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‘What Works’ for teaching EAL?

Developing teachers’ subject knowledge and research engagement through the use of on-line evidence-based guidance.

Dr Naomi Flynn,

University of Winchester/

University of Reading

In this paper I am going to present my account of the co-construction of a MESHGuide for EAL – for children who speak English as an additional language – who now make up approximately 20% of the pupil demographic in English schools.

The guide was co-authored by myself and two colleagues from Hampshire’s ethnic minority support team – EMTAS – . Hampshire is a county setting with 150 languages spoken but where pupils are often in very small numbers in schools.

During the writing process we harnessed the support of recognised experienced teachers of EAL to give us feedback on what they would like to see and on their trial of the draft guide as a support for action research.

The project was funded by the University of Winchester so the process of writing the guide sat alongside my research questions.

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Project Aims

Co-construction of a MESHGuide for teaching EAL

Can an on-line guide develop theoretical and practical SK for EAL?

Can an on-line guide support research engagement/ activity?

“The need for greater understanding of the myriad social processes involved in knowledge-making in different settings for different purposes remains high.”

(Moss, 2013: 247)

The aim of from the start of this project was the co-creation of a MESHGuide which on the surface of things felt quite straight forward. However the different agenda of each stakeholder was apparent: for EMTAS the aim probably stopped at the creation of the guide but for me I needed to ask questions around the context in which we were working.

I was interested to explore the notion of knowledge mobilisation and its place within the narrative around a research-engaged profession who may draw increasingly on on-line guidance, but I am concerned about what I see as a range of unanswered questions in this narrative.

I am not sure that we all share a view of what we mean or want by knowledge mobilisation; although Gemma Moss and others have made clear that it requires attention to complex social processes that are mostly likely to play our differently in different settings in terms of how knowledge is shared of mobilised.

I am sure that there are conflicting views on what constitutes a research-engaged profession – is it one that reads research and allows that to inform practice or is it one that actively carries out research in order to informed practice – these are two very different things with very different potential outcomes.

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Research Context:�Communal Constructivism

Communal Constructivism

“…a pedagogic theory concerned not, like social constructivism, with understanding all learning, but with researching and understanding the ways in which good learning “is brought about.” (Scrimshaw, 2001: 136)

“…forms of ICT bring…different forms of virtual and real community building and operation as well as the different ways in which knowledge is constructed, shared and reconstructed … by teachers and learners”

(Leask and Younie, 2001: 119)

So here we are, the three stakeholders as part of a collaborative team, a community of enquiry. I think we probably set out thinking we could all put this together in practical terms but were taken by surprise to some extent by the complexity of creating knowledge in an on-line learning space.

Bring in quotations

I have found the process of writing this paper quite troublesome because I want to theorise an experience of writing in a new space but that felt intensely practical –particularly given its audience. I think that tension is of itself a part of sharing evidence-informed knowledge using ICT and perhaps part of the complex process of communal constructivism.

Bur grappling with this was vital if the end-users were actually going to be able to use this knowledge in order, to use Scrimshaw’s term, bringing learning about.

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Research Context:�On-line learning space

“This process of creating and sharing (on-line) usable knowledge is best accomplished by a community of researchers and practitioners working together, as opposed to researchers developing findings for practitioners to consume.” (Dede et al, 2009)

“Teachers would benefit from an accessible and well-developed online platform for sharing research and evaluations of different approaches to professional development, based on robust evidence about their impact on the quality of teaching.” (DfE 2015)

…….digital technology should be a broad concern for all education researchers, regardless of specialisation or background.”

(Selwyn and Facer, 2014: 483)

The understanding that knowledge mobilisation is complex has also been given considerable airing in the literature around on-line learning spaces. I should start by saying that before writing a MESHGuide I had no background in ICT beyond use of digital literacy for the teaching of English. I am a teacher educator with a research interest in the teaching of EAL learners but I agree with Selwyn and Facer’s observation that digital technology should be of interest to all of us as educators.; and perhaps particularly those of us who lean towards socio - cultural ways of examining the profession. There is a natural link between exploring social relationships in education, exploring how those work for knowledge mobilisation and furthermore exploring how those work within technology.

Government consultation on a World-Class Teaching profession shed light on an interest from teachers for on-line learning spaces . This interest comes with a series of caveats that it must be rigorously research-evidenced and this puts further pressure on any of us wishing to support a self-improving profession to be part of that authorship.

Dede et al’s Harvard review of the research around on-line professional development identified the need for knowledge shared on-line to be co-constructed if it is to be useable. Thus, the creation of the MESHGuide appeared to chime well with a number of differing but converging narrative s round knowledge mobilisation and research engagement/ research-informed profession.

