Recently, I attended two Sydney events that have given me pause for (further) thought on the mixed state of play in Australian education. These were the Australian School Improvement Summit on Wednesday October 29, and the researchED Conference at St Catherine’s School on Saturday November 1. For those of you unfamiliar with researchED, it is a platform that hosts low-budget events, always on Saturdays, so teachers and researchers can come together, share ideas and discuss existing and evolving evidence concerning education across year levels and sectors.
At both of these events, there was discussion about the importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum, for all students, but most particularly those whose backgrounds create a lack of financial, social, and human capital that can only be offset by strong educational experiences curated by classroom teachers.
Natalie Wexler is a US education writer and commentator, author of two highly regarded texts, The Knowledge Gapand Beyond the Science of Reading, and co-author, with Dr Judith Hochman, of The Writing Revolution. Wexler was a keynote speaker at both of the above events, acknowledging first that the focus on explicit and systematic phonics instruction in recent years has been entirely appropriate, because of the serious and harmful policy and practice deficiencies highlighted in Emily Hanford’s American Public Media Sold a Story podcast.
Wexler’s central thesis (like many before her) is that effective decoding skills are the necessary but not sufficient toolkit for students’ reading success. She highlights the complex factors that can stand in the way of children’s comprehension of text. These include knowledge of increasingly complex vocabulary, mastery of more elaborate sentence structure, inferencing ability, and the application of prior (background) knowledge when reading. Of course, different factors may be more or less in play to create difficulties for different children reading the same text.
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Professor James Engell of Harvard English in a recent email to me:
“Over my more than forty years of teaching I’ve found students at all levels increasingly untouched by any formal study of grammar, rhetoric, imagery, or verbal patterns.”
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