Berkhamsted Research - Issue 3

Introduction

Welcome to issue 3 of Research at Berkhamsted, our annual showcasing of research undertaken by staff and students and celebration of continued engagement with other research active schools.

On returning to school in February after more online teaching and learning, the discourse at Berkhamsted was not about ‘catching up’ or ‘repairing’. Rather than unhelpfully assuming shortcomings or something broken and in need of repair among students and staff, we focused more pragmatically and positively on ‘rebalancing’. We aimed to rebalance digital habits, resilience, adaptability, teaching, and learning, drawing on that which we had learned from lockdown.

This rebalancing has continued in the first few weeks of Michaelmas term. And it also seems to me that there is a rebalancing taking place across certain facets of education: in the use of cognitive science (EEF, 2021; Perry, 2021; Civinini, 2021), in approaching race, gender, and sexuality (Roberts, 2019; 2021; Elliott, Nelson-Addy, Chantiluke, and Courtney, 2021), in public examinations (Hyman, 2020, McConville, 2020, Lucas 2020), in engaging with research (Sherrington, 2021), and even in the negotiation of the ‘Trad’ vs. ‘Progressive’ dichotomy (as the exchange between Barbara Bleiman, Martin Robinson, Andrew Atherton, and others on Twitter demonstrated at the end of May (2021).

Indeed, this theme of rebalancing emerges strongly among many, if not all, of the articles published here. The issue opens with Dr. Kathy Weston’s ‘Cultivating Pupil Resilience: Pathway Beyond a Pandemic’. Weston argues that schools should rebalance their approach to mental health in children following two years of COVID-19, lockdown, and school closures. Weston cautions against assuming that all

children are suffering or that all children’s experience of the pandemic – and, indeed, of mental health – are the same. Along similar lines, Laura Knight’s ‘Digital Wellbeing at Berkhamsted School’ describes Berkhamsted’s recalibration of digital device usage to improve digital wellbeing among students. Knight shares how her approach sought to re-educate and establish clear boundaries about acceptable use so that technological innovation could be embraced rather than shunned. Wellbeing is also central to Stuart Simons’ project outlined in ‘Does having a therapy dog present in reading lessons have a beneficial effect on student engagement and development in reading?’. Disrupted by the school’s closures, Simons intends to rebalance his ongoing project following its initial iteration, which started to suggest the positive impact of wellbeing dogs in the English classroom.

Moving onto learning and teaching, James Green’s ‘(Re)finding the Main Verb: Ancient Languages and Educational Inequality’ calls for ancient languages to be placed at the heart of Classics teaching as an effective means of levelling the educational playing field through a fairer redistribution of cultural capital. Following this, Grant McWalter’s ‘Ability Grouping at Berkhamsted’ examines the impact of setting on pupil progress. He comes to advocate various tweaks to setting to accommodate certain problems of self-perception. English teacher and Head of Research at Downe House School, Dr. Andrew Atherton, continues the pedagogic thread in ‘Disciplinary Retrieval: A Case Study in English Literature’. This refreshing article, well-versed in cognitive science, evaluates the effectiveness of retrieval practice and suggests that perhaps the best form is disciplinespecific.

Four articles by Daisy Goldhagen, Micheila Brigginshaw, Katie Duce, and Will Findlay then concentrate on rebalancing specific approaches in their respective subjects. Goldhagen’s ‘Can ‘Mark Making’ art help weak spellers develop their handwriting?’ looks to bring ‘automaticity’ to the foreground of handwriting and spelling. Brigginshaw’s ‘Soundscapes of the self’, taken from a book chapter she has previously published, calls for the need to restore balance in our relationship with our environments by listening more carefully and not simply prioritising the visual. Duce’s piece describes her endeavours to introduce more metacognition and supercurricular knowledge and understanding in her teaching; Findlay’s looks at changes to the History curriculum in the context of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, suggesting that, in the cultural and social development of pupils, consideration of what you teach should not outweigh how you teach it.

This section on learning and teaching is followed by three essays by external writers. Cambridge PhD candidate Vaughan Connelly’s original and thought-provoking ‘When Less Can Be More’ puts forward a convincing case for reassessing the allocation of teaching time to teachers to allow them more time to do things that really make a

difference. Dr. Paul Parham and Prof. Gloria Moss's then supports tweaking teacher leadership style and inclusiveness for a positive impact on student performance; Dr. Ceri Sims and Paul Thompson's explores the best way to help young people develop as leaders. The issue concludes with a selection of EPQ write-ups and academic book reviews. I do hope you enjoy reading all contributions as much as I enjoyed editing them.

As always, my sincere thanks extend to all writers for their willingness to publish, openness to feedback, and punctuality with deadlines; to Deputy Head of Teaching and Learning, Hannah Butland, whose suggestions and insights have been invaluable; and to Jen Hallesy for designing the issue.

Dr. James Cutler (Head of Research and Teacher of English)

Many thanks, once again, to James Cutler, our Head of Research for editing such an inspiring collection of articles. I hope that you enjoy this third instalment of our Research Journal. Berkhamsted is a school which encourages Action Research, further study and innovation. Many thanks to all of you who have engaged with this and produced articles for the journal. In this issue there is a wide range of articles from contributors outside of our organisation - welcome to you and many thanks for insightful and interesting pieces. Every year teachers start afresh with new students but teaching the same subjects, content and exam specifications as the previous year. Engaging with research and innovation keeps us fresh, excited and motivated to develop the young people in our care. I hope you find something in this issue to enhance your teaching and create that 'buzz' that teaching really can give.

Hannah Butland Deputy Head of Teaching and Innovation

Cultivating Pupil Resilience: Pathways Beyond a Pandemic

Dr. Kathy Weston

Does having a therapy dog present in reading lessons have a beneficial effect on student engagement and development in reading?

Stuart Simons

(Re)finding the Main Verb: Ancient Languages and Educational Inequality

Can ‘Mark Making’ Art help weak spellers develop their handwriting?

Cultivating Pupil Resilience: Pathways Beyond a Pandemic

Coming to terms with the ‘Coronacoaster’ The ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic has been characterised by a challenging period of unprecedented national lockdowns affecting work, family life, and education.

Over the course of the pandemic, the mental health research community has been monitoring the impact of the restrictions on children and young people. Researchers have noted that primary school children’s mental health has been adversely impacted more than that of secondary age pupils (Co-Space, 2021). Moreover, children with SEN/ND, those from lower income households, or homes where domestic violence is present, have been particularly vulnerable throughout.

Happily, average mental health difficulties among primary and secondary school aged children appear to have decreased again, as schools reopened and restrictions started easing. In general terms, most children and adults have coped, and some have even thrived. It would be wrong to assume all pupils across a school community have been adversely affected.

The Big Picture: pre-pandemic

As we reflect on the impact of the pandemic on school communities, it is worth placing young people’s mental health difficulties in context. Prior to the pandemic, it was estimated that half of all psychiatric disorders were diagnosed before the age of 14, with 75% of all mental illness starting by the age of 24 (Foulkes, 2021). Prior to the pandemic, the UK was witnessing rising rates of anxiety and depression (particularly among older teen girls) and a decrease in positive body image in young people (NHS Digital, 2017). There was evidence of growing sleep deprivation among teens, increases in levels of self-harm and a decline in boys’ overall wellbeing (HBSC, 2020).

In short, the mental health of children and young people has been on the national watch list for some time. Adolescence has always been characterised by psychological change, challenge, and identity flux, though young people generally cope well with the storms and stresses of this particular period of their lives.

Next Steps for Schools

Schools have, and always will, play a critical role in supporting children and young people in terms of their resilience, mental health, and wellbeing. As we step into the academic year 2021/2022, it may be helpful to consider some optimal ways of supporting pupil resilience moving forward.

Watch your language Nudge pupils towards retrospection

The pandemic has generated headlines and new terms designed to denote damage done in terms of educational progress or mental health. They might be snappy, but press headlines about ‘recovery curriculums’ and ‘lost generations’ can convey a hopelessness that is unhelpful to young people. This type of language implies that things are irretrievably lost. It also implies a lack of heterogeneity in young people’s experience that simply isn’t accurate (Foulkes, 2021).

As school communities, we should seek to use more positive and hopeful language consistently, both across the school, and on an individual level, and pay attention to the language that pupils use to describe both themselves and the situations they find themselves in. It may prove fruitful to draw pupils’ attention to the relationship between language and personal identity. By modelling a prudent approach to the use of language to describe thoughts or emotional experiences, we serve young people well.

Retrospection can breed resilience. Before pupils reset for the next school year, ask them to reflect on some ‘Covid-keeps’ based on their experiences throughout the pandemic. What did they learn about themselves that they didn’t know before? Which habits do they wish to keep? What do they now value more? Which insights will inform their future outlook or decisions? This reflective exercise can prompt a helpful reframing of the pandemic and initiate a sense of gratitude, which in itself can nudge them towards recognising their own resilience and personal strengths.

Help pupils set ‘small achievable goals‘

Retrospection can also spark an interest in future goals. We know that goal-setting and a sense of purpose in life are important pillars of mental health (Reynolds and Parkinson, 2020). What can you do to encourage pupils to actively articulate goals? How can you help them to mark their own progress? In advance of the new school year, can they be encouraged to set termly targets, not just in terms of academic attainment, but also goals connected to sleep hygiene, physical exercise, honing social skills, achieving balance when it comes to their digital diet, accessing new experiences, and increasing acts of kindness towards others? Can they be encouraged to do more of what they enjoy? We know that helping young people to engage with valued activities in different areas of their life can increase rewards and reduce symptoms of depression, so attune to what they are interested in and encourage them to pursue it (Brett et al., 2020).

In the wake of the pandemic and particularly in the next academic year, the plea from psychiatrists is that schools should work hard to amplify activities that directly boost pupil voice, self-esteem, self-worth and that drive them towards “meaningful participatory engagement” (Pavarini et al , 2020).

Resist the desire to ‘mollycoddle‘

Post-pandemic, it is understandable that parents, carers and educators may want to psychologically ‘mollycoddle’ children and young people. As counterintuitive as it may seem, research suggests that this approach isn’t helpful or effective. Over-protectiveness may contribute to poorer mental health outcomes, as it denies young people the opportunity to puzzle things out and may reduce their self-esteem or compromise self-belief. Anxiety can often be exacerbated by adults overly reassuring or telling young people that everything will be ok (Creswell, 2019).

Instead, adults should coach, nudge, scaffold conversations, actively listen and model courage where they can. Certainly, in the case of anxiety, young people need to be educated about the difference between ‘normal’ worries and wobbles, as opposed to problematic, paralysing anxiety, which inhibits them from doing what they love or enjoy. The latter may require clinical attention, whilst the former is part and parcel of everyday human experience. This distinction is key.

Remember how powerful you are

School staff should be conscious of how important staff-pupil relationships are to pupil wellbeing and resilience. Value the important contribution that you make each day, on an individual level, through simple, everyday exchanges with young people and appreciate that teacher-pupil relationships can be an important protective asset when it comes to pupil resilience.

Research shows that a supportive school climate and having trusted adults at school are incredibly important to young people’s mental health. Indeed, school climate has been found to account for 30-50% of differences in children’s mental health outcomes, whilst school size, gender balance, ethnic minority proportion, and socio-economic disadvantage account for only 1% or 2% (Patalay, 2020).

Make sure that pathways to support are crystal clear

In any school community, it is critically important for all pupils to understand and be able to articulate precisely how they can access support, if required, and who is ‘there for them’ in real terms. Mapping out these support pathways is an easy yet enormously effective strategy that can keep young people safe. In times of crisis or difficulty, it can be challenging to recall

numbers, email addresses or even the names of staff members who could offer support. All school staff should also be familiar with pathways to both internal and specialist support (Bignardi, et al., 2021). In terms of auditing how well supported pupils feel, schools should remember that young people can and should play a leading role in this process. They can also provide useful insights into potential barriers to accessing support among their peers. Longer term, peer-led mental health initiatives can increase perception of self-efficacy and autonomy along pupils, both of which relate strongly to the idea of resilience (Dray et al., 2017).

Stay alert to post-Covid ‘red flags‘ Resources to support your school community

At the time of writing, there are two emerging issues related to children and young people’s mental health that are gaining researchers’ attention and which schools should stay alert to. The first is a rise in eating disorders, which appeared to coincide with the return to school in Autumn 2020. Particular stressors associated with the pandemic conflated to form what one expert describes as a ‘perfect storm’. These stressors included high levels of social anxiety, isolation, the normalisation of restrictive eating in family life, a fear of obesity, a lack of peer support, and concomitant low motivation and mood (Nicholls, 2021).

An additional issue that has been observed since January, 2021, is a surge of 'severe tics and tic-like attacks', particularly in teenage girls (Heyman, et al., 2021). The same picture has emerged internationally (ACAMH, 2021).

If you are wondering about next steps, wish to learn more, and be able to access resources that can meaningfully address some of issues outlined above, look no further than <www.tooledupeducation.com>.

From Autumn 2021, your school community will be able to access hundreds of resources designed to empower parents, carers, and educators to apply research-informed solutions in everyday life.

‘Tooled Up’ resources relevant to this article are: a resource sheet on ‘tics’, interviews with experts in adolescent mental health, Professor Shirley Reynolds and Dr Dasha Nicholls (with accompanying notes), resources for pupils (relating to transition, wellbeing, mental toughness, resilience and managing anxiety).

If you have any questions please contact: <kathy@tooledupeducation.com>.

BIO

Dr. Kathy Weston is the founder of ‘Tooled Up Education’, a digital library of evidence-based resources on parenting, family life and education. She is a criminologist, holds a Masters and Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge and worked for many years as an education researcher within Higher Education. She is the co-author of Engaging Parents (Bloomsbury, 2018; 2020) and a sought-after keynote speaker. See: <www.drkathyweston.com>.

Digital Wellbeing at Berkhamsted School

Overview

This project aimed to tackle the challenge of improving digital wellbeing of students at Berkhamsted School. It explored the creation of strategic and cultural change to a new approach that is both pro-technology and pro-boundaries.

Introduction

In the past decade, there has been an enormous change in how we view the relationships young people have with technology. The rising power of the smartphone, the growth of ubiquitous, high-speed wi-fi internet connections, the power and influence of social media, and the growing acceptance that educational technology has a valid and purposeful role to play in teaching and learning, have all created a shift in the educational landscape in which schools operate and families live. This article will explore how I have led changes at Berkhamsted to support the wellbeing of pupils and families as they navigate digital life.

My hypothesis

Wellbeing at Berkhamsted School will be improved through the articulation and adoption of clear, consistent structures, values, and learning opportunities which are both proboundaries and pro-technology.

For the purposes of my project, I was very open to how wellbeing could be improved. Having never undertaken a culture-shifting piece of work like this before, I was not sure how much impact my interventions would have. I was keen to see if my work could have a tangible positive effect in the following areas during the timespan of the project:

1. Changes in attitudes and behaviour

1.1. Improved consistency and certainty about behaviour management expectations for the use of devices, with a shared language for the community to use. Indirectly, I hoped that this would contribute to a reduction in parental complaints and concerns about the use of mobile phones.