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Research Context:�Teaching EAL Learners

Decreasing resources for ethic minority pupils and pupils with EAL since 2011

(Strand et al, 2015: 12)

Diminishing availability of pre-2010 guidance for EAL

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Project design

Summer 2015

Final reflective interviews

Re-drafting the MESHGuide

Spring 2015

Designing individual projects drawing on the draft MESHGuide

Running 6 week interventions

Autumn 2014

Participant selection

Initial interviews

Co-authoring draft

5 schools

7 teachers

2 LSAs

2 x Infant

2 x Primary

1 x Secondary

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EAL MESHGuide content:important for teachers

The first set of interviews in the Autumn had the express purpose of exploring with the teachers what they would want to see in on-line guidance. The were coded using NVivo and some clear themes emerged in terms of the teacher’s wishes which are broadly defined using the terms on this slide.

Straight away , there was a tension between knowing something must be research-informed but really wanting quick access to resources. This meant we had to make some pragmatic choices about content and writing style and this possibly included some compromise.

Teachers’ responses focussed on resources despite a heavy steer from me that the guide would link theory and practice – what does this say about the nature of research engagement and research readiness with teachers? Is there a practical reality that we as academics must take account of if we are to genuinely contribute to knowledge mobilisation?

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Co-Construction: Important for the teachers

Resource Oriented

Curriculum matched

Time Saving

(First Aid)

What Works?

Intercultural Understanding

Age appropriate

Fluency related/ age related

Expert recommendation

Phonics and reading comprehension

Grammar and writing

Pre-selected recommendations

‘Help, I don’t know what’s out there!’

Accessible theory in accessible language

School-related national differences

Working with parents of ELLs

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Co-construction: stakeholder differences

Resource Oriented

Curriculum matched

Time Saving

(First Aid)

What Works?

Intercultural Understanding

Practical and theoretical

Driven by fluency levels

Whose theory?

Succinct yet ‘enough’

Risks in ‘expert recommendation’

Teachers

Authors

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The EAL MESHGuide

EAL MESHGuide

EAL MESHGuide front page

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Teachers’ Projects with the MESHGuide

School type	Year	Project outline
Primary	R	Creating opportunities for spoken interaction
Primary	1	Developing EAL pupils’ phonic knowledge
Infant	1	Support for writing for EAL pupils in Y1
Infant	2	Supporting reading comprehension for an ABL pupil to attain NC level 3
Primary	5	Developing language for writing with beginner EAL Y5 pupil
Primary	6	Supporting ABLs with grammar and vocabulary
Primary	1 - 6	Exploring resources for use by LSAs
Secondary	7 & 9	Exploring reading activities for Year 7 and 9 beginner EAL learners

We wanted the teachers to actively use the MESHGuide to inform their teaching, and in order to do that I worked with them on designing mini-projects – most of which were with one or a small groups of EAL learners and with a specific focus mostly related to literacy development.

It's very much the case that the teachers plan for their research in terms of their practice. They are looking for improved performance and they all focus quite a lot on personality as part of the need for the additional input. This is possibly at odds with the way in which an academic might select participants for research but does it matter? Is it within the remit of classroom researchers to absorb these different starting points? Is research that seeks improved outcomes research (the EEF would say so).

Selection of focus for their research shows how different each of the teachers’ starting points might be – need for the guide and for future interventions to take account of significant individual differences in EAL learners and for their teachers individual setting differences – particularly in areas of low density EAL.

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Knowledge Mobilisation and �Research Engagement

In the weighting of commentary in the interviews conducted after the trial with the guide to support their projects, the conversation shifts away from talking about resources although there is still some emphasis. As the purpose of the pre and post interviews were necessarily different, direct comparison of the weighting of commentary is not helpful, however it does interest me that as a result of using the MESHGuide the teachers’ dialogue moved in to discussion of their new subject knowledge and the ways in which the guide was a research facilitator.

Note how the weighting for research facilitator, pedagogical shift and improved outcomes is similar and – although I deliberately differentiated commentary in terms of the coding process – actually the three code identities at times seemed interchangeable.

I had concerns about accessibility but thankfully we appeared to have got the writing style right – teachers found it accessible.

Look however at how little commentary is given over to actual research engagement – and in this case I am referring to reading research to inform practice. The teachers had read the summarised research we had created for them to support their teaching, but none of them went to actual research articles – the most obvious reason being that they simply can’t access them.

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Does a co-constructed MESHGuide for EAL develop subject knowledge and research engagement?

The result of these actions (using L1) was that it became clear that the focused child’s understanding of the learning happening in class was excellent. And this reassured me and my support staff that we could focus just on his mechanics of writing, rather than thinking how else can we make sure he’s accessing the curriculum.

(Y5 pupil’s teacher)

I think the biggest change is in me, if you think how terrified I was when we first met, I was like, “I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do.” And now actually I feel really confident that what I’m doing is working and I have strategies.

