A Critique of Pure Teaching Methods and the Case of Synthetic Phonics
Selected arguments sketched
Standard quantitative empirical research into a teaching method’s ‘effectiveness’, often glossed as its ‘effect size’, is a familiar phenomenon. Examples investigated include Group Work, Direct Instruction, Mastery Mathematics, Inquiry-based teaching, Synthetic Phonics and Whole Language approaches. It is now very fashionable for teachers and policy makers to try to base their practice on research. They want to know whether, if “it worked there, will it work here?” They will be thinking, “It worked in the contexts covered by the research. But will it actually work in my school or my classroom?”
​
One of my main contentions is that unless the ‘it’ can be specified so as to be consistently implemented and detected, these questions cannot be answered. There is a dilemma here. Either ‘methods’ are characterized as recipes, or as abstract and open to multiple interpretations. On the one hand, the recipe choice means that the method becomes readily researchable. It is clear what counts as implementing it, and observers can readily agree on whether it is actually happening. On the other hand, if it is still researched but as flexibly interpretable, what can teachers take from any effect size ‘proved’ by people such as Hattie? For teachers must still engage in their familiar day to day choices about which interpretation or combination of interpretations of the supposed method is appropriate. Their choices may well vary even within one lesson, and with good reason.
​
If the recipe horn of the dilemma is chosen, have any such recipes actually been researched? Few schools in their right minds would ever agree to follow a script precisely. If, despite my doubts, they really have been investigated, the focus was not true teaching. The next few paragraphs outline my argument for this assertion.
​
Teachers always aim (and, surely, should aim) to promote understood knowledge. ‘Understanding’ is an elusive notion and a matter of degree. I explore it by revisiting Skemp’s distinction between instrumental and relational understanding. His cognitive map analogy for relational understanding captures something crucial about ‘understood’ knowledge. Knowledge of the latter kind is connected in our minds with other knowledge and beliefs. When a knowledge item is situated on a cognitive map, its very identity comprises, at least in part, its relationships with an indefinite variety of other pieces of knowledge.
​
The cognitive map analogy is less than perfect. New knowledge needs a place on a child’s cognitive map. Yet this cannot be a momentary spasm of cognition, before which the new content has no place, and after which it is definitively located. No- learned material gradually becomes increasingly connected to other content in the child’s mind. Sometimes the putative connections are wrong. This is often a temporary problem, but errors may be long lasting. Deeper understanding can only occur when at least some of these problems are overcome. The connectedness of any ‘one’ piece of knowledge is never fully comprehensive or complete.
​
True teachers will want to promote relational understanding in their pupils, at least to some degree, and at least for most subject areas. For if it’s merely ‘inserted’ into pupils’ heads without regard to what else they already know and understand, it fails to find a place on pupils’ existing cognitive maps. The new learning remains isolated in the child’s mind. The child cannot use and apply it in any circumstances, except, perhaps, those closely resembling those in which it was inserted into the child’s mind in the first place.
​
How can teachers teach in a way that relates to what pupils already know and understand? Among other things, they must permit and even encourage interaction between them and their students. Without this, they cannot discover anything about what their students currently know and understand. Yet that information is vital when the teacher makes decisions on the hoof. Throughout the lesson, she is making choices about her language, explanations, pace, tasks, questioning styles and sequencing. Her choices reflect her assessment of how the new learning will relate to pupils’ resident knowledge. How much interaction? To what extent will she treat the group as a whole rather than differentiating between pupils grouped by attainment? We can’t be precise about any of this. It will vary. It depends on the age and class size concerned, the character of the knowledge being taught and many other factors.
It is not as if no learning will happen without the teacher’s focus on relational knowledge, but rather that true teaching must take proper account of it.
​
Because of this vital but unpredictable interaction, what teachers do is never ‘pupil proof’ and definitively specifiable in advance of the lesson. Hence, what they do, even when teaching specified content to a given age group, will and should vary from one occasion to another. As a result of this, there is no one specifiable ‘method’ to be researched. There is often no ‘it’ that could possibly be researched!
​
In a distinct line of argument, I compare the status of natural science and social science classifications in general. Natural science categories such as the elements are basically stable and consistently recognisable by any observer in the right conditions. Whereas social science categories arise from collective human intentions and cannot simply be ‘read off’ from the world in the way that natural kinds can. This point applies to how we categorise teaching methods as much as to any other category in the social realm. The fruits of this comparison pose serious challenges for the cogency and stability of at least some teaching methods classifications across time, place and culture. Observers must interpret what teachers do. Such interpretations are not always consistent with each other, and can even change over time, yet, arguably, such variation is perfectly legitimate, given the rich and complex social phenomena being classified.
Suppose, nevertheless, we could set aside the profound problems associated with the search for teaching method identity. Imagine that empirical research could establish method ‘effectiveness’, that we could agree on the meaning of ‘effectiveness’ and what should count as the method ‘working’. Even then, teachers should never implement the method without carefully considering the relevant moral and value issues that nearly always impinge on educational decisions.
​
The nature of reading itself must inform how we teach it. Chapter 5 explores some fundamental concepts involved in the analysis of reading, including the idea of the phoneme and the concept of ‘word’. I challenge the versions of these ideas that are often assumed or needed by Synthetic Phonics. A ‘pure’ Synthetic Phonics method requires an idea of ‘word’ that does not sit easily with the fact that words are denizens of the realm of meaning.
Chapter 6 broadens the inquiry to embrace reading for meaning in general. Synthetic phonics adherents often hold that decoding is a necessary condition for reading. They deem anything outside this to be ‘guessing’. Yet such a move on their part is emotive and fails to do justice to the family of processes that reading comprises.
​
One inadequate conception of ‘word’ is closely linked to the so-called Simple View of Reading (SVR), beloved of phonics defenders and associated empirical researchers such as Tunmer. SVR says that reading is the ‘product’ of decoding and listening comprehension. Yet perhaps SVR should be renamed ‘the Over-simple View of Reading’. It sidelines the basic point that reading involves interaction between ‘decoding’ and meaning. It glosses over important complexities involved both in decoding and in listening comprehension. I also use some abstract and difficult philosophical theory to probe the gulf between speech sounds and written text, on the one hand, and the realm of meaning on the other. Although the gap between sound and meaning is generally acknowledged by phonics adherents, its true nature, magnitude and implications for decoding and reading are not always grasped.
​
Chapter 7 concerns a small percentage of 4-year-olds who arrive at school already reading, or, at least, well on their way to extracting real meaning from text. Their very existence should make us question the existence of ‘pure’ methods of teaching reading, and question them in a very particular way. Some advanced young readers will have had a rich experience of sharing story books at home with their families. The sharing can include times when the child is engaged in reading the text for themselves, supported by their parents. These children are rapidly developing their identities as persons, and in particular, as agents who interact with others and who can take account of others’ thoughts and feelings. Such developments can have important implications for what should and should not feature in how children are taught reading in the first year or so at school. In particular, what should not be part of their experience is a rigidly imposed, ‘first and fast’ dose of Synthetic Phonics. Or, at least, their teachers should retain professional autonomy in this area, so that they can make decisions about just how far, in what way and when such advanced readers will be ‘injected’ with Synthetic Phonics. Professional autonomy would serve to diminish the ‘purity’ of synthetic phonics teaching methods. Teachers should retain or regain such autonomy.