1.2. Increased evidence of a more warm, friendly community atmosphere and more convivial social interactions, especially outside the classroom (e.g. in dining rooms, outside spaces and house rooms).

1.3. Growing confidence and empowerment in how adults interact with children and young people with technology; narrowing the generational gap.

2. Changes in culture and atmosphere in school

2.1. Improved civility of human behaviours (from both adults and young people), such as giving full attention and eye contact when someone is speaking, awareness of others in physical space, being mentally present rather than distracted by devices

and notifications.

2.2. Wellbeing-informed decision-making around educational technology and the use of devices for learning.

I also hope that the project will set other longerterm positive shifts in motion, especially improved understanding about digital wellbeing through ongoing INSET and increased community learning opportunities for parents so that we might better bridge the gap between parenting and schooling when it comes to pastoral issues which manifest online. I believe that an increased awareness of digital wellbeing in the parents of younger children may challenge the trend that younger and younger children seemed to be creating habits which are not developmentally or socially helpful.

Process

Step 1: Listen, gather information, and observe

I wanted to gain a deep and broad understanding of the ‘ground truth’ in my own School and in the wider community. I cast my net wide: I attended several SMT meetings where digital wellbeing was on the agenda, I talked individually with Senior Managers and pastoral leaders, and observed the behaviours of students around the sites. I gathered information about the parental complaints and concerns that had come in about mobile phones, and listened to the feedback from those who run tours for prospective parents, who reported that they were hearing repeated concern about these issues and how the School handles them.

Step 2 : Explore the wider context

I sent out some questions to benchmark practice against other schools of a similar size and standing. I wanted to establish how those schools were dealing with these challenges, and what was working well in similar contexts to ours across a range of approaches to mobile phone policies and practices, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) provision or one-to-one programmes. The results of this investigation did not yield any particular trends: every school was doing something different and suitable to its own context. However, it was important to me to build credibility and realism into my planning process, so that critical voices using gossip and snippets of truth could be meaningfully challenged.

Step 3: Research and reading

I read and researched extensively across the academic literature and policy recommendations in the areas around digital wellbeing at an international scale, in order to gather in the highest quality thinking and formulate a plan which was not a knee-jerk reaction or a panicked response to

pressure. I was grateful to the Vice Principal at the time, who supported me in this by informing concerned parents that we were working on these issues and they could expect updates to our policies when we were ready to share them. This took courage in a climate where media volume on schools banning devices was high.

Step 4: Proposal creation

I put together a proposal for a new Digital Wellbeing Framework (DWF). It represented the first steps in developing new policy and practice for the use of mobile devices in School within a framework of digital wellbeing and teaching and learning. It aimed to resist the draw of headline-grabbing moral panic and anti-technology backward steps, and take a measured and reasoned approach to balancing the benefits of mobile technology with the challenges, based upon the latest research reports and findings.

In this document, I used a powerful metaphor as a vehicle for helping stakeholders to understand the changes at hand, borrowed from the original Byron Review in 2008: 'Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe - this isn't just about a top-down approach. Children will be children - pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim' (Byron, 2008, 2).

I wanted to clarify that I felt schools and parents should share responsibility for educating and safeguarding their children online, and how we could draw those lines more effectively. If schools ban technology they cannot control, they are pushing the problems onto parents. If parents just expect that the school will solve every worry, that is not workable or reasonable.

Step 5: Data collection

I decided on a mixed methodology approach which would include quantitative and qualitative data, gathered information from a range of qualitative and quantitative sources, including staff questionnaires, observations, student surveys, and benchmarking against other similar schools.

Findings

In my reading of the research, my exploration of the data from my own school and my study of anecdotal information from other schools, three key themes developed in the Digital Wellbeing Framework. I was very clear in my own mind that we would not jump on the media-fuelled ‘moral panic’ bandwagon and ban all mobile devices, as this demonised technology and made it look like we were afraid of it. Given how many teachers rely on mobile technology for their own professional and

personal productivity and communication, I also thought that would be hypocritical.

In order to promote ‘good’ use of technology, I needed to articulate what ‘good’ use meant and get to the heart of why this mattered in an educational context. It was important that there should be both a high-level link to school values, and a groundedness in the practical: thinking about how we could achieve civility, community, and an atmosphere which was better aligned with our perceptions of how the school should feel in the present, whilst developing positive behavioural habits for the future.

My proposal was structured around these three key concepts:

• Age-appropriate autonomy

• Digital resilience

• Ethical participation

I undertook a broad range of actions to bring these three core concepts into our School.

1. I created a completely new approach to how students may use their mobile phones, including zoning, the articulation of expectations of usage, a sanctions ladder, a new device policy which led to our digital device provision programme, and a shift of expectations on staff to lead by example.

2. I built a cross-curricular and pastoral programme for digital wellbeing, delivered across PSHE, ICT, and pastoral sessions. I led assemblies and created resources for tutor teams in houses.

3. I created a series of resources and CPD opportunities for staff on their own digital wellbeing.

4. I led a parental engagement programme including a regular newsletter and a successful new in-person event: 'Digital First Aid for Parents'.

Impact

This project led to a considerable cultural shift in School around how digital devices are used for learning. The School now has a language and a set of clear and well-established expectations about what ‘using technology well’ means for us as a community, and a structure for attending to those who do not meet them. We have a better understanding of how mobile devices impact upon conflict at home, friendships, sleep, stress and pressure, and mechanisms to influence positive change over time with students and families. We have a staff body who are more confident addressing issues involving mobile devices and better informed about the digital spaces and experiences young people live and engage with. We have a noticeably improved atmosphere in School, and an understanding of how device use can impact on social skills and civility. This is all part of an ongoing journey!

This project also helped me enormously in the development of my own leadership. I learned a lot about leading change through managing perception, shifting perspective and empathy. I recognised how important it is to communicate and share a strong sense of purpose in order to make and then maintain a change. I learned about the connections between behaviours and organisational culture, and how different people respond to rules and restrictions. On a personal level, it has helped me to develop the courage to be visible and creating space for my expertise to be valued. This has led to leading further projects and harnessing the power of positive disruption, both in terms of technology and culture.

BIO

Laura Knight is Director of Digital Learning at Berkhamsted School. She leads whole-school work on educational technology, digital wellbeing, staff training in digital learning, and IT in the curriculum. She completed her Masters in Educational Leadership and her Level 7 Senior Leadership Apprenticeship in 2020.

Does having a therapy dog present in reading lessons have a beneficial effect on student engagement and development in reading?

A dog is anecdotally said to ‘make a house a home’ and while it is somewhat clichéd, I believe the same could be transferrable for schools: having dogs in a school helps to make a school a community. As a life-long cynophile (dog-lover), I have regularly advocated having well-trained/ behaved dogs in school to aid the general well-being of not only students but also staff. Then, after learning about a canine reading project based at schools in Utah (Stone, 2008) and its subsequent journey over to the UK through the Kennel Club (The Kennel Club, 2021), I’ve expanded my advocacy to include reading dogs.

As Head of English, and as a natural bibliophile, I face an almost daily struggle to pass my love of literature and the restorative joy of reading onto my charges or anyone who lends me an ear! As an educator during one of the most technologically advanced periods in human history, where social media provides immediate dopamine hits (Haynes, 2018), it is a serious endeavour to make the 'slow-burn' of a great novel or in-depth analysis of a non-fiction exploration appealing to many students. After a year at Berkhamsted, appreciating the overwhelming cynophilia of those at the school, I realized the potential to place my two loves together for an action research project to encourage students to become bibliophiles as well.

Before fully conceptualizing my research project it was important to consider the breadth of work that had already been done in the field. A large number of research papers and projects had been completed in both America (for example, Lenihan et al., 2016) and the UK (for instance, Hall, et al., 2016) with most focused on early years and foundational habits rather than engagement in reading at the secondary school stage. While a great deal of the results focused on reading aloud, noting that dogs are good listeners and don’t judge or criticize readers, there were also numerous transferrable ideas about the impacts on reading engagement for older students as well. Having dogs nearby whilst reading can aid relaxation, slow one’s heart rate, and even lower blood pressure, whether the student is reading silently or aloud (Intermountain Therapy Animals, 2019). There is also some evidence to suggest that improving reading motivation can impact reading performance, with time spent with the dog serving as the incentive (Guthrie and Cox, 2001). Initiatives such as ‘Paws and Think’ and Reading Education Assistance Dogs (R.E.A.D) offered a strong foundation of positive evidence to encourage me to explore what benefits Berkhamsted pupils might gain from introducing my canine buddies regularly into the school environment.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, we began introducing dogs into the school environment under the title of 'Well-being' dogs and then explored the impact of 1:1 sessions with these dogs alongside particularly reluctant readers, timetabling students with one of the dogs for 30 minutes a week during the 2019/20 school year.1 The initial plan was to explore pupil well-being through questionnaires as well as take a baseline assessment of reading age at the start of a 10-week programme and then again at the end of the period of time. Having visited the Institute of Education to outline my hypothesis for action research, I was advised to lower my ambition levels from what I had characterised as hard data and measuring progress to a less concrete, softer, but no less significant, impact of having dogs in school. Indeed, the Literature Review (Hall et al., 2016) I evaluated at the start of my project gave so many potential avenues for exploration as noted above.

These 'Well-being' dogs became a part of the daily experience of many pupils walking around the campus. However, those experiences were generally limited to offices, duties and drop-in appointments, as the dogs were not actually present in lessons. It felt like a missed opportunity not to incorporate these animals into lessons with students who were unphased by their presence. While my initial intention was to focus on tracking potential improvements in reading age encouraged by the dog, the aftermath of returning to the classroom in a pandemic required a shift in my objectives. The students’ well-being, concentration and focus became a new priority, following the potentially distraction-prone environment that had been online learning in the quarantine situation of 2020.

They would greet and 'pet' the dog at the start of the lesson or before the lesson began, and then interaction with the dog would be limited to one pupil at a time having a well-being break. If the dog wandered the room, pupils were welcome to 'pet' the dog, but not call her towards them or play directly with her. The contract proved an effective tool that ensured initial clarity of expectation, and while the dog’s novelty eventually wore off, the potential consequence of taking the dog out of the classroom, was enough to ensure students’ best behaviour.

Ahead of the lessons I also engaged the class in a baseline questionnaire that explored engagement in reading and reading habits (Appendix 2). Of students’ responses, an encouraging 59% claimed to read daily, with a somewhat concerning 15% noting they read only occasionally (Figure 3). While these numbers are unverified student responses, the tail (pardon the pun) of these occasional readers, led me to earmark this group as those students who might benefit most from an extra element of motivation/engagement provided by a dog’s presence.

The dog makes the atmosphere a lot more calmer and more relaxing. I have enjoyed having the dog.

The first trial was to bring the 'Well-being' dogs into two reading classes, a group of Year 7 girls and another of Year 8 boys; both classes were very excited, with a few exceptions, by the prospect of having a furry friend in lessons with them. At first, I worried that the dogs themselves would be a distraction, so to pre-empt this potential issue, all pupils entered into a classroom contract.

Prior to COVID-19, reading lessons would have taken place in the Library providing a fresh and relaxing space for reading lessons coupled with the gamification of the reading process with 'Bookopoly' but upon our return to school, Years 7 and 8 were confined to a single classroom for a majority of their lessons. The lack of a change of space risked an added monotony to their reading lessons; however, the presence of a pooch shifted this significantly. It was notable that students settled quickly at the start of lessons, fulfilling their contractual obligations, and over the course of the year there was an audible buzz coupled with a spring in their step thanks to the dogs’ presence.

Because of the Covid-related disruptions, it is hard to quantify the students’ improved engagement in their reading beyond their own anecdotal offerings, as much of the year was spent online. At this point in time, the dogs’

Figure 1 – Studious Vera

Figure 2 – Tired Molly after a hard day’s work

involvement can neither be credited nor blamed for their lack of winning position in 'Bookopoly'; however, I am encouraged by both classes’ upper-mid-table rank in terms of books read and reviews completed within the game. While the success of the action research was not intended to be measured through numerical ranking as initially considered, I credit a great deal of these students’ post-Covid enthusiasm in these classrooms to the presence of the dogs.

This enthusiasm was quantified through regular blind straw polls regarding their enjoyment of their reading (using the traffic light system) and the impact of the presence of dogs in lessons. Only two of the 39 pupils regularly voted that they did feel the dogs were not helpful. My conclusions regarding their enthusiasm linked to the dogs’ presence were also made evident by control lessons – those in which the dogs were not present. Students consistently gave higher scores in terms of enjoyment of the lesson when the dogs were involved. In fact, when the dogs were not present, students would immediately enquire as to their whereabouts and noted dissatisfaction with the dogs’ absence.

To further assess the impact that the dogs had on reading engagement and progress, pupils were invited to voluntarily offer their personal responses to the dogs’ presence in class in February. Given the ongoing COVID-19 situation, I was not able to gather responses from all of the involved students, but of those who shared thoughts, their responses were interesting to quantify the impact the dogs had on not only their experience of reading, but also on their general wellbeing and engagement in the lesson. Pupil comments included references to the ‘calming’ presence of the dogs, the ‘nice’ feeling having the dog around for a wellearned break gave, and even helping pupils ‘to read a lot’ and ‘concentrate’. Many equated the dogs to ‘fun’, ensuring lessons were ‘relaxing’, and the dogs helped some ‘de-stress’, which I feel is an important element of non-screen time in a screen-dominated COVID-19 world. When school shut down, many students who have dogs at home even took to reading with their dogs during the streamed lessons as represented in Figure 4 (overleaf).

Once we were back in school and the dogs were cleared to re-join, I took a more formal questionnaire to compare experiences before and after the 'Well-being' dogs being in class and the feedback was noteworthy.

Pupils can be seen to be happier when asked to read to themselves with 22% happy to read to themselves after the time with the dogs compared to 10% before.

Prior to “Well-being” dog’s presence (Oct 20)

Post- “Well-being” dog involvement (May 21)

Fig 3: How often do you read outside school for pleasure?

Fig 5: How do you feel when you are asked to read to yourself? (5 is Happy and 0 is Physically ill)

Prior to “Well-being” dog’s presence (Oct 20)

Post- “Well-being” dog involvement (May 21)

Fig 6: How do you feel when you are asked to read to the class? (5 is Happy and 0 is Physically ill)

There also appears to be an increase in students feeling more comfortable reading to the class (moving from 66% up to 80%), which is encouraging. The extra spaces for comment were also taken up well with some highlights below:

'I love having the dog around, because when you are focusing hard on a book, it is always nice to stroke the dog every now and then.'

'I have loved have [sic] the dog in but I don't really thinks [sic] that she helps with my reading. I do love the company though. I also love how calm and sweet she is and she does make me smile when I see her.'

'I really enjoy the dog coming in and I am always excited for my reading lessons.'

'I think I like the dog being there now I am used to it. I am scared of dogs but sometimes it is a little scary when she is excited. I still read in the lessons but I do notice she is there. I don't mind either way, but it does help me build my confidence slowly around dogs, so I do find it useful because I can always quietly read and it won't distract me too much.'

'I don't really notice Vera too much but she's a nice addition to the room and I enjoy having her here.'

