Ep 27. Using evidence in education with Pamela Snow

[00:00:00] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk and Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor, and your host. 

 

You are listening to episode 27 of Chalk and Talk. My guest in this episode is Dr. Pamela Snow. She is a cognitive psychology professor in the School of Education at La Trobe University in Australia, renowned for her expertise in language and literacy instruction. My podcast generally focuses on math instruction, but as we heard in episode 20, there are some parallels with reading.

 

Pamela co-established the Science of Language and Reading Lab at La Trobe, which helps schools adopt well-established scientific approaches to improve how they teach children to read. I was really excited to talk to her about that, and I wonder if something similar could be established for math. Pamela demonstrates unwavering integrity.

 

She sees school as a health intervention and effective language and reading instruction as a social justice issue. I would say the same is true for math. We cover a range of topics, including evidence-based approaches for teaching reading, the golden mean fallacy, foundational skills in reading and math, whether programs like the one at La Trobe might start emerging in other universities, and a whole lot more.

 

I admire her passion and the amazing work she's doing in Australia and globally, advocating for using evidence in education. I hope you love this episode. Now, without further ado, let's get started.

 

I am honoured to be joined by Dr. Pamela Snow today, and she is joining me from Australia. She is a professor of cognitive psychology in the School of Education at La Trobe University. She is a registered psychologist and a qualified speech-language pathologist. She has previously worked in public health research, and she holds a Ph.D. on Acquired Brain Injuries from Trobe University. 

 

She has over 200 research publications, with many on language and literacy instruction. She translates language and literacy instruction and support research for a general audience on her blog, The Snow Report. She has been a vocal critic of pseudoscientific approaches to early reading instruction.

 

In 2017, she co-authored a book for parents, teachers, and clinicians called Making Sense of Interventions for Children's Developmental Disorders: A Guide for Parents and Professionals. In 2020, she co-established with Professor Tanya Serry the Science of Language and Reading or SOLAR Lab in the School of Education at La Trobe University, which I imagine is pretty unique.

 

And I'm really excited to hear more about all this today. Welcome Pam, welcome to my podcast.

 

[00:03:18] Pamela Snow: Thank you so much for having me, Anna. It's a delight to be here.

 

[00:03:22] Anna Stokke: I understand that your career trajectory has changed over the years. So, you started out in speech pathology and then moved into public health. But how did you end up doing research in language and literacy instruction?

 

[00:03:36] Pamela Snow: You're right. I started in speech-language pathology. I did my Ph.D. under two neuropsychologists. On acquired brain injury and I worked in acquired brain injury as a clinician for 11 years, which was an incredible experience in itself, but continues to inform my knowledge of cognition and how we think about cognition and information processing retrieval practice.

 

After my Ph.D., I had to make some decisions about what I wanted to do. And in a nutshell, my decision was that I wanted to broaden my knowledge base and my skills and I was fortunate to be appointed into a research fellow role.

 

It was a conduit appointment between the School of Psychology at Deakin University and the Australian Drug Foundation. Now, I think they were really courageous in appointing me and maybe I was courageous in taking the position, but that opened doors for me to thinking about public health policy, and I started reconsidering my own discipline of speech pathology, which I felt was way too focused on individuals and didn't think enough at a population level. 

 

And I started to publish along those lines and tried to refocus, reorient speech pathology to have a position at the policy table at the population health level. But in that role I started reading about risk and protective factors in child and adolescent mental health because I was doing research on drug and alcohol prevention and education in schools.

 

What really struck me was the literature on adolescent mental health and risk and protective factors. So and I remember being struck by the fact that on a particular table that I was looking at in an article, there was a list of risk factors for adverse mental health problems and a list of protective factors.

 

And at or near the top of the list of risk factors was academic struggle and poor academic achievement, and at or close to the top of a list of protective factors was academic success, you know, the flip side of that. So that really got me thinking about the role of academic achievement in students' well-being.

 

And we're in my speech pathology hat that I started to think, well, you know, what, what is it that promotes academic achievement? Well, you can't achieve academically if you're not reading and writing proficiently, if you're not on grade level in those skills. So why aren't we thinking about those things as a public health intervention?