(Y5 pupil’s teacher)

And to know before we wrote what the EAL children would need, and just to have that to think about, we never really did that before. So when we were planning properly we, kind of, put a box on to cater for that…..we would never have thought of that before.

(ABL Y1 pupil’s teacher)

… it was really useful, particularly the reading (guidance), which I didn’t realise I didn’t know [laughs] until I did, which is strange, isn’t it?

(ABL Y1 pupil’s teacher)

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Does a co-constructed MESHGuide for EAL develop subject knowledge and research engagement?

Research engagement

Research activity

Professional development

Perceived Benefits

CPD potential
Personalising interventions
Feedback loop
Always current

Tensions

Desire for face to face support
Lack of access to empirical research
Research active or research engaged?

I came away from my conversations with the teachers and from my analysis of our interviews with the feeling that the teachers see research activity and professional development as synonomous. One of the strengths identifiable from the project was that the teachers could take the guide and pick out just those sections that related to their particular needs – they didn’t have to trawl through a whole book and nor, they admitted, would they any more. So the overall strength of this particular type of on-line guide was that it generated both interest in research and understanding of how to use it to develop appropriate teaching strategies for individual learners.

The guide allowed the teachers to operate within their own contextual factors to shape interventions that were personalised. I wondered is this a strength or a problem with the guide in an environment where teachers are increasingly encouraged to carry out research that is very specific and often RCT controlled? I hope that there is room for both and that the strength of on-line guidance is that.

In tensions several teachers comented on the value of my visits which allowed them to talk things through – particularly in terms fo designing their research, but also in terms of their EAL learners’ needs. So there is need to see if on-line support can act asa CPD tool without that, and indeed a call for more CPD research relating to EAL from Murphy’s systematic review of interventions for EAL published earlier in 2015.

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Where next?

“The point is that the duty of intellectuals and academics is to use the privilege afforded by their role to go beyond merely writing papers and to explore ways in which this knowledge might make a difference...” (Ellwood, Thorpe and Coleman, 2013:196)

“…digital technology is clearly associated with a redistribution of work that has to be done in delivering educational opportunities, as well as a potential redistribution of responsibility for educational outcomes that result.”

(Selwyn and Facer, 2014:487)

A MESHGuide has the flexibility of content to support teachers in creating personalised, research-informed interventions

Upscaled use of the EAL MESHGuide alongside face to face training to support systematic interventions with EAL learners.

So in conclusion this pilot has raised a lot of new questions for me about working with teachers and local authority colleagues to support knowledge mobilisation and a self-improving profession.

I am very drawn to the discussion by Ellwood and colleagues , writing about the business world, that there is a moral imperative for researchers to engage in joint knowledge generating activity with practitioners.

But I am equally mindful of the responsibility for us as authors to be very sure that what we have published works for teachers and bringing and empirical basis for their pedagogical choices – and Selwyn and Facer go so far as to suggest that technology of itself redistributes responsibilities for educational outcomes.

Pupil outcomes from the use of the MESHGuide were promising but not significant or systematic enough to report at this stage and so this is where we hope to go next with the EAL guide. We feel that the flexibility of content in the guide supported teachers well in designing personalised interventions so we are looking to upscale the use of the guide as part of the CPD element of an intervention study – this of itself will generate new knowledge that informs the next iteration of the guide and thus support a research-informed profession.

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References

Dede, C., Ketelhut, D., Whitehouse, P., Breit, L & McCloskey, E. (2009) “A Research Agenda for Online Teacher Professional Development”, Journal of Teacher Education, 60: 1, 8 – 19
DfE (2015) A World Class Teaching Profession: Government Response, Reference: DFE-00110-2015
Ellwood, P., Thorpe, R. & Coleman C. (2013) “A model for knowledge mobilisation and implications for the education of social researchers”, Contemporary Social Science: Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences, 8:3, 191-206
http://www.meshguides.org/category/general-pedagogy/english-as-an-additional-language-general-pedagogy/
Leask, M & Younie, S (2001) “Communal constructivist theory: information and communications technology pedagogy and internationalisation of the curriculum”, Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education, 10: 1 – 2, 117 - 134
Moss, G (2013) “Research, policy and knowledge flows in education: what counts in knowledge mobilisation?”, Contemporary Social Science: Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences, 8:3, 237-248
Scrimshaw, P (2001), “Communal constructivist theory: a response to Leask and Younie”, Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education, 10: 1 – 2, 135 – 141
Strand, S., Malmberg, L & Hall, J (2015) English as an Additional Language (EAL) and educational achievement in England: An analysis of the National Pupil Database, (Report for The Education Endowment Fund, Unbound Philanthropy and The Bell Foundation) Oxford: University of Oxford Department of Education