'I think it’s very good to have Vera here because whenever i find it hard to concentrate i watch Vera for a bit and that helps reset my concentration'

'Great to have her really like her but can sometimes be slightly distracting'

'I don't notice that the dog is in the room until I lift my head up and see the massive fluff ball but when I do look at the massive fluff ball I always think that it's cool that there is a dog in the room where I'm supposed to learning [sic] but I do sometimes think that it is distracting because I would be in the middle of reading

a sentence but then I would look down at the dog and lose my place on the page.'

'I really like having a dog around whilst reading because it is really calming!'

It is really encouraging to read the pupils’ comments, those positive, reflective and even critical, as it helps me analyse the process and refine it ahead of next year. A more uniform experience for pupils in their reading lessons would be ideal, as many noted the positive impact the 'Well-being' dogs had on their reading experience. Clearly, logistically this simply would not be possible; however, we can certainly look at getting a dog into at least one reading lesson for every class. There was real joy communicated through the final questionnaire and the long process of this action research has proved worthwhile. Stepping back, there have been so many variables involved in trying to enrich the pupils’ reading experience, but the presence of 'Well-being' dogs has been a positive one and I hope to continue to build on these foundations.

As a final note, I’ve included the reflections of a Year 13 student, highlighting her positive experience with the presence of these dogs – 'I really appreciate having the "Well-being" dogs in school, especially Molly and Vera when we have them in our tutor time. I think it gives us something else to focus on as a bit of a distraction and relax instead of stressing over work. I also think seeing "Well-being" dogs around school and just being able to give them a stroke or a cuddle is really useful for all of us because it leaves us feeling happier and more relaxed.'

BIO

Stuart Simons is Head of English at Berkhamsted and is passionate about reading and education. He specialised in AfricanAmerican Literature and Critical Theory whilst at Sussex University. In his spare time, he likes walking or running behind his Golden-Doodle Vera and supporting, through thick and thin, the once-mighty Arsenal.

Figure 4 - Rose with Jess and Berry! Megan with Roxy.

Reading with dogs even during Lockdown!

(Re)finding the Main Verb: Ancient Languages and Educational Inequality

Though it would be reductive to claim that Classics-the study of ancient (principally the Greek and Roman) languages, literatures, and cultures-has enjoyed a truly stable place in the academy at any point in recent history, it is certainly true that the last year or two have been a period of especial challenge and uncertainty for the future of the field. Social media, and in particular Twitter, have housed a sustained and animated debate around what Classics can and should offer us in the twenty-first century. Though the conflict is complex and is closely related to the current drive to decolonise the curriculum, a lot of the issue in Britain really comes down to the central problem of how Classics may or may not perpetuate educational inequality at all age levels. This problem is nowhere clearer than in the parallel issue of whether ancient languages should retain their central position in the way Classics is taught and assessed. It is this question that I will attempt to deal with here.

Although some see Latin and Ancient Greek as inevitably gatekeeping institutions which restrict access to a niche field, closer inspection of the contemporary situation in the UK suggests that the linguistic element of Classics offers a unique opportunity to renovate the subject. Though its elitist past is undeniable, Classics also has a rich history of democratisation (Hall and Stead, 2020); reaffirming the value of ancient languages, I will argue, is one effective way to continue this tradition which, alongside the denigration of the humanities tout court, finds itself in a precarious but far from hopeless position. Neville Morley realises that '[w]hile masquerading as a pedigree animal, [Classics] was always, in reality, a mongrel—fighting for territory with other, larger, and more popular disciplines' (2018, 68), but this amorphousness can be in part resolved through a characterisation of Classics which places Latin and Ancient Greek at its core. It is important to note that this redefinition needn't exclude the cultural and literary-critical strands of Classics which have been developing over the last century, or signal a complete return to the continental philological bent which Bulwer describes as a 'rigorously grammatical pedagogic method' and depicts as alive and well in contemporary Europe (2018, 67). Rather, a broad Classics curriculum which endorses and foregrounds rather than regrets and diminishes its dependence on ancient languages can work towards dealing with the socio-political scrutiny which it is undergoing. Drawing on recent pedagogical scholarship and my own experiences in the Latin classroom (as a student at Berkhamsted, an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford, and a volunteer TA elsewhere), I will make the case that '(re)finding the main verb' in both Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 5 settings works against educational inequality, before briefly considering how these claims relate to pedagogical approaches. Ultimately, I will argue that recovering the historic emphasis on ancient languages in Classics can help secure and enhance its future.

Educational inequality in the UK is as prevalent and relevant at the Primary level as it is at the Secondary level, particularly given that it is during those ages that essential skills such as literacy, oracy, and numeracy are initially developed. In recent years, this age-bracket has been targeted by organisations which realise the potential which Classics possesses to enhance the

development of such primordial skills. The organisation Classics in Communities was established to make the most of the curriculum reforms in 2014 which, for the first time, allowed ancient languages to be chosen in the place of MFL for children aged from six to eleven. Charities such as The Iris Project and The Latin Project are working to facilitate the study of Latin in Primary Schools while the AHRC-funded ACE (Advocating Classics Education) is assisting the public perception of such schemes. These programmes are a cause for hope not only because of their frisson of activity over the last few years, but more importantly as a consequence of the evidence they are providing that ancient languages have a crucial role to play in ameliorating educational disparity. Holmes-Henderson, Hunt, and Musié in their seminal survey of these efforts, Forward with Classics, note that '[i]nitial analysis of the data reveals positive trends in the development of literacy skills, when a classical language is used as the medium for (or supplement to) literacy learning' (2018, 3), which suggests that the benefit of offering Classical languages to Key Stage 2 is not simply that it shares around cultural capital historically denied to the state-maintained sector but that it has a peripheral impact on attainment and development.

'Classics as an educational discipline has been one of the best of all at radically reinventing itself'

area of English morphology and orthography. This was strong evidence for me that ancient languages have a real practical value in democratising Primary education as well as they redistribute cultural capital. This utility is not far from what Morley realises was perceived in Renaissance humanism: 'The usefulness of Latin in this context was that it allowed communication [...] across linguistic boundaries, rather than because it gave access to the treasury of ancient thought—and so it was seen as a basic skill associated with one's schooldays' (2018, 6). Thus, the current efforts to deploy Latin to socially beneficial ends in state-maintained primary schools suggest that ancient languages are tools for improving standards of education in a tangible and deeply important way.

Mary Beard

Far from perpetuating inequality, ancient languages are thus beginning to offer a powerful tool to increase educational opportunity early on in students' lives, and I have been lucky enough to witness this first-hand, having spent a week in 2019 and a week in 2020 as a volunteer TA with The Latin Programme teaching in inner-city schools. One salient memory is a lesson in which we were using the genitive case in Latin (which mainly indicates possession) to explain possessive apostrophes in English. By way of brief explanation, Latin marks the case and number of its nouns with inflections such that there are specific endings for nominative singular, nominative plural, genitive singular, and genitive plural— for one group of nouns these are <us>, <i>, <i>, and <orum> in order. While English does a similar thing, it's a far more complex paradigm given that all of these four depend on a specific combination of the letter <s> and an apostrophe—in order, <>, <s>, <'s>, and <s'>.

Teaching the English paradigm through the Latin one was a remarkable experience, especially with classes in which a substantial proportion of the students had acquired English as a second language: using translation exercises from English into Latin and vice versa enabled the students to get their head around a deeply confusing

Though teaching ancient languages at Key Stage 2 addresses inequalities in literacy, the place of Latin and Ancient Greek in the pre-university Key Stage 5 context is one that has implications for inequalities in access to higher education, particularly to the most prestigious universities. Currently, A Levels in Latin and Ancient Greek are almost entirely taught in independent or selective schools. The fiftieth CUCD Bulletin entitled 'A Level Classics poverty' shed light on the scale of the problem: 'Without change and targeted support, the subjects may simply die in the state-maintained sector' (Hunt and Holmes-Henderson, 2021, 18). Latin A Level, for example, is taken by 76% independent school candidates and those candidates are heavily concentrated in London and the South East (Hunt and Holmes-Henderson, 2021, 2-4). This has had an impact on the number of students who apply to and obtain positions on Classics courses at competitive universities, leading to a cycle of privilege and exclusivity in Classical Higher Education which, in reality, finds its genesis at Key Stages 4 and 5.

Attempts have been made to rectify the situation at the university and at pre-university levels. The Classical Civilisation A Level has been championed as a solution, and Khan-Evans has shown that the course, which has no language component and teaches texts such as The Odyssey in translation, is particularly popular with learners who haven't experienced the study of Classics beforehand (2018). In combination with this Key Stage 5 opportunity, many universities are now offering Classics courses which integrate the teaching of Latin and/or Ancient Greek ab initio: the Oxford Course 2 programme has become a well-documented example of this. Yet both the recent CUCD bulletin and my

personal experience indicate that to pursue this halfwayhouse and essentially give up on the prospect of ancient languages being (re)introduced to state-maintained sixth forms would be a mistake. Hunt and HolmesHenderson have demonstrated that because A-level Classical Civilisation is not facilitating the attainment required for entry into Russell Group universities, it is not having the positive impact which it purports to on access to competitive higher education (2021, 15). Turning to experience, despite the best efforts of institutions such as Oxford to create alternative pathways into Classics and construct ab initio language courses, they are far from imperfect, and the Classics Faculty at Oxford is currently working to reform their curriculum partly due to the persistent divide between those who have had the privilege of studying an ancient language before arriving and those who have not.

We can surmise, then, that the only way to address the inequality in access to Classics courses at British universities is to begin to deal with the issue at the preuniversity level, and in a way that admits the necessity of some ancient language competency. While some are calling for a radical decentring of Latin and Ancient Greek within the field, that sort of reform is years away from completion, and in the end unlikely at the most competitive universities. We are left in a situation where only a bold reassertion of the value of studying Latin and Ancient Greek at A Level can generate real change; (re)finding the main verb is not just attractive at Key Stage 2 but imperative at Key Stage 5 if Classics is to be democratised in modern Britain.

However, this call for a linguistic focus in Classics does not come without pedagogical implications, especially given that one of the principal reasons for the reputation that Latin has for exclusivity is perhaps the perception of the way it was and in some cases still is taught. Hunt has usefully divided ancient language pedagogies into three: (i) the grammar-translation approach; (ii) the reading approach; and (iii) the communicative approach or the 'direct method' (2016). At Berkhamsted, I experienced essentially a combination of (i) and (ii) (using the relatively standard Cambridge Latin Course and John Taylor's textbooks) and in Lower Sixth had occasional lessons which made some use of (iii); this is, according to Hunt, a fairly typical situation in the UK, which currently favours reading in contrast to the sustained European insistence on grammar-translation (2018, 90). It is the first of these pedagogies—the grammar-translation approach—that is arguably responsible for the view of Latin as inherently exclusive due to its emphasis on metalinguistic terminology. This has precipitated claims such as 'a grammar-translation course is heavy on the

understanding of grammar and vocabulary prior to the translation of Latin' (Darby, 2018, 142). My experience at The Latin Programme, however, suggests that this is a short-sighted view of the situation. In actuality, a combination of grammar-translation and reading can be the time at which, not 'prior to which', children are taught the 'understanding of grammar' which Darby assumes is a prerequisite; indeed, the course can be all the more valuable for that. Thus, although Hunt and others are keen to emphasise the way that the currently fashionable direct method can generate equality in the classroom, we should be alive to the power in the traditional approach of rigorous grammatical analysis, for it is this pedagogical framework which is improving literacy at Key Stage 2 and allowing students to feel the benefit of their ancient language work elsewhere—in MFL as well as English Language GCSE settings, for example.

Upon reflection, ancient languages stand out as a strand of Classics which has a real potential to address educational inequality in the UK at the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary levels. Perhaps the leading bastion of Classics currently in the public eye, Mary Beard, has asserted that 'Classics as an educational discipline has been one of the best of all at radically reinventing itself' (2018, xvi), and an attention to the etymology of the verb reinvent here—only afforded through a study of Latin!—leads us to see its literal original meaning: to 'find' (from invenio, literally, 'to come into') 'again' (from re-, a prefix indicating iteration/repetition). In the end, this essay has been an attempt to argue that it is in refinding the prominence of ancient languages in Classics that we can truly reinvent its socio-political function.

BIO

James Green left Berkhamsted in 2020 with A*s at A Level in English Literature, Spanish, Latin, and Mathematics, as well as full marks in an EPQ on Darwinism in the novels of Thomas Hardy. In his final year, he was appointed Head Boy and enjoyed success in a number of Oxbridge essay competitions. He has since begun his undergraduate study in Classics & English at Exeter College, Oxford, and regularly volunteers with organisations who widen access to Classics and higher education.

Ability Grouping at Berkhamsted

A great deal of educational research has already investigated the merits of grouping pupils by ability which may call into question the need for further research in this area (see for instance, Education Endowment Foundation, 2018; and Francis, Taylor and Tereschenko, 2020). However, there is a huge diversity of approaches which fall under the label of ‘grouping pupils by ability’ and this can make it problematic to confidently apply to Berkhamsted the general research findings, which are based on meta-analyses studying a diverse range of practices from a wide range of contexts. This article presents the results of a collection of research into setting at Berkhamsted in Key Stages 3 and 4.

What effect does ability grouping have on pupil attainment?

The overwhelming consensus of the educational research over the last fifty years has been that there is little or no overall benefit to pupil attainment from grouping by ability (Francis et al., 2017; Taylor et al., 2017). However, same-ability grouping is associated with a higher spread of achievement than mixed ability grouping (Hallinan and Sorensen, 1983; Wiliam and Bartholomew, 2004). This increased spread has been attributed to the advantages of grouping by ability being experienced by those with high prior attainment and the disadvantages being felt by the lowest attainers. This discrepancy of effect can be accounted for by the sociolearning environment (SLE) model. This model suggests that the intellectual ability of peers within a class has an impact on progress. Pupils who are exposed to higher levels of peer ability benefit compared to those who are not. This model therefore leads us to the conclusion that the particular set to which a pupil is allocated matters more than whether the school sets at all. This is clearly a particular pertinent issue for borderline students who could be placed either in a higher or a lower set.

This concern has prompted investigations into the effect that set placement has on borderline pupils. A quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design has been used in several studies to examine this effect (Abadzi, 1984; Linchevski and Kutscher, 1998). Under this approach, pupils are assessed before they have been placed in sets and then again some time after. By analysing the regression lines for the higher and lower set, a discontinuity between those who initially fell either side of the cut-off may be identified. The nature of this discontinuity then indicates whether a group effect, if it exists, favours the higher group or the lower group.

These studies have found that although the highest students in the higher set and the lowest students in the lower seem to be unaffected by grouping by ability, students near the cut-off, who could have been classified in either group, were negatively affected if allocated to the lower group.

I adapted this discontinuity design to address the question of whether set placement makes a difference at Berkhamsted. Nine retrospective ‘investigations’ took place – each looking at a pair of adjacent sets to see whether there was such an effect. For practical reasons, these were all concerned with Mathematics attainment.

An example of the hypothetical results of such a design. a. (no discontinuity) indicates no effect. b. (positive discontinuity) indicates an effect which favours the higher group. c. (negative discontinuity) indicates an effect which favours the lower group.