 

You know, what, why, why are we not thinking about this as something that's beneficial, essential to all children? That, you know, going to school, in a sense, is a public health intervention? Some children start further ahead than others by virtue of their preschool experiences, their home environments, and so forth.

 

But really school is a lever, or education is a lever that we can pull. There are a lot of levers that we can't pull very effectively, you know, when it comes to what's going on in children's home environments and so forth. But we really can pull this lever, and why are we not pulling it more effectively?

 

So that led me then to a couple of decades of research on young people in the youth justice system, young people in child protection, out-of-home care, and in alternative flexible education systems. So. In a sense, metaphorically, I parked myself down at the bottom of the cliff within the ambulances to have a better understanding of those children who really are, in multiple systemic ways, casualties. 

 

You know, in a biopsychosocial sense, and get an understanding of what it might mean if we were building better fences at the top of the cliff. So, through that research, I became more and more interested in the protective effects of high-quality reading instruction in particular, education more broadly, but reading instruction in particular, and just became increasingly disappointed, I suppose, at what I found when I started turning over the rocks in that space, that there was very high variability.

 

I'm talking about my context here in Australia, but this is of course has applied in other first-world industrialised English-speaking nations. Very high variability with respect to how we prepare teachers. Well, in fact maybe not so much variability, but lots of gaps in, in that space. But high variability in terms of what schools were doing.

 

So this seemed to me to just be perpetuating social injustice and social inequities. It's hard enough for a lot of children that they're starting from behind in a whole range of ways, but when they're getting to school, they're not on a trajectory away from those origins, that there's just a perpetuating series of events.

 

And then if you're a boy from a, you know, should we say a chaotic, difficult home environment and it's boys in particular, it's not exclusively boys, you know, that have been covered in this research, and you don't make the transition to literacy in the first three years of school, you're going to be flagged as a kid with a behaviour problem.

 

And then everything after that is going to have the word behaviour written on it. But there's good evidence to show that when we look at those children who are acting out and disruptive they're in many cases not reading well, and what's the chicken and what's the egg? So I guess that's the sort of short, long story of how I landed where I am.

 

[00:09:47] Anna Stokke: You've got a lot of knowledge in cognitive science, neuroscience, how the brain processes information, which really, you know, helps you describe and explain and understand how students learn, and you sort of got involved in public health and policy. And so you see school as a public health intervention and children not being given effective instruction, and language and reading is really a social justice issue.

 

Does that kind of sum it up?

 

[00:10:23] Pamela Snow: Absolutely. Summed up beautifully.

 

[00:10:25] Anna Stokke: When children are not being taught effectively in school, that can really put them behind the eight ball then. You know, especially if they don't have someone at home to help them. So it's really the responsibility of society, schools, governments, etc., to make sure that children receive a good education in school because it is a social justice issue. Is that how you see it?

 

[00:10:49] Pamela Snow: Absolutely. And I really rail against parent blame in the reading space. People sometimes say and you hear this, unfortunately, sometimes from some education academics, “Well, parents need to do more. Parents need to read to their children more.” It's kind of code for “Parents need to love their children to literacy and do our work for us.” 

 

Well, of course, you know, as a speech-language pathologist by background, as a mother, as a grandmother, I love seeing adults reading to children and I think it's tremendously important. And it's important for a whole range of people that hopefully are fairly self-evident, but we need to remember that: a) that's not teaching children how to read and b) not all parents are in a position to do that for a wide range of reasons.

 

Some parents don't have very good literacy skills themselves. Some parents have very chaotic, challenging lives and, you know, they're dealing with unstable housing and paying rent and not knowing whether they're going to be able to put food on the table. It's a very sort of middle-class assumption in many ways that parents have the capacity, the resources, the human capital to be doing those things. 

 

But why are we sending people to university for four years doing education degrees if we're not giving them specialized knowledge and skills that other people don't have? And then saying that it's parents’ job. So, I, I think we deprofessionalise teachers when we say that parents have to do more. And we contribute to the Matthew effect of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. If we think that it's on parents to shoulder that responsibility. 

