In this episode, Claire had the chance to chat to the wonderfully effervescent and inspiring education consultant, Jane Considine, about the teaching of reading and writing in schools, while they were both at the Reading Rocks North conference.

Jane grew up in Birmingham, and despite having a mother who was a teacher, Jane never wanted to follow in her footsteps. In fact, she resisted it quite significantly, instead choosing to embark on a retail management scheme (although her real dream was to put her tap dancing and drama skills to good use as a West End performer!). While in her retail role, she went on to win awards in Customer Service. When she was put in the training department, she realised quite quickly that her heart was in teaching and so enrolled on a teacher training course at Newman Teacher Training College in Birmingham. Even though she got pregnant in her second year at this Catholic establishment, through sheer grit and determination, she earned a first-class honours degree.

After having taught for a while, Jane was offered a job working at a Local Authority level and relocated her family from Birmingham to Northampton, where she became one of the first National Literacy Strategy trainers in the country.

She decided to go freelance after feeling as though the system was too tightly-scripted for all of the things that she wanted to say regarding education, so she branched out on her own and has never looked back. With many educational resources and books to her name, Jane is widely regarded as one of the most influential education consultants in the UK.

In the podcast, Jane speaks candidly with Claire about her background, as well as giving useful tips that teachers can integrate quickly and easily into their classroom practice. Jane hopes that by sharing her expertise, teachers around the country can become more confident in the teaching of reading and writing, thus benefitting the children in their classes.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Recognise the value in nurturing kids’ imaginations.
  Children’s writing is not always going to be what we expect. As teachers, it is vital to understand children’s imaginations and to recognise risk taking in writing and word choices.

• Be brave – if you have things to say, don’t be afraid to say them.
  Because a lot of focus is now on other political issues, people in education are making a stand for what they believe in. If you believe in something, say it! Be real and honest in who you are; embrace your weirdness!

• Be the master of your own jobs list.
  Unfortunately, the jobs list for teachers never ends so you must know when to walk away from it.

• Use the Educational Endowment Foundation to discover real and impactful research.
  Using Google is great, but there can be a lot of information to take in and it’s sometimes hard to know what it relevant. The EEF have done the hard work in terms of research and have filtered what is impactful. This is a good starting point for using research in your school, but you have to live it in your own school and see what works for your children.

• When teaching reading, you’ve got to model the invisible.
  Once you’ve got past decoding, teaching reading is about reading for meaning. To teach children to do this, you have to model the invisible: a way in which you might do this is to stop on a sentence; unpick it; say things like, ‘I think the auhor has used this word because…what does this word suggest?’ and, ‘Is this always the case? I don’t know, but I think…’. By doing this, you are giving the children the tools to read for meaning and articulate their thoughts clearly.

• Use Oscar nominated short animations and Carnegie prize winning books to teach English.
  Using high-quality picture books, novels and films/animations will give children a solid starting point on which to build their own writing.

• The sequence of writing is not always the most important thing.
  If you get the children in your class to be central character writers, you may have less sequence and plot points, but the writing will be much more impactful if they are writing truly empathetically in that character’s shoes.

• Authors write to create a positive or negative effect; get your kids to do the same!
  Authors are usually writing to create a positive or negative effect on their readers. By ensuring children are clear on whether they are writing for a positive or negative effect, they will be able to choose the right grammar and vocabulary to support this.

• Children need to be taught to use words in sentences, not just as standalone vocabulary.
  Sometimes teachers are very focused on introducing new words but do not always provide a context in which they can be used. Building new vocabulary into sentences attaches meaning to it and makes children much more likely to retain it.

• There are just 9 ideas for writing.
  The idea that there are just 9 ideas that can be taught in a systematic way will be appealing to some teachers and pupils. The 9 ideas are: the 5 senses, feelings, actions, speech and thought. Writing is not only about these big ideas, but also about the teaching of grammar for writing and literary techniques such as simile, metaphor, alliteration, onomatopoeia etc.

• Vary the ways in which you teach grammar
  Look at authors and how they write in order to give your children strategies to write in this style. Examples include Terry Pratchett who, instead of saying, ‘the old, tall house,’ would put the adjectives at the end and say, ‘the house stood on the hill, old…tall’, and Cressida Cowell who creates long, beautifully described passages, at the end of which, the readers are hit with a jolt: a short, impactful sentence.

• Twitter is one big staffroom – it’s real and honest.
  Twitter is great for finding real advice from real teachers about a range of subjects.

BEST MOMENTS

“Teaching’s in my life because my mum’s a teacher, my auntie was a teacher, my grand-aunt was a teacher and there was a lot of teacher chat in the house. You’d help your mum out; you’d help with books and marking.”

“I didn’t know I taught in a ‘tons of money’ era; only looking back now. This was an era when all kids had a glue stick. Every term, they had a glue stick. Now I see glue sticks with numbers on because [teachers] have got to count them back in.”

“I don’t care what anybody says about the [National Literacy] Strategy…it was a structure that we had never had before in teaching. I’m not talking about content-heavy national curriculum; I’m talking about real research-led, evidence-based discussion.”