The results suggested that being assigned to a particular Mathematics set in Key Stage 3 has a near-zero effect. In Key Stage 4 there was some evidence to suggest that the Mathematics set pupils are allocated to in Year 10 does make a difference to their progress over the following two years: on average, for a borderline student, being placed in the set above at the start of Year 10 was associated with finishing eleven places higher in their end of Year 11 cohort ranking comparatively with being placed in the set below. These results were not statistically significant, but repeating this experiment for other cohorts in the future may provide more confidence in the findings.

Examples of Discontinuity Graphs at Berkhamsted: that on the left shows a positive effect for higher set placement; the right shows a near-zero negative effect.

What effect does ability grouping have on pupil experience?

Large scale surveys have found that the majority of pupils reported preferring setting by ability to mixed-ability classes. However, while those in lower sets tended to prefer mixed-ability groupings, pupils in top sets tend to prefer setting. These results are considerably more pronounced with boys, whereas there is a tendency for girls in particular to feel under pressure and lack confidence if in the top set. This corroborates previous research which suggested that girls are particularly negatively affected by high-competition, high-pressure, highanxiety, high pace classrooms (Boaler, 1997).

One plausible position that pupils could hold, which is notable by its absence in the literature, is that setting may be appropriate in some subjects but not in others. This

may be because studies have tended to focus on setting in general, or setting in one particular subject, neither of which would bring this view out. There is considerable evidence that this position is held by some teachers. Some subjects, such as Mathematics, which are perceived as requiring the working through of a body of subject knowledge in a logical sequence, are often considered to be inappropriate for mixed ability teaching whereas in subjects which are thematic and involved more class discussion, mixed ability teaching is often seen much more favourably.

The literature on how set placement affects selfconfidence is disappointingly mixed. Some research has found small self-confidence benefits for pupils in top sets in comparison with those in lower sets (Kulik and Kulik, 1982; Ireson and Hallam, 2009). However, other studies have

found the opposite effect with higher self-confidence occurring in lower ability groups (Preckel, Gotz and Frenzel, 2010; Belfi et al., 2012). This lack of consensus can be explained by the presence of two competing mechanisms: the first of these is the 'big-fish-little-pond' effect, in which pupils compare themselves to their class mates and consequently those in lower sets have the advantage of comparing themselves to others of comparatively lower-ability than those in higher sets. The second mechanism is an extra-group comparison in which pupils compare their own achievement with that of students across the cohort, known as the ‘basking-in-reflected-glory’ effect. The relative strengths of these two competing effects may vary according to the context of the research and timing, thus explaining the discrepancy. One plausible explanation is that in the immediate aftermath of set placement, the ‘basking-in-reflected glory’ effect is much stronger as set placement is at the forefront of pupils’ mind and they have not yet had the opportunity to compare themselves to their new classmates. As time progresses, this becomes less important and the ‘bigfish-little-pond’ effect takes over.

'Pupils reported enjoying subjects in which they were set by ability'

My investigation involved undertaking a large scale online questionnaire, consisting of 36 statements about the pupil experience of Mathematics, English, and school in general, and asked respondents to mark their level of agreement with each statement on a four-point Likert scale. This allowed for quick and powerful quantitative analysis of pupil responses cross-referenced with their set placement. This was supplemented with six semi-structured interviews with pupils.

The semi-structured interviews revealed that some students, possibly disproportionately girls, experience considerable acute emotional and confidence-changing response to set changes:

'In year nine, when you get the email, you’re all really anticipating it because you’re really nervous that you’re going to be put in a low set…My sister got moved down a set in Mathematics last year and she was so upset. She was utterly destroyed. So I think it does have a big impact on your confidence, but at the same time if you get into the top set, you can kind of have like a confidence boost that all the hard work has paid off.' (Pupil F)

The questionnaire produced a number of highly statistically significant results of correlations between set placement and inclination to agree with the statements. There is conclusive evidence that set placement in English and Mathematics at Berkhamsted is associated with general academic self-perception as well as subject-specific self confidence. This association is stronger as pupils move up the school and sets become more granular. This does not necessarily imply that set placement is responsible for the changes in self-confidence, as the causation could occur in the other direction, or perhaps more plausibly, the correlation could be the result of a third variable which has an effect on both self-confidence and set-placement (e.g. attainment). Future research could be done to establish if these correlations still occur when correcting for attainment. The finding that Mathematics set allocation is a considerably better predictor of self-perception of ‘cleverness’ than overall position in the year averaged across all subjects suggest that they might. An absence of a causal mechanism also does not detract from the finding that pupils in our school tend to derive their self-confidence through comparison with their wider cohort (i.e. ‘basking in reflected glory’) rather than those in their class (i.e. ‘big-fish-small-pond’) and that this effect increases as they go up through the school. However, the experiences of pupil C and the friend of pupil B (below), should remind us that this is not a uniform effect:

'I think it’s quite balanced…for people who get put in top set…it improves your confidence at the beginning because you think "I’ve been put in a top set; that’s really helpful" but I don’t think it continues to improve the whole time, because it’s quite stressful sometimes to keep up. I think that for lower set students although it could be a hit at the beginning when they find out they’re in a lower set, I think they do get more support and they do get more encouragement and from some of my friends who have been in the set below me…in maths…their confidence has grown amazingly and then they’ve been moved up to the top set and they’re doing really well because of that.' (Pupil B)

'Well I feel like before I moved up, I was really confident in my set. I felt comfortable with who I was with...and then when I moved up, I felt

really really happy and really really confident. Then I realised that all the other people in that set were really good. I started to get worse and worse test scores and I realised that I wasn’t doing as well as I hoped to be. Then I started to feel really down about it and I’d get upset with my parents and stuff… Now that I’ve been moved back down, it’s just a bit sad, but I guess in a way it’s kind of expected.' (Pupil C)

Some of the most interesting results concerned gender. The associated confidence increase for Mathematics higher set pupils was noticeably lower for girls than for boys, which, along with the literature on this topic (Boaler, 1997), could prompt further research within the Mathematics department about improving girls’ maths confidence at the top of the cohort.

Overall, the results of the questionnaire show that pupils support ability grouping in our school. Pupils overwhelmingly reported that they felt they were in the right set for English and Mathematics and that the way that school sets pupils is fair. Pupils reported enjoying subjects in which they were set by ability, whereas support for mixed-ability classes was less clear-cut.

Concluding Remarks

It appears that there is little effect of setting at Key Stage 3 at Berkhamsted and, as the students are supportive, there seems to be no reason to make any changes. At Key Stage 4, the picture is more complex. Despite the highly statistically significant association between low academic self-confidence and lower sets and the indication that being in a lower set may have a negative impact on your progress in Mathematics, there is no clamour from the pupils to change the system. Instead, further research is needed into whether low academic self-confidence is a causal result of set placement and how the Mathematics department can mitigate against apparent under confidence amongst its brightest girls. Repeating the quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design with future cohorts would be useful, in order to establish statistical significance of the effects found in this study.

Grant McWalter has been teaching at Berkhamsted for five years. He has recently completed a Masters in Teaching Studies at the University of Birmingham.

BIO

Disciplinary Retrieval: A Case Study in English Literature

The capacity for retrieval practice to strengthen long-term retention of previously studied information is one of the most well-established principles of cognitive science. Dating at the very least to the 1880s and Hermann Ebbinghaus's experiments on memory and the forgetting curve, in which he outlined that revisiting information slows down the otherwise rapid decay of recall, retrieval practice is now a mainstay of current approaches to pedagogy. Featuring, for example, in the excellent, albeit ubiquitous, Barack Rosenshine's 'Principles of Effective Instruction' (Principle No. 1 and 10) as well as the work of Bjork and Bjork (2014) and their concept of 'desirable difficulties', it is for good reason that retrieval practice is now a routine part of lessons.

However, such popularity comes with its downsides. A recent EEF study on retrieval practice, for example, found that the impact in the classroom was perhaps not as effective as one might have hoped or assumed.

Examining this outcome in a 2019 article, Professor Robert Coe suggested this discrepancy between aspiration and practicality, could perhaps be traced to what Steve Higgins (2018) calls the 'Bananarama Principle: ‘it ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it'. Coe suggests that it is one thing to demonstrate the efficacy of retrieval practice in small scale research studies, but another matter entirely when one transfers this wholesale to be implemented into the classroom. There are, Coe indicates, bound to be frictions that have nothing to do with the underpinning cognitive science, which is incredibly robust, but rather the way in which it might be enacted. Whether, as he suggests, it might be teachers are generating retrieval based purely on factual recall (which are easier and less time consuming to produce) rather than those that require students to interrogate the information they are recalling or whether chosen questions are too easy and therefore lacking challenge, Coe's post issues a timely reminder that thinking generically rarely results in the kind of gains we might desire.

Whilst the solution is certainly not to abandon retrieval practice, which is a highly effective strategy and a key aspect of a teacher's arsenal, one way forward might be to remind ourselves, as in most areas, that the way forward lies in rooting our practices and strategies in the disciplinary traditions of the subject in which they are to be enacted. We should not then think of retrieval practice only as a generic, transferable strategy, but rather as something that specific teachers enact in specific classrooms for specific subjects. We should perhaps think of disciplinary retrieval. With this in mind, I would like to offer a case study for what exactly this might look like in my own subject of English, although the underpinning principle that retrieval ought to be treated as a strategy rooted in and enacted through disciplinary traditions is applicable to any consideration of retrieval practice.

With this in mind, a natural starting point would be to ask ourselves what might we want retrieval practice to look like in English? One direction to take would be to use gap fill exercises for key quotations students need to learn or factual recall relating to context or author biography. There is certainly nothing wrong with this, and knowing such information and being able to quickly recall key quotations

is crucial, but equally this kind of retrieval probably doesn't characterize the kind of affective, connective, synoptic thinking that does to a large extent characterize the study of English.

As an alternative approach within the English classroom, imagine the following scenario. Your students enter the classroom and are met with the below on the board: Write down your favourite word or image from [text currently being studied] and explain why this is your favourite. You might give them 5 to 10 minutes to do this in the fashion of a typical starter. They can pick any word or image and will be expected to justify it in whatever manner seems interesting to them. It’s completely low stakes and upholding that favourite maxim of the English classroom: there’s no right answer. This also requires some initial retrieval since they need to retrieve from memory, without notes, a favourite word or image. Hopefully, though, given that it is their favourite this would not necessarily pose too great a problem...!

Once this initial activity is set up and completed, now the fun can begin as we find ourselves moving towards a kind of retrieval that is squarely and confidently English-y. We could, for example, and as a first step, simply call on one student and ask them to share the word or image they selected and to explain why. We might at this point move around the room and repeat the same conversation with a couple of students and perhaps invite some others to comment. However, a variation on this straightforward start might be to ask one student for their word or image, but then ask another student to justify why the first may have chosen it. First, the student being asked to justify has to think on their feet and use their knowledge of the text to consider the significance of a word or image they may well never have considered before. They are reapplying pre-existing knowledge to consider the text potentially in a new light. However, it’s also really beneficial for the student that chose the word because, inevitably, they’ll hear new things to think about for their favourite word. You might then go back to the student that chose the word and ask them to develop the justification for it or to outline what else they had.

From this basic principle of 'tell me your favourite word', we could continue in other, interesting ways. For instance, we could ask two students for their words and ask a third student to connect them in some way or for all to write down a possible connection. The third student in this scenario is doing a lot of cognitive heavy lifting by being asked to consider a connection between what is likely to be two disparate words or images from within the text. It is likely the two words may not have been considered next to each other before and so by thinking about them in this new, realigned context the student is able to reframe

their previous conception of the image. The alternative, of course, is that the two words are already naturally connected, but this is good too as it allows further rehearsal of familiar lines of argument.

If we wanted to use this initial question for some short written practice we could easily do that, seeing retrieval not just as recalling information, but rehearsing ways of writing about texts. As one example, we could ask a student for their word and then ask students to keep their hand up if they feel their word connects. We could then gather 4 or 5 and then ask everyone to write a short analysis that explains the ways they connect. This is a great way to maximise what Doug Lemov labels ratio (the number of students thinking hard at any given time), since everyone is required to do the writing. You could then transition this into an opportunity for live modelling (where you do it too and verbalise your thought process) or live marking (where you offer in the moment feedback on a couple of the examples students have just produced). Equally, you could ask two students for their words and ask everyone to write down all the ways they could connect those two words, again shifting into the potential for live modelling or marking.

In all of this, and there are many other ways we could develop or extrapolate from the starting activity of writing down a single favourite word or image, we are privileging a kind of retrieval that is specific to and immersed in the disciplinary traditions and norms of what it means to experience English as a subject. In this example, we are viewing retrieval practice not as disconnected from the subject in which it is enacted, as Coe seemed to be warning us against, but rather working within and for it. The same logic could and should apply to any subject. Indeed, this is where the most exciting and interesting thinking takes place at a pedagogic level: what does this look like in my subject and how can it be made to make sense for my discipline? It is at this intersection, between the discipline and the underpinning cognitive principles, such as with retrieval practice, that we can hope to ensure maximum impact, thinking deeply and carefully about what exactly this intersection looks like in the classroom.

BIO

Dr. Andrew Atherton is currently Director of Research and Academic Enrichment at Downe House, which involves co-ordinating whole school educational research as well as various enrichment opportunities, including the Oxbridge Programme. Prior to Downe House, he taught undergraduate literature for 5 years whilst completing a PhD in twentiethcentury literature.

Can ‘Mark Making’ Art help weak spellers develop their handwriting?

Introduction

Poor handwriting, spelling, and written organisational skills are often misunderstood to be one and the same. As both weak spelling and fine motor skills are often identified in children with SEND needs, the cause of poor handwriting can be overlooked and misunderstood. This research project was conducted with the aim of exploring the possibility of a link between poor handwriting and poor spelling, and how pedagogy can be adapted to best support pupils. Extensive research into spelling interventions has been conducted over recent years. Guidance is frequently changing and evolving; however, the role of handwriting is rarely discussed. Within the National Curriculum, reference to handwriting is scarce and specific pedagogy is not noted. Therefore this project aimed to open up the pedagogy surrounding handwriting instruction. This study explored the effectiveness of a ‘Mark Making’ intervention programme in supporting pupils who are weak in spelling and handwriting.

Literature review

Despite the growing use of IT in schools and increased provision of word processing arrangements for SEND pupils, much scholarship still strongly argues that handwriting holds an important position within contemporary education. Karavanidou (2017) explores the evolving context of 21st-century education, finding written script and the art of handwriting to be superior to that of typeface. Further discussion of the use of typing as a solution for poor handwriting highlighted the importance of the process of handwriting – combining both memory skills and visuomotor functions. The underlying theory, from which this project has been developed, is the notion of automaticity. Medwell and Wray build on the work of LaBerge and Samuels (1974) who defined automaticity as ‘having been achieved when a process can be effected swiftly, accurately and without need for conscious attention’ (2007, 7). Within the context of handwriting, automaticity refers to the ability of an individual to recall spelling from memory, and combine that knowledge with an understanding of graphic marks to produce written script without overloading the working memory. Medwell and Wray (2007) state that a child must reach a stage of automaticity of either skill, and if they do not, they will not be able to balance the workload of the working memory efficiently. This notion of automaticity in both skills highlights the need for further exploration of how each skill can be isolated from the other to allow for mastery in one before progressing to combining both skills. Traditionally, interventions have focused on developing spelling, though this project explored how handwriting pedagogy can be adapted to focus on the automaticity of handwriting, allowing the working memory to be freed up to allow for greater focus on spelling during written tasks.