 

[00:12:43] Anna Stokke: Sure, and I have a similar pet peeve about math. I have heard this before that the solution is to have parent nights because parents have such negative attitudes about math and they pass that on to their children. And so the solution is to somehow get parents to involving their children in math activities at home and speaking positively about math and that sort of thing.

 

And I think, well, but it's, it isn't a parent's job to teach a child math, right? That is the job of the schools.The parent blame thing really gets to me as well.

 

[00:13:16] Pamela Snow: Yes, I'm disappointed to hear that it applies as much in well, we say maths in Australia, but I'm disappointed that it applies just as much in that space.

 

[00:13:26] Anna Stokke: Let's shift to evidence-based reading instruction, and maybe some of it will apply to math too, because that's what I always love to talk about. So I think the place to start is biologically primary and biologically secondary knowledge. So can you say a bit about that and how math and reading fit in?

​

[00:13:46] Pamela Snow: Absolutely. So, I think this is a really important conceptual framework as a starting point that there are always some caveats around these frameworks. But this is the work of David Geary from I think the University of Missouri, who's written about biologically primary, biologically secondary skills.

 

So biologically primary skills being those that the human brain has evolved to acquire quite naturally through immersion. I like to say in village life. So, you know, when, when children are around adults and there are some things that have been, you know, wired into the human brain in an evolutionary sense, like turn-taking, reciprocity, recognizing facial expressions, because we have to be able to recognize facial expressions, and the flip side of, of that, you know, in terms of safety in an evolutionary sense. 

 

So oral language is typically identified as being biologically primary under typical circumstances where children are cared for by adults, they're going to acquire oral language skills. Now, of course, there are circumstances that will compromise that. 

 

There are all kinds of neurodiversity that will compromise a child's language development. But if we just go with the typical scenario for a moment, children develop language skills. But then there are biologically secondary skills that our brains have the capacity to learn, but we're not just going to pick up through opportunistic exposure.

 

So, me sitting and watching someone play a Mozart Sonata isn't going to turn me into a pianist. It might turn me into someone who appreciates music, but in order for me to learn how to play a Mozart Sonata, I'm going to need to be sat down at the keyboard, and I'm going to need someone to explain the one to one correspondence between the notation, the simple notation on the page, not in a Mozart sonata, in something like Baa Baa Black Sheep, to start off with, and what's happening on the keyboard.

 

So that's a biologically secondary skill. It's something I can learn, it's going to take a lot of focus, it's a lot of repetition and practice, if you like retrieval practice and I'm going to go from that novice stage of being very halting and stumbling and making a lot of errors, hesitant and it's going to take me quite a while to get to automaticity in that skill like playing the piano or another musical instrument or learning chess or, anything else that we can learn, but we're not going to just automatically become proficient in. 

 

And reading, of course, is a prime example of a biologically secondary skill as Steven Pinker the Harvard psychologist, says we have a language brain, we don't have a reading brain. So we can acquire the skills of reading. Most of us need to be explicitly taught. Now, of course, there's a continuum of ability. Some children will pick up biologically secondary skills or some biologically secondary skills more easily than other children will or more easily than they will another skill.

 

So some children might pick up reading very easily but still need a lot of support and assistance with learning a musical instrument. We need to remember that there's still a continuum. So this is a broad conceptual framework. And I also like to emphasize that when we're talking about oral language, yes, it's biologically primary, but as I said a moment ago, a lot of things can compromise oral language development.

 

For example, we know that some children are reared in very language rich environments, text rich environments, and they're going to have an advantage of being exposed to more complex, more elaborate language, vocabulary, sentence structure, and so forth, that of course is contributing background knowledge.

 

And we also know that probably somewhere, Around 7 to 10 percent of children have a language disorder, developmental language disorder a lot of that epidemiological work has been done by people like Tomblin and colleagues, Dorothy Bishop,  Courtenay Norbury. So in fact,  Courtenay Norbury's work has shown that in a class of 30, there will probably be two children who have a diagnosable developmental language disorder.

