knowledge?

So with language learning, it's not the linguist's model of the chopped up grammar that matters. It's what is coalescing in the learner's mind.

And what is going on in the learner's mind is not neat. Or complete. Pupils' conceptualisation of the language is partial, messy, personal, and includes misconceptions and random associations. It's a process of making patterns, extrapolations and assumptions, making links, (mis)understanding rules. Constantly evolving, and beyond the direct control or conscious knowledge of the teacher or the pupil.

This is what teaching is. Working with pupils and their evolving understanding. Of course well sequenced planning and clear explanation is important. But the sequencing is the process of growing what the pupil understands and can do. It's not the prearranged sequencing of chopping up the expert's overview into what they imagine should be logical from their position.

Chopping up the Knowledge is not the same as analysing the skills and building them up. Chopping up the knowledge is just chopping up the knowledge.

You're not following a neat foolproof recipe. When you make a roux, your attention is on what's happening in the pan. Stirring, adjusting the heat, adding more liquid as required. Don't keep looking at the recipe or throwing in the amount of liquid it stipulates. Keep your eyes on what's happening in the classroom. That's why having a lovely coloured triangle with percentages or a magic bullet simple pseudo science theory is limited. And what we really should be researching is the reality. How thinking and memory combine. How skills and knowledge inter-relate.

I think I've made my point there. I had some ideas about what that means in my experience of language teaching to include. I will look at them in a later post. I'm running out of space here, but I'll sketch them out because the point of this post is to say it's the reality that matters:

• It's always been my mantra that "It's not about learning more language. It's about getting good at using what you know." This is what ex pupils always identify as the key insight they got from my teaching.
• Try to make pupils' partial stock of language a working repertoire they can deploy. Rather than bits of a plane that will only fly once they eventually have the whole kit.
• Define grammar as the kit of language that can be deployed to generate meaning. Not an abstract set of intellectual rules.
• Use metaphor for metacognition so that pupils understand they are accumulating a compact snowball of language. They mustn't let it melt, and more will stick to it.
• Encouraging pupils to use their partial interlanguage to express themselves, understanding that the more they take risks, there will be mistakes. But that's how learning works.
• Understanding that we have to work on thinking up what to say, making it more coherent, more developed, personal, spontaneous. This is as important as learning more language.
• Teaching routines and strategies that pupils can deploy, so that their knowledge is built up into skillful performance and used creatively.
• Constant monitoring of the balance of explicit and inductive conceptualisation and deployment of rules.
• Seeing that it is in using the language that pupils create the links and articulations of their knowledge, explore its limits and possibilities.

If you are familiar with how I teach or with posts on this blog, you will see that this is what I have spent the last 30 years developing. Teaching that engages with where the pupils are. A sequencing of language that creates a living, working repertoire that can be deployed and which will grow.

A Year 8 French group who are really on the ball

 A scientific hypothesis has to be tested against reality. And the biggest test is whether it can be used to predict outcomes. Not just to test its validity but for it to be useful, creative and to contribute to a better world. A similar thing can happen with metacognition. Our understanding of the learning process and how we share that understanding with pupils. One of the best ways to do this is through a metaphor. (Spoiler. All theories of cognition rely on metaphor.) A robust metaphor isn't just a description of a concept. It can guide thinking and be extended to knew knowledge and how it is deployed.

I have written before about metaphors which can unlock the language-learning process for pupils. This post is going to look at how the Football Game Plan metaphor for learning to develop extended answers has gone down with my Year 8 class. And importantly, how a tried and tested metaphor took a new twist. A new twist that meant what they were learning fell into place and transformed a piece of knowledge into a new skill they could deploy.

I had already shown them the overall GCSE speaking/writing game plan so they could see how their learning fitted into the overall picture. Here's a Spanish version of the game plan.

You can see there is a defensive half, where pupils have to be able to play out from the back, moving the ball around with confidence. And the attacking half, where pupils can take risks, show off some fancy moves and try to score some goals.

My Year 8 are totally in control in the defensive half.

There's no need to take risks. They can talk all day if necessary without giving the ball away: I like... because I can... but I don't like... if I have to... because I love... and if... then I can... but if... then I prefer... but I don't like... because I can't... and I have to... so if... then I prefer...

Just about all of the girls and most of the boys in my Year 8 class are very keen on football. So it's a nice metaphor to use. There are a few who aren't as obsessed with football, but if they learn a bit about the modern game through their French lessons, then that's all valuable knowledge.

It gives them key tactics - Note the one-two with the if sentences. If it is sunny then I like to go to the beach... but if it rains, I prefer to go to the pool. But it also shapes their attitudes to learning French - Well drilled skills, quick thinking, decision making, control and risk taking.

But this term, it's really clicked with this group. And it's taken care of an element that isn't in the original game plan, and made it work in a way it wouldn't otherwise. I'm talking about conjugated verbs.

You'll notice the preponderance of 1st person verb + infinitive forms in the game plan. My Year 8 French group have been working on er verbs in the present tense. This doesn't fit with the game plan. It's something they learn, but not something they deploy readily enough.

Here's what happened.

We are building a model answer together on the board.

Every pupil in the class will automatically know to pass the ball and move into space with because I can or especially if... Just like this:

What we have here, is a new opportunity. If you mention someone else (in this case mes amis), then that is when you have the chance to use your conjugated verb.

I like to teach pupils this as a rule or as a trigger. When you mention someone else, always follow it up with using a conjugated verb. If you say with my brother... then you can say he... or we... And some pupils get it. But with this Year 8 class, this is where the football metaphor kicked in. With an idea that just clicked and meant the pupils really went for it.

I used the words they will have heard time and time again from their football coach, or seen pundits show in TV analysis: When you mention another person, "even before you receive the ball, you get your head up, have a look, and see what your options are."

You can see how pupils now look at the arrows on the whiteboard in a different way. Instead of being some confusing French words that don't mean much, it's now a range of options for them to pick from as part of a quick decision-making process where they need to be on the ball.

The only thing was. When they started to use it for themselves, it turned out the verb they really needed in the present tense was aller. 

Which is lucky. Because that's exactly what's next in the plan!