Mark Making

Mark Making is a form of artwork based on using lines. Lines are straight, curved, layered and used to create block colour. Adapted from art-based schemes of work, Mark Making initiatives offer a more objective approach to forming lines, providing the opportunity to explore shape, pattern, and layering without external pressures for perfection or a prescriptive success criterion. For this project, no official scheme of work was followed. Instead, Mark Making principles were used to create an intervention programme which was based on the principle of establishing mastery in the formation and control of lines, in order to enable progress with handwriting. Mark Making strips handwriting pedagogy back to basics, facilitating a slower progression where single skills are isolated and mastery established, which Cahill (2009) argues is crucial to establishing orthographic-motor integration and eventually automaticity. For the intervention programme, a series of Mark Making activities were designed based upon the key handwriting objectives used in Year 4. Figure 1 outlines the intervention programme, examples of activities and the link to handwriting targets.

Intervention group and programme

The intervention group was created following formative assessment by class teachers. 10 children were selected (9 boys and 1 girl). Analysis of class data and annual progress testing in English data showed a common weakness in spelling across the intervention group. Intervention sessions were held weekly for 12 weeks for 20 minutes a week. Sessions were held outside of curriculum time. Pre-intervention questionnaires and assessment were conducted in week 1, and post- intervention questionnaires and assessment completed at the end of the 12 weeks.

Data collection

Data was collected in three different ways to give a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data, in the form of observations and a questionnaire, was collected alongside quantitative assessment data. Data was collected and analysed with the aim of answering two questions: can Mark Making help children who are weak spellers develop and progress with their handwriting? how can using a Mark Making intervention programme

help increase understanding of the pedagogical needs of pupils working on handwriting, especially those who are weak spellers?

Observations provided an insight into the children’s understanding of the role of handwriting practice. Through discussion and open conversation, children noted links between the art-based Mark Making activities and traditional handwriting practice, demonstrating that Mark Making was aiding them in building their understanding of the process of forming and positioning lines. Furthermore, the children showed an increased awareness of how the foundation skills of handwriting are present in more aspects of learning than simply handwriting, which had a positive effect on their mentality towards handwriting. Another important finding was the comments pupils made about their own work, namely that the closer the task was to writing and forming letters, the more critical pupils were about their work. Even without attempting tasks, pupils made remarks about the difficulty of tasks and how successful they would be, most commonly predicting a negative outcome with specific mention of comparison to others.

Data collected through observations does little to help build an understanding of how Mark Making can aid

Figure 1

progress, but it is useful in building an understanding of the pedagogical needs of pupils when working on handwriting. Observations highlighted a need to understand how a task as strictly prescriptive as cursive handwriting has an impact on pupils’ perceptions of their ability. The comments made showed that pupils did not just negatively regard their handwriting ability, but because handwriting was often linked to spelling, and developed during English curriculum time, children also reflected negatively on their ability in English as a whole. This thus demonstrated that pupils needed both pedagogical and emotional support.

Analysis of the pre- and post-intervention questionnaire further emphasises the need to understand the emotions experienced when completing handwriting tasks, and how adapting the style of these tasks with Mark Making can have a positive effect on emotional wellbeing and attainment in handwriting. Figure 2 shows that children associated more negative emotions than positive with traditional class-based handwriting sessions. Further analysis showed pupils identified themselves as feeling positive and determined at the start of a task but reported that by the end they felt frustrated and angry. The reference to frustration is interesting when viewed with Medwell and Wray’s (2007) notion of overloading the working memory when automaticity is not yet achieved. Comparatively, when this bottleneck effect is removed from the working memory, as spelling is removed from the process, pupils identified themselves as feeling a range of emotions which were more positive, and not a single child reported feeling frustrated - as displayed in Figure 3.

Emotions felt when practising handwriting in lessons

activities completed in lessons

Emotions felt during intervention sessions

Again, the analysis here does not indicate whether progress was made in terms of handwriting attainment, but it does show that progress was made in terms of children’s ability to process, access, and complete a task in a more sustainable and healthy way.

Assessment data provided an alternative understanding of the effectiveness of Mark Making. So far, analysis has highlighted how understanding can be developed through using Mark Making, and pedagogy can be informed as a result of this increased understanding, but the effectiveness of it as an intervention programme has not yet been explored. Assessing handwriting is difficult: there are few tools available to assist with assessment, and, by nature, handwriting rather distinctively is

activities completed in intervention sessions

Comparison of the number of targets not yet achieved between pre-and postintervention assessment

Number of targets not yet reached

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

4 handwriting target

Pre-intervention assessment against handwriting targets

Pre intervention assessment against handwriting targets

Pre intervention assessment against handwriting targets

September 2020

September 2020

September 2020

Clear descenders

Clear ascenders

both objective and subjective. Objectively, letters are either formed correctly or incorrectly. This approach to assessment is very binary and offers little insight into progress made or level of mastery. Subjectively, one person’s idea of neat, well-formed handwriting is different to another’s.

Leading strokes

Finger spaces

Evenly sized letters

Joined letters Year

Achieving target

Not achieving target

4 handwriting target

Number of children achieving target

Number of children achieving target

Post-intervention assessment against handwriting targets

Post intervention assessment against handwriting targets

September 2020

September 2020

Clear descenders

Clear ascenders

Leading strokes

Finger spaces

Evenly sized letters

Joined letters Year

Number of children achieving target

Figure 5

'Mark Making handwriting can be better understood as a reflection of personality'

Therefore, for the purpose of this study, pupils’ handwriting was assessed against a series of targets which were objective and then moderated to minimise the effect of subjective opinion. This resulted in a relatively narrow data set from which interpretation is limited. What can be seen in Figure 4 is that all children did make progress following the 12-week programme. Without greater detail on specific letters, speed, and placement, it is difficult to establish a causal correlation between the data and the intervention programme and progress seen cannot be solely attributed to the intervention programme. Factors such as age and the increased frequency of writing as the term progressed, must all be considered. Figure 5 provides more detail into which targets saw the greatest increase. The fact that ‘leading stroke’ (the one target not specially targeting by the intervention programme) saw the lowest increase would suggest that the intervention had a positive impact as those areas which were targeted saw a comparably greater increase.

Although the data does not show a strong and direct progression as a result of the intervention programme, the intervention programme had no negative impacts on attainment. Moreover, the positive impact made on pupils’ wellbeing, selfefficacy, and esteem, provides sufficient evidence to suggest that it is an effective intervention programme, particularly for weak spellers.

Key findings

Can Mark Making Art help weak spellers develop their handwriting?

Mark Making can help all children to develop their handwriting skills in a safe and enabling environment, but it is particularly beneficial for weak spellers. By removing the presence of both letters and spelling, pupils are able to avoid overloading their working memory, and therefore are more likely to be able to develop individual skills to mastery level. This will enable the automaticity of handwriting, which, in turn, has the potential to help facilitate better progress

with spelling. Using Mark Making as an intervention does not remove the need for formal instruction on letter formation. Instead, it ensures a solid foundation from which to progress. A combination of both traditional letter formation and Mark Making activities would be beneficial.

How can using a Mark Making intervention programme help increase understanding of the pedagogical needs of pupils working on handwriting, especially those who are weak spellers?

The importance of the emotional wellbeing of pupils when working on handwriting is highlighted as being influential on progress. Pupils’ mental wellbeing when approaching and discussing handwriting drew attention to the need of practitioners to better understand pupil needs. As stated above, the bottleneck effect caused when overloading the working memory was identified as a barrier to learning for weak spellers. However, analysis of the emotional impact also demonstrates how mental wellbeing can too be a barrier to learning. Pupils noted how handwriting affects their confidence across English and they felt their handwriting reflected their overall academic ability. A strict, traditional understanding of handwriting instruction, being centred upon reaching an end goal which is prescriptive and rigid, has the ability to negatively impact pupils’ mental wellbeing. Mark Making handwriting can be better understood as a reflection of personality, centred around creativity, design and difference. Mark Making enables learning by creating a safe and encouraging learning environment. Accurate formation of letters is important, but without an appreciation of variety and flair, it can stifle progress. Therefore, Mark Making can help practitioners increase pedagogical understanding, which can help facilitate greater progress and learning moving forward.

Recommendations

- Tasks, such as working towards a pen licence and meeting handwriting targets, should be introduced earlier than Year 4, to avoid a significant gap in abilities developing and becoming noticeable to pupils.

- Mark Making should be used in conjunction with letter formation work. And for best results, Mark Making should be used first to establish mastery before progressing onto formal letter formation.

- Mark Making can be adapted for use as an intervention group or used for whole-class teaching; it can be linked to topics and reflect pupil interests.

- Class teachers and Art specialists could work together to incorporate Mark Making art into the curriculum, offering a range of materials, tasks, and degrees of structure.

The scale of this study was limited. Further research into long term effects of using Mark Making, and the impact on intervention groups in different year groups, would be of use in the future. This study focuses on an intervention group who were both weak in spelling and at handwriting by exploring how adapting handwriting provisions can enable progression. In addition to this study, further research into adapting spelling provisions and whether this results in an impact on handwriting would be of interest. Continuing to explore the notion of automaticity, but from the perspective of mastering spelling, rather than the handwriting emphasis of this study, might also prove useful.

BIO

Daisy Goldhagen has worked at the Prep School for three years. Previously, she studied at Durham University and holds a BA in Education Studies and Geography, an MA in Education Studies, and a PGCE.

Soundscapes of the self

Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music: Fifty Years of Sound and Silence was published by Routledge in November 2020 as a celebration of the innovative work of John Paynter and Peter Aston. The purpose was to build on the main themes of this work: the child as artist and the process of making music. The intention was to integrate practical work with critical and analytical thinking and consider where the next fifty years might lead in terms of music making.

My creative project, Soundscapes of the Self, was discussed in this work. In response to Paynter and Aston, it explores the nature of sound, the importance of understanding that true listening is hearing with attention, and how to explore the process of creating a soundscape which has a personal meaning. It considers how sounds can evolve into a composition and how to use the technologies which we have available to us in order to do so.

Places and communities have long been defined visually, though there is an increasing interest in investigating our sonic environment. This encompasses a wide range of practitioners, from architects to ecologists, and sound artists and composers. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer, was fascinated by the sonic environment and how we popularised the idea of the ‘soundscape’. He was especially interested in exploring how we could make sense of the sonic environment (see Schafer 1993). Now with the easier availability of technologies, this offers an accessible means of composing.

A soundscape can be designed by the composer to represent an experience, a memory, or to evoke a sense of place within a community. Creating a soundscape of the self enhances one’s understanding of personal space and identity.

The very nature of these compositions are an exploration of sound and silence, relying less on the use of repeated rhythms or melodic patterns. Critical to the making of a

soundscape is a refocused approach to listening. We are surrounded by sound and don’t often take the time to listen or to ‘hear with attention’. The American composer Pauline Oliveros, pioneer in the development of experimental and post-Second World War electronic music, emphasised the importance of ‘deep listening’ which is:

Listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep listening represents a sense of heightened awareness and awareness to all that is there.

'As a composer I make my music through Deep Listening.'

(Oliveros 2002, 27)

The central principle of this project was to encourage the pupils to develop the concept of listening as being ‘hearing with attention’. We often discard the sounds around us as being unimportant. In order to achieve a state of deep listening we have to be aware of and include everything.

Such a state was evocatively promoted by Oliveros as, ‘Take a walk at night, and walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears’ (1974, 5).

As a preliminary activity, the class were asked to sit quietly, closing their eyes to listen as deeply as possible to the surrounding sounds.

Upon a second time of listening, they were to make a note of the different types of sound that can be heard. These sounds were described in a table with reference to pitch, duration and timbre.

Pupils were asked if they felt they could represent these sounds visually. A useful exercise was to look at examples of other graphic scores, to demonstrate how composers have notated their work, not in the conventional sense, but through imaginative visual description.

As a second preliminary activity, using the work of sound ecologists Gage and Krause (see, for example, Krause 2008) we considered how sounds might be classified in terms of the respective fields of Biophony (birds and animals), Geophony (non-biological natural sounds) and anthrophony all sounds produced by humans.

These terms are used by those working to understand the ways in which the interactions of humans in their environment impacted upon ecological conservation and so linked with aspects of other subjects which the pupils were studying and aware of. We discussed the sounds you might hear walking in town, if you’re near a train station, a cafe, the sounds of Ashridge forest.

The aim of this creative project was to create a soundscape unique and personal to you and where you live. You could take an aspect of your day, or surroundings and document these, and create a composition from these elements. The pupils experimented first with taking a sound walk, to identify and record interesting sounds. Some chose to make an audio narrative of a specific place, simply by choosing a location and then leaving the recording running for a minute. They created a musical scrapbook of sound taking recordings from a variety of places. Working in pairs, sounds were selected with consideration to a variety of pitch, duration and intensity.

It was lovely to see the enthusiasm of the pupils who would come back having added to their sonic scrapbook, describing the sounds they had heard and how it could work in their composition.

There are different ways of approaching the compositional process. The collected sounds could be reproduced vocally or on instruments, or input into a computer programme, of which there are various examples. Different tracks can be produced and layered, or the sounds modified and altered, (for example, by time stretching particular sounds). Alternatively, the use of recorded

sound could be combined with other instruments, or the discovered sounds could be the inspiration for an instrumental or vocal composition.

Emily, investigating her school environment, used recordings including corridor chatter, school bell, the sound of writing, and a teacher giving instructions to the class. Her composition opened with the sound of the school bell amidst indistinct chatter and footsteps over a repeated four chord pattern. This was looped to provide a hypnotic accompaniment to her soundscape. This track segued into the sound of the teacher’s voice and then to the sound of writing. The latter had a distinctive rhythmic quality and was layered to build intensity and exploit this. The bell interrupts this sequence and leads back to the opening chatter at a higher volume than before. The sound of writing, on a single track this time, but stretched to distort the sound, was used, juxtaposed with the sound of a cough, then a sigh. A final bell rings and the four chord accompaniment plays out to fade.

How do we become better listeners in a world dominated by visual stimuli while being surrounded by sounds we may not notice? Pupils were encouraged to consider how, as a part of this process, they might listen to their environment in a different way and be more mindful of the sounds by which they are surrounded. For further ideas about listening, investigate Pierre Schaefer’s theory of listening modes (see, for example, Kane 2014, 15-41). He described the ideas of ‘reduced listening’ in which he identified the musicality hidden within commonplace sounds, complex rhythms, interesting textures, or tonal qualities.

Other useful ways to research would be to listen to examples of this process in other composers. Deserts (1950-4) by Edgard Varèse in which sequences of ‘organised sound’ on tape are interwoven into a composition for an orchestra of wind, piano, and percussion. The melodic content of Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988) is based on the contour and rhythm of ordinary human speech. Many composers have been passionate lovers of nature and show this in their work.