“You try and come to me and tell me there’s a better document than Grammar for Writing: there isn’t…what I don’t know about what’s been written about education through history of time…I make it my business to know. I read everything. I read everyone’s books. I am research-informed, but I’m not stupid. You’ll catch me live in a classroom, saying, ‘That’s what the research says…shall we live it? Shall we feel it? Shall we breathe it, kids?’”

“Kids’ imaginations are really quite disappointing because they are drenched in Fortnite and they have got guns in them and axes and lots of blood and guts…because they’re a bit disappointing, we don’t nurture them and help them flourish… “[We’ve got to] start with what they care about and then take them to new places.”

“Kids’ ideas are more remarkable than adults’ and we’ve got to notice when they’re breaking into those risk-taking word choices. That’s where the magic happens.”

“I knew I had things to say, and I didn’t want to be told what to say, and that was really important to me. I pride myself on being truthful and real and honest. I will tell it straight and I mean it. Those are the principles I stick by.”

“It’s good to rattle at people’s thinking and when you do that, it can be a bit uncomfortable.”

“The minute OFSTED say, ‘We care about knowledge-rich curriculums,’ that’s a tidal wave. That one small comment, that is a tsunami. The impact…this is what OFSTED have got to start realising…the things that seem not that important, or just a passing comment. The impact…I know a lot of teachers who lost their summer holidays building knowledge organisers, sharing knowledge organisers, because these things have such a huge impact. Enormous…a tsunami of impact back in school…it’s a flippant comment.”

“Teachers are good guys; we are morally good guys… we’re not doing things for OFSTED, we’re doing things for children of course, but everything we’ve got to take on, it’s a lot of interfacing between National Curriculum, research, OFSTED messages; there’s so much to consider and that’s the toughest thing about teaching and of course, the job list never ends.”

“Sometimes small schools feel like an easier option, but everything’s compounded and magnified and then you’re trying to do 4 jobs. That’s like mind-blowing, brain-explode stuff…tough.”

“The heart of the matter in reading, is to read for meaning. There is nothing else that needs to be done. Once you’re over the decoding hurdle, the whole point of reading is to read for meaning. Within that, how do we show children how to read for meaning? We have to show them our reading brain, but we can’t show them, so we have to start articulating the invisible and make it visible.”

“Authors are broadly writing to create positive or negative effects… If I ask kids to describe a storm, and I don’t tell them if it’s a positive or a negative storm, half of the words are not right. Half of it’s wasted. I’ve got to tell the kids: this is a positive storm; the farmer has been waiting for this storm for weeks; this is the farmer’s story; this is his plot… and so essentially, once we know it’s a positive storm, we can get words on the right side of the street.”

“Kids need to be taught that it’s about driving words into sentences because that’s where meaning is yielded… it’s alright collecting words, but sentences is where it’s at!”

“In the Write Stuff, you get a structural system that is going to prop you up when the stress is on… It can be applied to any picture book, any novel, any film. It’s a structural view… It talks about the teaching of sentences, the cruciality of sentences and it talks about teaching kids structures to help them with the ideas of writing.”

“You’re not going to find anyone who cares about reading and writing more than me… not only do I care about it, I live it, I breathe it, I teach it.”

“This is about me empowering teachers to show them a clear pathway to be better reading and writing teachers and I truly can help people with that.”

“You know what teachers say? They want more time. Do you know what kids say? Do you know what kids want more of? More time. Do you know what everyone wants? More time… time is the most precious commodity of all.”

“The truth it, where [education] needs to go and where it is going are aligning and where it needs to go, is to a real and honest place.”

“The smallest of things can make the biggest difference.”

VALUABLE RESOURCES

Jane Considine:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JaneConsidineEducation/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/janeconsidineLinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/jane-considine-b2b4113a
URL: https://www.thetrainingspace.co.uk/
The Write Stuff: https://www.thetrainingspace.co.uk/product/write-stuff/
Hooked on Books: https://www.thetrainingspace.co.uk/product/hooked-on-books/#The Spelling Bee Programme: https://www.thetrainingspace.co.uk/product/spelling-bee-programme-complete/
Carnegie Prize: https://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/
Oscar Nominated Short Films: https://oscar.go.com/nominees/short-film-animated

The Teachers’ Podcast: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheTeachersPodcast/
Classroom Secrets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClassroomSecretsLimited/
Classroom Secrets website: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/
LIFE/work balance campaign: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/lifeworkbalance-and-wellbeing-in-education-campaign-2019/

ABOUT THE HOST
Claire Riley

Claire, alongside her husband Ed, is one of the directors of Classroom Secrets, a company she founded in 2013 and which provides outstanding differentiated resources for teachers, schools, parents and tutors worldwide.

Having worked for a number of years as a teacher in both Primary and Secondary education, and experiencing first-hand the difficulties teachers were facing finding appropriate high-quality resources for their lessons, Claire created Classroom Secrets with the aim of helping reduce the workload for all school staff.

Claire is a passionate believer in a LIFE/work balance for those who work in education citing the high percentage of teachers who leave or plan to leave their jobs each year. Since February 2019, Classroom Secrets has been running their LIFE/work balance campaign to highlight this concerning trend.

The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education.