 

And of course, other children who maybe don't reach that cutoff, but don't have strong language skills. So, when we talk about oral language skills being biologically primary, I think it's important to not say they're set and forget because we need to be developing all children's language skills way beyond the kind of everyday tier one vocabulary that they acquire through their everyday lives.

 

And we also need to remember that some children are going to have, be facing struggles when it comes to their language skills, you know, because of a language disorder, maybe children on the autism spectrum. There's a range of reasons that some children struggle with language. So it's not a simple binary of things over here we don't need to worry about and things over here, the biologically secondary, we do need to worry about. 

 

We need to remember that there is a range of abilities in both, and we need to be thinking about what that means from an instructional perspective.

 

[00:19:34] Anna Stokke: Okay. So essentially, reading is something that has to be taught?

 

[00:19:38] Pamela Snow: Yes. 

 

[00:19:38] Anna Stokke: And same with math?

 

[00:19:40] Pamela Snow: Yep, absolutely

. 

[00:19:43] Anna Stokke: David Geary, and I think he was on the National Math Advisory Panel, actually. There's a lot written about biologically primary and secondary knowledge in the National Math Advisory Task Reports.

 

And yeah, so he was on that panel. 

 

[00:20:01] Pamela Snow: And there's another David whose work I quote in this space too, and that's David Didau, who has written a very nice book blog post for teachers. I can send you the link. And it just explains that idea of biologically primary, biologically secondary for teachers. It distills David Geary's work quite nicely.

 

[00:20:24] Anna Stokke: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about reading because how could I have you on and not talk about reading? So my understanding, and I talked about this in a previous episode with Matt Burns, there are two main schools of thought about how to teach reading, essentially whole language and phonics.

 

And it's come to light that research evidence supports systematic explicit and direct phonics instruction for teaching children how to read. So can you remind us how long has that research been around?

 

[00:20:56] Pamela Snow: Well, the debate's been going on for a very long time. I mean, at least decades. Jeanne Chall was writing about reading instruction and influencing reading instruction policy in the United States when I was at primary school. But I think it actually, depending on, you know, where you choose to put the lens, it arguably goes back much longer than that.

 

And I think in 2024, we've moved beyond talking about whole language versus phonics. I think, you know, very broadly, that was the division, if you like, in thinking. There's now been in the last 25 years or so, three national inquiries into the teaching of reading. Well, four, I guess, if you include the work that's been done in Canada recently in Ontario, but there was a National Reading Panel in 2000, there was the Australian National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy in 2005, and then the UK Rose Report in 2006. 

 

And I think it's fair to say, and you know, all of those reports and reviews can be criticized, of course, but there is a strong consensus in those reports that reading needs to be taught systematically and that we need to start at the more granular level of helping students to understand how speech and print map to each other.

 

So you can call that phonics instruction if you like. Now what happened? Of course, there's often backfire effects out of these things. So we might, I think we're a little naive if we think, “Well, there's a report that says we should do things this way and, and therefore that's how they will be done.”

 

Maybe that happens in aviation and in some areas of medicine where we see immediate consequences of not applying best evidence straight away and there's an immediate accountability when best evidence is applied. But unfortunately, in education, there's not immediate accountability and we don't immediately see the consequences of our policy and practice decisions.

 

That's a slow burn. And people get to blame everybody else except for what's happening in the instructional space. So we started to hear this term balanced literacy more and more after those national inquiries. I think it probably had been around before the U. S. National Reading Panel. So there was an acknowledgement, albeit probably reluctant in some respects, that yes the decoding part of reading, of getting the words off the page needed to be given more emphasis.

 

But what we saw really was a patch on whole language. So there was a reluctant acknowledgement that yes, we'll put decoding in the mix, we'll put phonics instruction in the mix. And there was a preponderance of so called three queuing, you know, this idea of came from the work of Marie Clay and also from Kenneth Goodman, the idea that children use multiple cues in order to get words off the page.

 

And so we should be teaching them using, you know, encouraging them to look at pictures, use context, but, you know, everything, ironically, except from focusing on the letters in the word and, you know, as Mark Seidenberg says, you know, everything that children need, the information that they need, is in the word in front of them. 