Many of Beethoven’s were inspired by his long walks, including the Pastoral Symphony. Much of the music of Claude Debussy evokes the natural world in some form, and he was passionate about the symbiosis between music and nature, capturing the essence of landscapes and the drama of nature in works such as Les Collines d’Anacapri and La Mer. The influence of nature could be explored in the works of other composers, such a Messaiens’s depiction of birdsong in his magnum opus Catalogue d’Oiseaux and Jonathan Harvey’s Bird Concerto with Pianosong, scored for solo piano, instrumental ensemble, and electronic and computerised hardware. Lucy Claire, with her beautifully evocative soundscape compositions, notes how ‘Music is everywhere! It is in the whoosh of the wind, the patter of the rain, the rhythm of a train and the ding of a bell’ (see: <www.lucy-claire.com>).

As an extension to this project, could there be a way of creating a record over time of one’s own personal sound ecology and environment? Soundscape compositions, by their very nature, allow the listener to become immersed in the physical environment of a place, highlighting the ecology of the setting. This idea, in 2020, fifty years on from the publication of Sound and Silence, has been brought into sharp focus with the drastically altered sonic environments across the globe. Sound ecologists are mapping the world, creating a shared audio landscape. For example, the fascinating work on the site of ‘Cities and Memories’ by Stuart Fowkes (<www.citiesandmemory.com>), which explores the unique sounds of different areas, cities and natural sites, and creatively reimagines them, creating unique sounds with an innovative use of technology.

John Paynter writes in Hear and Now: an introduction to modern music in schools that ‘Music is about getting excited by sounds’ (1972, 7-14). There’s not such a big gulf between the music of today and the music of the past.

In fact, there’s no gulf at all. All that has happened is that resources have increased. There are now more sounds to be used for making music and more ways of using them. Find some sounds and start making music.

BIO

Micheila Brigginshaw is a musician and teacher of music. She is passionate about the power of music to inspire creativity and enable one to reach their full potential. She has worked at Berkhamsted School as a classroom and piano teacher since 2010. Micheila became interested in the writings of Pauline Oliveros, the development of soundscaping in the work of contemporary composers and the way in which that offered an accessible means of composing in the classroom. This led to further research and publication of an essay in Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music, published by Routledge in November 2020. Micheila continues to research in this field. This subject and the importance of ‘listening with attention’ remains a source of fascination for her.

The role of current affairs: Contemporary subject knowledge acquisition at A Level

Introduction

The aim of this action research project was to explore a more holistic approach to studying Sociology A Level, and to combine the metacognitive processes of interleaving and spaced retrieval through the application of sociology to current affairs. This action research project aimed to encourage students to explore the links between their A-level subjects and apply their subject knowledge to contemporary examples in the news. As Browne (2015, 4) notes, for real success in Sociology, students need to be critically engaged with the world around them and use their sociological knowledge to analyse the societies in which they live. ‘Pupil Voice’ gained in December 2019 notes that Year 12 students selected Sociology to gain a better understanding of the world around them; to learn about the reasons why people behave the way they do; and because Sociology links in well with their other subjects.

Academic literature notes the importance of encouraging students to be active learners (as my literature review below explores). One of the ways this can be done is by encouraging students to make links between what they are studying and what they see in real life. This will help them to understand the relevance of their studies. There are also many benefits of keeping abreast of current affairs and current events in society, such as the fact that students will develop their skills in critical reading as well as collaborating with their peers to discuss their analysis of the article.

The procedure for this project involved a focus on ‘application’ in lessons with one target Year 12 class. In these lessons, students would apply their knowledge of sociology to interpret a contemporary news article and explore any links to the exam board syllabus. Any impacts were measured through quantitative data gathered by students’ test scores on four low stakes interleaving-style tests over a 7-week period. The participants were three classes of Year 12 Sociology students. One class of 12 students made up the experimental group, while two classes of 14 and 7 made up the control groups to allow a comparison to be made.

Literature review

The first area of research I explored was looking at active learning (in Brown et al.’s (2014) use of the term). I wanted to focus on enabling students to realise how different parts of a syllabus link together. This is because in Make It Stick, Brown et al. state that one of the

strategies for students to understand concepts better is for them to apply the relevance of an abstract concept and make it something concrete; and to see the relevance of their studies. I considered here the role of holistic learning – aiming to encourage students to see how different subjects and topics link together.

In terms of active strategies for learning, the academic literature was consistent in encouraging students to learn from each other. As Lucas and Bernstein (2015, 78) note, giving students more ownership and responsibility to develop their intellectual skills can enable them to learn from one another. Group discussions are also highlighted as a way to motivate students (Black et al., 2004). Through dialogic talk among students and discussing contemporary topics, pupils can challenge one another’s views or build on them to develop their own understanding of the topic. This is particularly relevant in subjects like Sociology, where there is often no one ‘right’ answer, and all students should have the opportunity to debate their views on differing topics.

This also led me to explore literature on metacognition and strategies for interleaving. Interleaving is a process whereby students switch between topics within a subject in order to improve their learning. In Sociology, this works well by exploring a key sociological theory, such as functionalism, and then studying it in a range of contexts, such as in relation to explaining the family, the education system, and the role of crime and deviance in society. This could be done in this project by taking a news article and modelling how to link it to a variety of topics or concepts students have studied since the beginning of the course.

Low-stakes testing is a strategy which has attracted a lot of research in recent years and is a key way of practising interleaving. By encouraging frequent knowledge recall, the process of ‘forgetting’ becomes interrupted (Brown et al., 2014). As this is an area in which much research has already been done, I decided to amend the strategy and focus on encouraging students to apply their knowledge to news articles, as well as then testing them on the syllabus content, to measure any impact on knowledge recall.

Spaced practice is another area which is mentioned in academic sources as providing a good opportunity for learning. This is where students are tested or invited to recall information that they have studied some time ago. Donovan and Radosevich (1999) reviewed 63 studies carried out on students using cramming (massed practice) and spaced practice and found that students who used spaced practice had superior learning and recall compared to those using cramming. My action

research project attempted to use this strategy through the application lessons, where students needed to recall content they have studied throughout the two-year linear A-level course at various intervals.

This ties in with Newman’s (1854) long-established intellectual principle. Success in Sociology requires students to demonstrate this intellectual principle as it highlights that everything must be seen in relation to the whole picture. For example, one cannot analyse an institution in society, such as the family, the education system, religion, or media alone. Rather, one must consider the various links between all of these institutions and how they both shape, and are shaped by, society. If students can demonstrate skills in synthesising, applying, and evaluating information, they are far more likely to be successful. These skills require students to be active in their understanding, rather than just passive receivers of information. Claxton (2008) supports this idea, arguing that schools must train students in particular ways of thinking and learning, and that there must be an emphasis on learning to learn – a metacognitive principle.

Procedure

Based on the literature review, I decided to take the following plan of action: I planned a number of lessons with a specific focus on ‘application’ of sociological knowledge, where students would analyse news articles and apply any sociological links they could. They would also be encouraged to apply links to their other A-level subjects. They would then present their article to other students in the class, giving a short summary of the article, and then explaining the links they had made. To assess whether this was also helping their understanding of Sociology as a whole, I constructed a series of ‘mini tests’ which were based on the principles of interleaving and spaced practice.

In the application lessons, I would select some news articles that had some direct links to what students had been studying recently. For example, in the first application lesson, students had just finished the ‘Families and Households’ module, so I included articles which directly impacted the family, such as an article on smartphone addiction among young people; Northern Ireland decriminalising same-sex marriage and abortion; and an article discussing who is responsible for ill children. I also included other articles which had more indirect links to the family, such as an article on climate change protests, the housing crisis, and London homicides.

Students were put in pairs of similar ability and were invited to ‘bid’ for the article they wanted to analyse. This

was to allow them to have some choice, while making it slightly competitive. Following Black et al.’s (2004) recommendations about student participation, I invited students at first to brainstorm any possible links they could make between their sociological knowledge and understanding and the article they were given. They had 15 minutes to recall their knowledge and apply it to the article they had, before feeding back in a general class discussion and teaching each other. This was because the literature recommendations were to promote student dialogue as a way for them to learn from each other. An example of an annotated article can be seen in Appendix 1.

In order to measure any impact of this project, I designed a series of small tests, around the metacognition principle of interleaving. Students were tested on content they had been studying a few weeks prior to the test, with the aim of interrupting the process of forgetting and

Key findings

encouraging students to retrieve information from memory, thus strengthening their knowledge recall. For example, when studying ‘Education’ as a topic, students would complete a spaced retrieval test on the ‘Families and Household’ module.

Students completed 4 tests each over a 7-week period. An example of a test students completed can be seen in Appendix 2. This created 132 individual pieces of data as test scores – 48 in the experimental group, with 84 in the control group. For each test, an average was taken for the class results for the experimental group and the control groups. The table below shows a summary of the main sets of data – a bar chart to show the results from the interleaving tests by the experimental group (who received the application lessons) and the results from the control group.

From the results, two main conclusions can be drawn:

1. The experimental group consistently had higher test scores than the control group. This could show that the application lessons had some effect in enhancing students’ understanding of concepts. Applying the concepts in a new context – to a news article –helped them see the relevance of sociological concepts in contemporary society. This then translated in their ability to recall the concepts at a later date in the interleaving tests. The biggest difference was seen in test 2 – where the experimental group had a class average of 6.5 out of 10, while the control group had an average of 4.3.

2. The control group, despite not having any explicit application lessons, still made consistent progress

between the first and the final test. Their average increased from 3.4 out of 10 in the first test, to 6.5 by the final test. This could demonstrate that the process of regular low stakes testing and spaced retrieval can be effective. Students in the control group showed improvements throughout the 7-week period of spaced retrieval tests. These students therefore still benefited from the spaced tests which aimed to interrupt the process of forgetting and enhance their knowledge recall.

Evaluation

The data from my experimental group demonstrates that their performance on interleaving tests did improve throughout the year. In the first test, the mean score for the experimental group was 4.9 and by the last test, the mean score was 7.5. By using the principle of interleaving during the application lessons, the key concepts were more accessible for the students and had become more embedded in their thinking. They were now able to apply these concepts, rather than simply remember them.

However, it is also important to acknowledge that there may be significant individual differences in these classes such as difference in ability, the work they have done in other lessons, etc. These confounding variables were not controlled for in this project. Equally, the control groups, despite not receiving application lessons, made progress over the course of the 4 tests. This shows that it could be the practice of spaced retrieval tests which has an impact on their scores, rather than the application style lessons themselves.

This project was based solely on three Year 12 classes, all studying Sociology in the same school. Therefore, it is very difficult to generalise from my findings and observations to make any overall conclusions. Nonetheless, it has guided my own personal teaching practice and I feel confident in making similar recommendations to other colleagues and teachers of other subjects. It has been useful for the students to make links between their subjects and apply concepts from their studies to the world around them.

Now that my experimental group have entered Year 13, I am noticing the impact these application lessons has had on them. In one of the first lessons back after lockdown, I

Appendices

Appendix 1: An example of a student annotated news article from an application lesson.

Appendix 2: An example of an interleaving test.

BIO

Katie

Duce

joined Berkhamsted in 2017 and has taught a range of subjects including Sociology, Psychology, Geography and PSHE. From September 2021 she will be Second in Department for Sociology.

introduced a new theory of ‘Crime and Deviance’ to the class, and then invited them for 20 minutes at the end to read an article on the London 2011 riots and apply any of the concepts they have just learnt to the article. I was impressed by the links they were able to make –not just from the recent topic they have learnt, but also topics they had studied previously. This action research project could make a real impact on the progress that students make. This is because by making links between what they are reading and what they are studying in their subjects, they will be stretched and challenged, and will be displaying higher order thinking skills.

An investigation into the Year 9 History curriculum and its impact on the social development of pupils

This project began in September 2019 as an exploration of how we can ensure the History curriculum at Berkhamsted best supports our pupils’ social and cultural development. I certainly did not possess the foresight to predict the current national and international debate on British History that has flared up during this project. The international protests that followed George Floyd’s death and subsequent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement encouraged Berkhamsted’s History Department to accelerate some changes to the syllabus at all age groups. Frustratingly, the national debate continues to rage about what we should teach at the detriment of seeing the value in how we do so. This Action Research project has taken a conscious position against token curriculum adjustments that some have called for. Instead, it has looked at combining a review of content with a concurrent focus on method and development of meta-cognitive skills. The basis of the pedagogy used to deliver the syllabus needs to be reflected on alongside the content of that curriculum. One should not be changed without the other. As research into metacognition demonstrates, the ability to learn how to learn is of potentially equal importance to the pupils’ social development as what they learn.

This project investigates the suitability of the current KS3 curriculum for History and how it is applied at Berkhamsted School. It asks how curriculum choices impact the social development of our pupils, and how we can adapt our practice to best support them by addressing method and content concurrently. In particular, it looks at how our current study of the Atlantic Slave Trade can be adapted to prevent a purely victim narrative forming in regard to African History, as well as a better appreciation of African agency in History.

History at Berkhamsted is compulsory until Year 10. The choice was made to focus this ARP on Year 9 as it is the last year of study for a significant number of pupils. I hoped to achieve an understanding of how History at Berkhamsted can ensure that pupils are both developing as global citizens as well as developing the historical skills required by those who wish to study the subject further. As Berkhamsted benefits from relative freedom of choice on its KS3 History curriculum, it is important to look at how we can best meet the needs of our pupils with the knowledge that some will leave KS3 and never study History again. Due to COVID-19, the project was paused, and the data is still incomplete, but this has allowed me to compare new changes we have made on the syllabus to last year and action them.

Research

A key seminal text on this debate is Claire Alexander, Debbie Weekes-Bernard, and Joya Chatterji’s History Lessons: Teaching Diversity In and Through the History National Curriculum (2015). Alexander et al., concluded that schools should make a better use of resources from museums, universities, and non-exam board locations to help create a truly diverse curriculum. Importantly, the argument is made that using these diverse resources alongside a non-exam-based system of assessment can help pupils develop their social skills. This ARP does demonstrate this in action at KS3 level as an effective way of diversifying the curriculum and supporting the metacognitive development of our pupils. Resources were used from beyond the normal KS3 textbooks and pupils had much greater ownership of which resources they used. The text also makes significant recommendations about the purpose of ‘nationhood’ that are too broad to be analysed effectively in this project. Alexander et al., also explore diversifying the teacher cohort and the perceived benefit that this has on pupils’ social development. As with the discussion of nationhood, this is an issue best left for a different project, but the clear message is that merely adding and removing topics from the curriculum is not enough.

Thus, central to the debate that Alexander et. al., address is the purpose of a curriculum in contrast to just its content. This was backed up by Audrey Osler, who cautioned the Labour government in 2009 against using the History curriculum to promote national unity and identity without knowing what the end goal was (Osler, 2009). Osler persuasively argued that a better focus for a History curriculum is to help pupils become ‘cosmopolitan citizens’ as opposed to solely ‘citizens of a nation-state’. While Osler’s focus is largely on the impact of concerns about Islamic radicalisation, the arguments can be applied to the broader question of how a curriculum should function. It is clear from recent evidence, however, that Osler’s call for a diversified curriculum as means to encourage social development is not perceived to have been met.

The debate about curriculum choices is not the preserve of academics and teachers alone. A petition from July 2020 that reached over 250,000 signatures demanded that the government make Britain’s ‘colonial past compulsory’ (Petition to UK Government, 2020). In response, the Department

of Education asserted the view of the government that the current National Curriculum allows for analysis of matters of conquest at all stages. According to the National Curriculum, KS3 History should improve chronological knowledge of ‘British, local and world history’. There is a particular demand on combining depth studies with broader overviews to allow pupils to build up a confidence with the ‘long arc of development’ alongside the ‘complexity of specific aspects.’ Apart from the Holocaust, the specific topics that a school may wish to teach are not statutory. There are broad descriptors from which recommended topics may fit best, but it is not a subject beset by compulsory content. For the social enterprise group, ‘The Black Curriculum’ which was founded in 2019, this is not enough. They accuse the current system of ‘omitting the contribution of Black British history in favour of a dominant White, Eurocentric curriculum’ (Arday, 2019). It would appear from the current debate that there is more division than cohesion amongst those with a vested interest in the curriculum.

However, from this research there are accessible and practical steps that Berkhamsted can explore. This is not a cry for token action solely in response to a visible and immediate problem, but an action designed to further support the development of pupils at Berkhamsted.

Action

Applying the action points from the research to the KS3 curriculum was carried out in the following manner. This project followed a scheme of work that concludes with the essay question: ‘White middle-class abolitionists played the most significant role in ending the Atlantic Slave Trade’. (This question has now been changed to focus on the actions of slaves as a primary argument.) For 2019-2020, the Year 9 curriculum content was not adapted. Instead, I adjusted my method of delivery. I explored what the merits were of resource diversification and asked whether that should form a key platform to our approach. I had 2 sets of Year 9 boys (for this project Set A (18) and Set B (15)). Both sets were of a similar academic level. Set A were taught the Atlantic Slave Trade SoW making use of two textbooks. Set B were taught through a combination of independent research, multimedia resources, and flipped learning. (An example of a Set A task in comparison to a Set B task can be seen in Appendices 1 and 2.) Using the recommendations from the ‘Black Curriculum’ platform, Set B were encouraged to research their

own take on the question. Pupils were regularly asked to feed back on what they thought about their research, their knowledge, and their application of both (see Appendix 3).

This was one data set and there are significant variables. Despite being of a similar base ability, the pupils in Set B were predominantly ‘legacy’ pupils. They had studied History at Berkhamsted in Year 7 and 8 and found the structuring of their work a more accessible task than Set A. They also worked harder. However, it was clear from the quality of both their written and verbal contributions that pupils in Set B had a better appreciation of the role of black figures in the ending of the Atlantic Slave Trade than pupils in Set A. They avoided a sole focus on victimhood when discussing the actions of slaves and avoided a one-dimensional answer. Their feedback from the course was also more positive. However, the quality of their written work had not developed as strongly as those in Set A.

Upon reflection, the adjustments I made in 2019-2020 were effective in increasing the social awareness of pupils. They did not, however, meet the dual purpose of also developing the academic written skills any more so than the previous method. Furthermore, the question of who was most to credit for the ending of the slave trade yielded similar responses across the groups. In casual low-stakes pupil voice, Set B had a greater awareness of the topic. Yet when the official assessment was taken, this variance was less stark. It may be that the use of the metacognitive approach would yield greater reward when used over a longer period of study. I am currently exploring this with my current cohort, but the results will not be known until after their study of the Holocaust (with which I am combining it) later in the academic year.

For 2020-2021, the Year 9 curriculum has been adapted considering the BLM movement. Instead of starting the topic of Atlantic Slavery by looking at the Trade straight away, the history of the Kingdom of Mali was added. There was no textbook for this SoW, and a colleague prepared the lessons in the format of an investigation into who played the most significant role in the end of the Slave Trade. Furthermore, the focus question was adapted from focusing on ‘White middle-class’ to the actions of ‘slaves themselves’. The addition of the Kingdom of Mali was a benefit to the pupils, although the impact was lessened by the lack of time given to explore the topic. Pupil voice was more positive than with the previous cohort, Set A. They were especially keen to

explore the History of Africa pre-Slavery in much more detail. I would suggest that this was a significant social benefit of the addition of the Kingdom of Mali. Next year this will be set as research topic for Black History Month to give the pupils more time.

The adaptation of the question was more significant. In shifting the focus of the question, pupils were more inclined to explore other avenues in their answer. This is significant as the materials with which they learned were largely the same as the previous cohort. It raises questions about how we assess our pupils and their learning for the topic.

Conclusions

This project has been tripped up at various intervals. It has, however, actioned pedagogically based adjustments to the History curriculum at a KS3, Year 9 level. It has focused only on half a term of the curriculum. This narrow focus has limited the ability to make a judgement about the whole year but has allowed a targeted intervention and reflections on this.

It is apparent that Berkhamsted is very well-placed to adjust its delivery of History in Year 9 to build on its excellent current platform. With all pupils having a digital device of their own, the ability to diversify the resources used to teach the topic of Atlantic Slave Trade has been proven to have a material impact on the knowledge and skills of our pupils. This project also demonstrates the importance of not making snap curriculum decisions to address perceived areas of weakness. The two different cohorts both reveal development in social awareness and areas where they maintain previous dispositions. In suggesting actions, this project is clear that pupils benefit most when the teacher has the time to properly resource a topic and allow a pedagogy-based approach to learning. This is not a quick action to meet a current social demand. There are also legitimate questions to be asked of the mode of assessment. However, due to the current iGCSE and A-level assessment criteria, we are limited as to what we can try and achieve on this front. In any case, diversifying the curriculum is of benefit to the pupils as long as the process is supported with an understanding of skills for learning.

BIO

Will Findlay

joined Berkhamsted in 2018 and teaches History and Politics to Years 7-13. From September 2021 he will be Second in History and begin his role as Head of Old Stede House.

Appendix

The Actions of White Campaigners

1. Summarise the work of The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade

• Study source 2 and 3

1. How does William Pitt present slavery?

2. Do you agree with source 3, when it claims abolition will 'avenge peacefully ages of wrongs'? Why?

The Actions of Black Campaigners

Read the Summary of Equiano. Does Olaudah Equiano have an impact on abolition?

Appendix 2 – Research style task

Persevering: The Fight to End the Slave

Trade

Task

1

Read and research about the individual that you have been given. Remember to avoid Wikipedia unless it is for dates!

Highlight, underline or mark any comments or details that show evidence of perseverance. In this instance, we will describe perseverance as:

1. Taking risks and knowing that abolition was worth it.

2. Having the strength to continue when there is great doubt.

3. Having a long term goal.

4. Not allowing distraction from the ultimate goal; abolition.

Task 2

With your partner, you should discuss how the individual overcame the hurdle or hurdles that they were presented.

Following this discussion, answer this question; How did your figure from History use perseverance to help abolish slavery? You MUST refer to both the individual and the definitions of perseverance in Task 1.

Extension Task

If you have time, answer the following question in your books, making reference to the specific examples you highlighted in Task 1.

1. Have the actions of your individual been displayed in any films, books or songs?

Appendix 3

Set B: Selection of responses. Pupils were asked to reflect on their overall views of the resourcing, their confidence in the subject, and their awareness of different members of the campaign for abolition.

- 'I enjoyed exploring and learning about Equiano. I am not sure I knew much about former slaves actually writing and campaigning!'

- 'I think that I know that I am better at finding out about Equiano and Prince now. The research prep was probably the most useful task.'

- 'William Wilberforce was much more important but now I have found out about other people.'

- 'The best part is working together on the resources and exploring the websites. That is the best part about learning about what happened'

- 'I would prefer to have a book as well so that I can use that instead of the websites. I found the prep interesting but some of the lessons were hard to follow.'

- 'I found it much more interesting to have access to the websites.'

When Less Can Be More

'Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.'

Proverb

Metacognition, collaborative learning, feedback, scaffolding, peer tutoring, direct instruction, problem solving … the list of ways teachers and learners may sharpen their axe is long and growing: at the time of writing, a Google search for educational effectiveness returned over 445,000,000 results (in 0.61 seconds). Despite this, Professor Rob Coe (2013) of Durham University laments the poor impact of research, as measured by England's stagnant performance in international benchmarks over the last thirty years. Despite much hope and optimism, Coe believes too little is known on how to effectively translate 'what works' into different settings. While the reasons for this are complex, there is one simple ingredient that, although not sufficient, seems very necessary. That is the investment of time. Schools and teachers, just as much as learners, need to take time to sharpen their axe.

In a highly performative world, driven by school inspections, league tables, and high accountability, reconfiguring our use of time looks brave. Prior to the COVID pandemic, more was more, with many extolling the virtues of charter schools and academy schools that taught many more hours. And now, as we look past COVID, 'more time' has been a key candidate for how to help pupils catch-up lost learning. My research, summarised in this paper, suggests otherwise. It is based upon three questions:

• How do secondary teachers' timetabled hours relate to pupils' attainment?

• Does 'more time' for learners relate to better GCSE results?

• Does teachers' workload relate to their decision to move schools, or quit teaching?

Methodology

To illuminate these questions, I analyse curriculum data from the annual School Workforce Census, completed by every state secondary school in England since 2010. This census

illustrates when teachers move schools or leave teaching. It also automatically gathers timetable information from school databases for 76% of teachers. This is highly valid and reliable data which can be matched with school level value added data (2010-2014). Thus it is possible to calculate, for example, the hours taught per teacher, the average hours taught in a mathematics department, and the average hours of instruction, per pupil, in say GCSE English.

Of course, correlation is not causation and mistakes can be made by statistical models that omit important variables and biased findings, leading to incorrect conclusions. To prevent this, and other biases, good studies should track change over time (longitudinally); have very large, representative, sample sizes; use standardised outcome measures (e.g. GCSE value-added per school); include a wide range of statistical controls; and have a control group (preferably in a randomised control trial) (Vignoles et al., 2000).

These points have guided my research. For example, I include widely agreed factors such as pupils' prior attainment, the proportion of free school meals, pupil absence and pupils with EAL, SEN and so on. I also include schools' OfSTED rating, whether the school is urban, and based in London. I also include staff turnover, the proportion of NQTs and full-time staff, average age, in models of teacher workload. Having data from 2010 to 2016 enables longitudinal regression models to be built. Not only is it reassuring to have a temporal relationship between measuring workload in November and attainment in June, this data also allows me to build 'fixed effects' or FE regression models which are considered the 'next best thing' if a randomised control trial is not possible. In a fixed effect model, the department acts as its own control group as we analyse change over time, relative to the department average.

On workload and results

The possible effect of departmental workload on aggregated value-added performance, is estimated by three different statistical models using OLS, RE, FE regression. Each of these provides increasingly robust evidence of a possible causal effect, although such robustness comes at the cost of being much more statistically demanding. These results, which control for a wide range of factors, including students' allocated learning time, show a consistent and statistically significant pattern in all bar one model. In both English and Mathematics, strong evidence for a small negative effect size (-0.03) is found in the most rigorous FE models. In science, a small negative effect (-0.04) is found in RE models only.

Table 1 - Effect size of average department contact hours, on departments' GCSE value-added, 2010-2014

Compared to the effect sizes seen in John Hattie's (2009) table of interventions, these effect sizes seem very small. However, as Coe points out, much smaller effect sizes are expected when working with national level administrative data, and data based upon standardised test results (as GCSE value added statistics are). A better comparison may be if we were to compare these effect sizes against the effect of additional instruction time for pupils. This question (e.g. does more allocated instruction time lead to better pupil performance) represents the flip side of the coin to teacher workload and is one that has not been examined before in England's secondary schools. The message here, as published in the peer reviewed London Review of Education (Connolly, 2021), contradicts 'the orthodoxy of more'

1Matthew Kraft of Brown University (2018) also offers a interesting explanation of 'effect sizes' and how they should be interpreted.

found in political discourse. England's results suggest effect sizes of 0.08, 0.07, 0.09, 0.07 for English, science, mathematics and the humanities – a result that is very close to previous analysis of international PISA data showing an effect size of 0.06SD (Lavy, 2015).

Table 2 – The effect size of additional KS4 instruction time on school level value added, 2010-2014

English Teachers (2014)

On workload and retention

Staff turnover in England's state schools hovers around 20%. This represents an extraordinary loss of staff talent, experience, and management time, which previous research has shown to have a negative effect on student attainment (Gibbons, Scrutinio and Telhaj, 2018). Looking across 2011-2015, teachers' workload typically has a significant relationship with teachers exiting the State sector when modelled with logistic regression. Fluctuations that do appear seem to match curriculum and other reforms of the time. These models include a similar 'rich' set of controls alongside additional controls such as changes in leader ship, the rate of fixed exclusions, average class size, and local house prices job market density. As this plot for English teachers in 2014 makes apparent, ceteris paribus, above average workload can quickly, and increasingly, add to the likelihood of a teacher quitting the profession, and thus, after a point, highlights that less can be more.

Small effects, large implications

Although small in effect size, these results point to large possibilities. If departments can create more non-contact time, even if at the expense of allocated instruction time for students, and they use this time for other school improvement initiatives – say designed to boost teacher collective efficacy – then the gains could be large indeed. Even without such improvement initiatives, changes to workload and allocated instruction time appear to carry little cost to attainment and will boost staff retention.

Such a finding may not surprise school improvement researchers who often implore schools to invest time in school improvement initiatives (Stoll, Fink and Earl, 2003). But to rethink curriculum time remains a bold ask in the current climate (Jacobs and Alcock, 2017). There are, however, multiple ways to square this circle. The first is to do less, but to do it well. Such was exemplified by the Neath-Port Talbot Local Education Authority who implemented the principles of high reliability schools to successively raise the performance of 11 secondary schools over a 15-year period. Such sustained improvement is very rare (Mangan, Pugh and Gray, 2005), making this initiative extremely interesting. A key feature of this reform, exemplifying how 'less can be more', was schools' sustained focus on a limited number of goals, with time for all to be involved (Stringfield, Reynolds and Schaffer, 2016).

A second, perhaps more radical way to find time for school improvement, is to reconfigure allocated curriculum time. This was the approach adopted in a three-year study of 'learning to learn', which followed a Year 7 cohort through to Year 9, in an English comprehensive. After reconfiguring their timetable, this cohort received approximately 400 lessons on 'learning to learn' with time reallocated from other curriculum areas. The results were highly impressive. When compared to predecessor cohorts, pupils' attitude to learning showed positive gains, and academically, all pupils exceeded expectations. Most importantly, however, pupils in receipt of pupil premium showed addition benefits. This initiative both raised attainment, and narrowed the

gap (Mannion and Mercer, 2016) in a clear display that less can indeed be more.

Similar stories abound in different fields. In a short trial of the four day week, Microsoft Japan saw sales rise by 40% (Kleinman, 2019). A New Zealand accounting firm made headlines with gains made by moving to a four-day week. Such was the wide spread interest in this story, that the NZ Government is considering ways to implement this more broadly post Covid (Roy, 2020).