 

And this perpetuated really business as usual from that was occurring before those inquiries, except teachers, I think, were given a false sense of assurance that, you know, as long as they were doing some phonics that their instruction was okay, but when we talk to teachers who were taught to teach that way, what we hear over and over again is “I knew that there were children who I should have been able to turn into readers who weren't becoming readers,” and a lot of teachers experienced terrible guilt and shame and regret when they look back on those children who in many cases they can still name they're so vividly etched in their memories.

 

So it allowed business as usual to continue and it allowed a number of conditions that, of course, Emily Hanford has talked about in her Sold a Story podcast, you know, the influence of big publishing houses on education. I think they've arguably had more influence on classroom practice than the body of research that we collectively refer to as the science of reading, unfortunately.

 

[00:25:56] Anna Stokke: It sort of sounds familiar to me because balance is a word that I hear a lot. So you have one group of people who are saying explicit systematic instruction is important. And this, could be in math or it could be in reading apparently.

 

And then you have another group of people saying, “No, I think that inquiry based instruction is the way to go.” And so then some people will say, “Well, we should compromise, right? So we should have a balance between these two things.” So what do you think about that?

 

[00:26:34] Pamela Snow: I think that's an appeal to the golden mean fallacy. The idea that when there's tensions between two different points of view, that if we just meet in the middle, everything will be okay. We don't accept the golden mean fallacy in so many other areas of science and policy.

 

And in fact, the application of the golden mean fallacy has really failed us because two decades on, we're starting to get some shift in Australia, but no state or territory in Australia adopted the 20 recommendations of our National Inquiry back in 2005. So that's, you know, nearly 20 years ago.

 

We opted instead for the fallacy of the golden mean that we'll just put everything in the middle and produce a casserole of instruction. And as long as we can take the lid off the pot and see some phonics and see some vocabulary work and see some sentence structure work, then we'll be happy.

 

And what's more, we'll say, “Well, the teacher is the cook in this kitchen, and it's up to the teacher.” This was very strongly espoused in the writings of Kenneth Goodman, that the teacher is the in front of their children, they should be empowered to make instructional decisions for their children. 

 

Now yes, to a point, of course, that is correct, but we don't say to pilots, “You just fly this thing the way that you think it should be flown,” you know, “Don't worry about the safety checks that Boeing has produced and that the checklists and, and so forth from the aviation industry.” You know, “You've flown lots of planes. You just fly it the way you think is best.”

 

We expect people in other professions to, in fact, swim between very narrow flags, and I think this is a paradox, Anna, because sometimes we hear from our teacher unions, for example, that, you know, we need to respect teacher autonomy and everybody else needs to step back and, you know, let teachers teach and do their thing.

 

But I think that seriously deprofessionalises teachers when we say that what they're doing is so unimportant that they can just choose their own adventure in the classroom. We don't say that to pilots, we don't say that to engineers, we don't say that to medical practitioners, to nurses, to allied health professionals.

 

And in fact, we hold those professionals to a very high standard of accountability. I mean, sometimes to the point of public exposure and naming and shaming, deregistration, you know, there's all kinds of accountability consequences. So you can't have professional esteem if you're not also going to have professional accountability.

 

And I think balanced literacy has contributed to a very unfortunate set of circumstances where we've told teachers that they can, you know, as long as they're broadly doing a bit of all of these things that they're teaching is okay and then we're going to have to uncomfortably kind of look the other way and shrug our shoulders when there's a significant proportion of children who don't succeed. 

 

“Well, you know, their parents should have read to them more when they were babies, there's not enough books in their homes, they're not trying hard enough, they're not ready.” You know, it's awful that teachers are put in that position of not being able to apply the best available evidence in the first place and identifying and supporting students who might be starting to fall behind.

 

Now we hear a lot about the science of reading and is it capital letters lowercase and you know, the science of reading is simply an evolving body of knowledge in the same way that there's a science of perception, a science of memory, a science of language and language acquisition. People try to diminish its importance and its translational significance because they don't always like the classroom implications and the knowledge that it means that teachers need to have about how language works. 

 

I often say under the bonnet, but for you, I'm going to have to say under the hood. And that's, that's uncomfortable then for universities to have to ensure that pre-service teachers are given that knowledge. So we've, kind of created a set of circumstances where we've, I'm going to say, dumbed down the reading process because that's kind of convenient for the people who've been preparing teachers for classrooms. 

 

It works well for the big publishing houses to produce these nice-looking resources that are attractive to teachers and children and parents and it works for some children. Great, but if we go back to thinking at a public health level, it needs to work for the overwhelming majority of children in the same way that road safety policy and laws and principles need to work for the overwhelming majority of road users. 

 

[00:32:05] Anna Stokke: And it's interesting you mentioned this about it being said that we should just leave it up to teachers to decide what's best for their students. Because you mentioned the Ontario Right to Read Inquiry or Right to Read Report and things are slow going here in my province. 

 

So, the provincial education department in my province released principles that focus on classroom teachers being best placed to identify evidence-based strategies for instruction that meet the needs of their students, right? So, in other words, there's no mandate or requirement or suggestion here to use evidence-based reading instruction in the province.

 

And the program that I hear a lot about being used in Manitoba schools is Reading Recovery. So, can you say a few words about that?

 

[00:32:53] Pamela Snow: So Reading Recovery came out of the work of Dame Marie Clay in New Zealand in many respects, I guess, a highly “successful” export. I put successful in inverted commas there, but it put New Zealand on the map most certainly. And Reading Recovery came out of Marie Clay's Ph.D. research on you know, she was looking at how children learn to read and looking at the so called cues that children utilize when they're learning to read.

 

And is an intervention for children who are not on track after, it's normally a year of what was would then been described as whole language instruction. Now, it is most typically would align with what we would refer to as balanced literacy instruction. I have a number of difficulties with reading recovery.

 

I know that it's sincerely well-intentioned and that reading recovery teachers are sincerely well-intentioned. As a first principle, I would say no child should have to recover. From their initial reading instruction. I think the use of the word recovery, I think, is telling and problematic.

 

I think having an instructional model that assumes a significant level of failure is important. problematic. And we almost need to perpetuate that level of failure to support the ongoing survival of the program. It's a wait to fail approach, but it's more of the same that failed those children in the first place.

 

So if we're not applying explicit teaching of how speech and print map to each other, you know, what we now would refer to, I think, more accurately, thanks to the work of Linnea Ehri as orthographic mapping. So we're getting those words, it's knitted into children's long-term memories in terms of their pronunciation, their spelling, and their meaning. That's what it means to have a word orthographically mapped. 

 

So your brain's not straining every time it sees that word, it's got it in its long-term memory. And of course that contributes to automaticity and fluency. But the kind of reading instruction that children are exposed to when reading recovery is the intervention.

 

They're not instructional practices that are promoting that orthographic mapping process in the first place. So we're, we're providing suboptimal instruction and then following that up with more of the same suboptimal intervention. So I think it is well and truly time for reading recovery to be retired because, you know, as they say at the Reading League, when we know better, we do better.

 

And we've got we need to think probabilistically, I think, Anna, that's probably a concept that works for a mathematician. You know, we need to say on the balance of probabilities, what are the instructional approaches that are going to get the vast majority, 90 to 95 percent of children across the bridge in the first three years of school from doing something that's biologically primary using oral language to something that's biologically secondary. 

 

Remembering that English has a relatively more dense orthography, so our writing system is one that is complex for historical reasons because we've borrowed so many words and their spellings from so many languages going, you know, particularly back to Anglo-Saxon invasions, Viking invasions, and there was the Norman invasion.

 

So we've got a large number of French words, a lot of words came into English from Latin via French. We've got Greek words, we've got words from a number of other languages as well, but we've got a complex orthography. So we need to spend the better part of the first three years of school helping our children to understand our writing system, unlike countries that have a more transparent orthography where they can knock that over in many cases in six to nine months.

 

So, you know, Anna, if you and I were going to go off next week and start learning modern Greek, I think it's fair to say that one of the first things we would want to do is understand the writing system because it's a different writing system from the one that we're familiar with, and we're not going to get anything off the page.

 

It doesn't matter how good our spoken Greek vocabulary is. We might be fluent in modern Greek, but if we want to learn to read and write in modern Greek, we're going to have to master that writing system. We're going to have to understand the correspondences between speech and print. And it amazes me that we don't have that same emphasis for the novice reader.

 

On ensuring that they understand how the code works and we don't appreciate the efficiency of focusing on that early to open doors to reading comprehension, I think it's pretty sad. And I saw this a lot in my youth justice research to be looking at 14-year-olds who are facing a closed door when it comes to reading comprehension because they can't get words off the page.

 

And I think this is the nub now of the the tension between balanced literacy and what I'm gonna call structured explicit literacy teaching, because it's way more than phonics. But this is the essential tension that this idea that we should be explicitly teaching five-year-olds how their writing system works.

 

Now, we need to remember that there is this thing called statistical learning and and we want to maximise opportunities for statistical learning that children, once they've mastered enough of the code and are getting enough print exposure, will draw inferences about phoneme-grapheme correspondences that they haven't encountered before.

 

And they'll have a go at getting words off the page and they'll mispronounce them, and if they've got the word in their oral language vocabulary, they've got a fighting chance of, you know, inferring what that correspondence is. But why wouldn't we be giving children a transferable set of tools to approach their writing system right from the outset?

 

Why are we going to leave it to chance and hope because that's not going to work for the vast majority of children. 

 

[00:39:46] Anna Stokke: Okay, so as you were talking, it reminded me a lot of foundational skills in math. It's very important that children know some things automatically. You kind of have to build math up, it's very cumulative. There's been a de-emphasis on some foundational skills like memorizing times tables, some people refer to these types of things, the practice and that type of thing, as drill and kill.

 

And what happens is it's very hard for children to solve complex problems because they don't have these foundational skills. So it sounds sort of similar. It's probably all from the same school of thought.

 

[00:40:31] Pamela Snow: Very much so, very much coming from the idea of inquiry-based learning the mantra that children value what they learn for themselves and that, you know, they'll remember better things that they discover for themselves. I've never seen any actual evidence for that. But the problem is if, if we're taking an inquiry-based approach to these foundational skills, we're producing something that looks like Swiss cheese in terms of, you know, classroom data and then also in terms of children's individual skills. 

 

And we're not taking responsibility as the teachers for what children are learning and we're doing this on their instructional time. This instructional time belongs to children. And I think that's a really important ethical principle in education policy that we have to think really carefully about how we use this valuable, precious window that children can't get back again. It's not for us to be doing experiments on children or applying ideologies that are more pleasant and attractive to us.

 

Perhaps it would be nice if just reading lots of beautiful books to children turned them into readers. Unfortunately, it doesn't. And that's a reality that we have to grapple with. And it's on teachers and schools and education systems to ensure that that success is provided to all children, not just the ones who by virtue of a range of, if you like, biopsychosocial advantages, we're going to get there anyway, because we know that there's a proportion of children who are going to get there or they're going to do better.

 

[00:42:22] Anna Stokke: Yeah. And I really like what you said about respecting children's time, that they only have so much time in school, that time should be used effectively. And parents are sending their kids to school and they're, putting their trust in the education system.

 

I think the same thing happens in math, let's give them complex problems that sound interesting and that will get them excited about math. When, if we would just spend the time on those foundational skills, we'd get them to the point where they could do those problems.

 

[00:42:55] Pamela Snow: That's right. And children love learning skills. They love the sense of mastery that learning skills give them. And then yes, I imagine in maths in the same way with reading, they can do some self-teaching that they get to generalize some principles from some core knowledge and skills that they have acquired.

 

[00:43:19] Anna Stokke: But it sort of comes back to another thing you were talking about, and I mean, I've talked to lots of teachers educated in many different provinces, states, countries, and I keep hearing the same thing, that most teacher education programs focus on inquiry or constructivism and very few teach about the science of learning.

 

So does that ring true to you? Yes.