With all this in mind, it is sobering to recall that the England's standard school timetable is based upon a model of 'industrialised' education from the 1890s (Shedd, 2003). Yet today's schools are vastly different to their Victorian forebears. The world learners are preparing for is vastly different and this difference is accelerating. Now more than ever, it's time to be bold, about time.

BIO

Vaughan Connolly is a teacher of Computer Science and Physics, and has held various leadership roles in both state and independent schools in England and internationally. He is completing a PhD in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge and is interested in school innovation and how we succeed in the fourth industrial revolution. Vaughan would like to thank the ESRC and DFE for supporting this research.

The Association between Teachers’ Leadership Style and Student Performance

Introduction and Background

Previous research in industry and higher education has shown a strong, statistically significant correlation between employer/university leadership style and employee/student performance, motivation, and wellbeing (Moss, 2016). In particular, an inclusive style of leadership, with attributes such as individualised consideration, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and empathy (see Table 1), have been shown in these settings to have a strong positive influence on wellbeing.

However, the impact of inclusive leadership on secondary school students has been overlooked. Sevenoaks School, in conjunction with Professor Gloria Moss, undertook a rigorous, quantitative study, the only one to date, on whether the strong association between leadership style and student performance observed in higher education and industry also exists in the secondary school environment, with mathematics teaching as the focus.

Methods

The same validated survey method as used in the industry and higher education studies was used, an online anonymous multiple-choice questionnaire that students completed either at the start of lessons or as homework. The survey collected demographic data on students’ gender, nationality, year group and ethnicity, as well as posing 34 questions concerning students’ assessments of their mathematics teachers’ inclusive leadership styles. Teachers’ inclusive leadership score was defined as the sum of the scores across all 34 questions. It also asked 12 self-reflection questions about students’ own productivity, motivation and wellbeing in the field of mathematics – with student performance defined as the sum of these 12 scores. The responses to the 46 non-demographic questions were noted on a Likert scale. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from Buckinghamshire New University Ethics Committee on 11th January 2019. Participation was voluntary and data was collected between 26th March 2019 and 3rd August 2019.

Results

In total, 721 students completed the questionnaire (response rate of 66.1%). 32 students did not complete one or more questions in the questionnaire and these surveys were subsequently removed, resulting in responses from 689 students included in the final analysis. It was found that through their leadership behaviours, mathematics teachers scored highly in providing an environment that allowed students to be themselves and operated on the basis of fairness. In contrast, students also felt that teachers did not always encourage students to express their concerns or opinions, particularly minority voices. Insights from such question analysis can be directly fed back into staff continued professional development (CPD) and discussions around how best to develop the aspects of teaching practice on which teachers scored least well.

A scatterplot of student performance versus mathematics teachers’ inclusive leadership score (Figure 1) produced a correlation coefficient of r = 0.81. This result indicates a strong positive linear correlation between these variables, consistent with the correlations found in the earlier studies. The results show that the more inclusive are teachers’ leadership style, the better students perceived their performance. Additional analyses also revealed an association between inclusive leadership and the three components of student performance – namely, productivity (r = 0.72), wellbeing (r = 0.75), and motivation (r = 0.76).

Competence

Individualised consideration

Idealised influence

Inspirational motivation

Intellectual stimulation

Unqualified acceptance

Empathy

Listening

Persuasion

Confidence building

Growth

Foresight

Conceptualisation

Awareness

Stewardship

Healing

Description

Teachers showing individual interest and offering one-to-one support for students

Teachers having admirable qualities that students want to identify with

Providing an appealing vision that inspires students

Encouraging students to develop their ideas and be challenged

Being inclusive in considering students

Putting oneself mentally and emotionally in the student’s place

Actively listening to students

Being able to influence students

Providing students with opportunities and recognition

Encouraging students to reach their full potential

Having the ability to anticipate events and where they might lead

Having a vision about possibilities and articulating that vision to students

Being fully open and aware of environmental cues

Articulating the belief that the school’s legacy is to contribute to society

Helping students cope with any burdens

Conclusions

Overall, a strong, statistically significant positive association was found between mathematics teachers’ degree of inclusiveness and student performance. This correlation did not differ by gender or by nationality. However, the strength of the association decreased significantly with students’ advancing age, indicating increased student self-motivation, resilience and ability to act as independent learners.

In terms of what the results reveal about the Mathematics Department in this study, the student responses to the 34 questions evaluating teachers’ inclusive leadership behaviours reveal that the department is strong at allowing students to display authentic behaviours, serves the broad needs of students and operates on the basis of fairness. Areas of potential

Table 1: Competences underpinning the concept of inclusive leadership in secondary education.

development include taking further steps to encourage students to express their concerns, creating an environment for minority voices to be heard, and implementing further strategies to improve student confidence.

In terms of its overall significance, this research provides valuable insights into the positive impact of inclusive teaching styles on student performance, motivation and mental wellbeing, suggesting that these positive effects should be translated into practical classroom-based teaching strategies. It is also hoped that this study piques an interest for any schools interested in undertaking educational research, either replicating this study or carrying out further studies into the impact of leadership on student performance. Schools interested in collaborating should contact Sevenoaks School's Institute for Teaching and Learning.

More information on this study can be found in Innovate, the annual academic journal from Sevenoaks School's Institute for Teaching and Learning: <https://www.sevenoaksschool.org/teachinglearning/research/innovate/>.

Figure 1: Scatterplot of student performance versus teachers’ inclusive leadership score.

BIO

Dr Paul Parham is Teacher of Mathematics at Sevenoaks School & Honorary Lecturer at Imperial College London (<pep@sevenoaksschool.org>).

Prof Gloria Moss is Professor of Marketing and Management at Buckinghamshire New University and IPE Management School, Paris (<gloriamoss@protonmail.com>).

Introduction and background

How can we help our youth to develop their leadership skills and behaviours? When pupils are given leadership roles in school they develop maturity quicker. Yet, pupils perceive leadership as a relational process rather than solely involving someone in a formal badge wearing position. To explore pupil leadership perceptions and its relationship to wellbeing as well as hope, sense of school membership and academic self-regulation, a research study was conducted at Sevenoaks school by Dr. Ceri Sims (Chartered Psychologist, Buckinghamshire New University) and Paul Thompson (Head of Geography, Sevenoaks school). The survey was completed by just under 250 pupils.

Results

Pupils as leadersIt is not all about wearing a badge

The key predictions were that higher levels of perceived leadership would predict a higher sense of belonging and internal self-regulation which will in turn predict higher levels of both hope and student wellbeing. The results showed that experiencing formal leadership positions was associated with having more leadership identity and responsibility as well as a stronger sense of school membership. However, of particular interest is that pupils who regarded themselves as someone who shows informal leadership behaviours such as community service, mentoring, helping others and involvement in organising school event or activities also had higher leadership identity, responsibility perceptions and a higher sense of school belonging. In fact, seeing oneself as a leader through everyday informal behaviours was more important than wearing a badge when it came to being hopeful about the future: only those with higher formal leadership self-perceptions reported having higher levels of Hope. The hope scale measured Snyder’s hope theory (Snyder et al., 1991) whereby having high hope involves setting more goals, developing pathways to achieve them and having agency self beliefs to motivate them to use those strategies to reach their goals.

'Having high hope bears a strong relationship to wellbeing'

Discussion and conclusions

Furthermore, leadership identity, perceived school membership, academic self-regulation and hope all predicted pupils’ wellbeing. Having high hope bears a strong relationship to wellbeing. Thus, encouraging pupils to develop their informal leadership identities and behaviours may be a key ingredient for increasing hope and wellbeing in young people at school. The findings suggest that having a formal role per se might not be the key driver for student leadership and that building a leadership identity through informal leadership behaviours may be just as important, if not more so, as being selected to wear a badge. Encouraging pupils to develop their goals, and supporting them to develop strategies and the willpower and confidence to achieve them may be another route to motivating young people to engage more regularly with acts of responsibility, kindness and community which can help to foster a stronger sense of self-leadership. Students with high hope typically are more optimistic, they focus on success rather than failure when pursuing goals and they perceive themselves as being capable of solving problems that may arise and tend to experience more purpose in life. Moreover, secondary schools can find ways, perhaps through PSHE classes, to communicate the message that leadership is within every pupil through making use of everyday opportunities and informal leadership experiences.

The longer term aim is to promote the understanding of these links between leadership selfbeliefs, providing opportunities for everyday leadership and the important role this has for student wellbeing (pupils seeing themselves as independent self regulators as well as connected to a bigger community within the school). Moreover, if we can harness pupils’ hope beliefs for the future, they are prepared to handle the many challenges and obstacles that life will throw at them and thus will more confidently continue to pursue their goals and ambitions in life.

It is also hoped that this study piques an interest for any schools interested in undertaking educational research, either replicating this study or carrying out further studies into the impact of student leadership. Schools interested in collaborating should contact Sevenoaks School's Institute for Teaching and Learning.

More information on this study can be found in Innovate, the annual academic journal from Sevenoaks School's Institute for Teaching and Learning: <https://www.sevenoaksschool.org/ teachinglearning/research/innovate/>.

BIO

Dr Ceri Sims is a Chartered Psychologist and Senior Lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University.

Paul Thompson is Head of Geography at Sevenoaks School.

Should Architects Collaborate More With Psychologists?

Introduction

The built environment has a huge impact on both our behaviour and mental state. Internal design can influence the way we think and feel, whilst an external facade can inspire or repulse us. Whether architectural designers are encouraging us to socialise in an outdoor space, live together more cohesively, or work more productively in an office environment, psychology has the potential to influence these designs and, in turn, our thoughts, feelings, and actions. With the stress and strains of modern day living, this could make a real, positive difference to us all.

This link between architecture and psychology was the subject of my EPQ and gave me the opportunity to explore the relationship between the two professions and determine to what extent architects and psychologists did collaborate. I also wanted to see if this partnership could be taken further in order to create more environments that have a greater positive psychological impact.

I also discussed why architects shouldn’t collaborate more with psychologists. I examined if there are other elements that may be more important to the clients and end-users, such as the internal culture and activities within a building.

Both my primary and secondary research confirmed that there is a strong argument for psychologists and architects to collaborate more although it was not as clear cut as expected.

The argument for

The debate over collaboration gained renown with the pioneering work of Professor David Canter and his 1977 book The Psychology of Place. Canter explained the psychological processes which enable us to understand places, how to use them, and, most importantly, how to create them.

Exactly 40 years later, a recent BBC Future article by Michael Bond, ‘The hidden ways in which architecture affects how you feel’ highlighted ways in which we are impacted by our surroundings through some of the latest ideas in neuroscience (2017). In New York, the BMW Guggenheim lab worked with neuroscientists, Colin Ellard, and the University of Waterloo to measure skin conductance around different buildings to record participants’ mood (BMW Guggenheim, 2013). They found mood was rated lower when façades were monotonous, but

higher when facades were more complicated. These findings suggest the built environment has a direct physical and psychological impact on us.

Researching more into the findings on how aspects (such as light) can impact people led me to the 2010 paper ‘Lighting, Wellbeing and Performance at Work’ by Silvester and Konstantinou. This focused on types of lighting and its positive impact on productivity. This was also highlighted within my primary research, with the architect Helen Revitt giving an example of the importance of light for night shift workers. She worked on the design of a 24/7 call centre with an environmental psychologist to advise on colour and lighting. They also implemented intermittent lighting, water features, and plants based on end-user suggestions. The results were very successful, suggesting added benefits of collaboration.

Galan-Diaz and Martens also noted the heightened collaboration between architects and psychologists during the 1970s in their article, ‘Architectures’ brief love affair with psychology is overdue a revival’. They proposed the decline was due to the lack of a common interest. Architects need to satisfy the end users’ needs and collaborating with psychologists can be seen as a threat. A notable example of where collaboration could have been useful was the Glasgow’s Red Road flats, which were demolished due to higher rates of crime and little social cohesion because of a lack of psychological insight and focus on wellbeing of residents. So, it is likely that these failures in architecture will be repeated with future projects where there is still little or no collaboration.

‘Nudge’ theory was also discussed as a potential psychological aid to architects. Sociologist William Whyte pioneered a new and improved layout in the New York area (Bond, 2017) to encourage socialising. He had advised architects to have public spaces arranged to ‘nudge’ people closer through 'triangulation', by positioning seating to encourage

strangers to socialise. His work has formed the ‘Project for Public Spaces’ organisation which continues to create sustainable and appeasing public spaces today. This provides a possible template for how psychologists could be utilised by clients as an advisor.

However, some of the challenges of collaboration were exposed in a 2001 Scottish joint university student study (Uzzell & Romice, 2001). The project centred around the regeneration of a deprived area of Govanhill, Glasgow. Strathclyde architecture students acted as the direct contact for the community clients and made decisions, while Glasgow environmental psychologists acted as the architects’ consultants. A significant benefit from collaborating was the use of ‘action learning’ to overcome problems, where the two fields considered the opinions of the other to help create a more diverse solution. However, one major hurdle was how the two fields needed to overcome their different educational backgrounds. Their different approaches to research methods, assessment procedures, and outcomes often resulted in communication problems.

Familiarisation of this could be very time-consuming for little benefit. Explaining this further, it is likely that the ‘distinction between 'intellectual' and 'cultural' capital in architectural education has perpetrated the disconnection between architecture and other disciplines’ (Uzzell and Romice, 2001, 79). ‘Intellectual’ capital is basing work on academic discoveries, while ‘cultural’ capital is considering the modern design, fashion, and societal needs to produce work, such as interior design.

Arguments

against

Challenges around collaboration were voiced in Canter’s 1977 book. He describes how the lack of a solid generalisable formula for the optimum way to design a building means it is difficult for psychologists to present clear guidelines and justify their reasoning. This also creates an additional conceptual layer. Each conceptual layer of ideas in designing a building

consists of different groups, from architects to clients, and creates different viewpoints that may contradict and result in personal disagreements. This can hinder a project, especially between the very different disciplines of architecture and psychology.

The aspects of conceptual layers and a lack of a generalisable formula also came from the 2017 book by Bernheimer, The Shaping of Us – How Everyday Spaces Structure Our lives, Behaviour and Well-being. Bernheimer suggests the most important conceptual layer is from the users of the building and how ‘the most wonderful places in the world were not created by architects, but by people’. In other words, people feel more positive about their environment if they have input into shaping it, be this a building or outdoor space. This led me to consider how architects perhaps need to collaborate more with the users and not psychologists directly.

was shown from the Environmental Design Research Association in Vancouver, where senior psychologists were saying 'I am doing my research for pure science, the industry can either take it or leave it' (Jarret, 2006). Therefore, it is not just the architects that need to make strides in encouraging collaboration, but also environmental psychologists.

'there is a strong argument for psychologists and architects to collaborate more'

Gander (2016) suggested that buildings should be ‘designed first and foremost around their occupants’. An example was the successful Coop Housing project in Berlin. Here, potential residents were given the ‘opportunity to customise their flat to their specification and character’. This was possibly a more effective use of budgets and time than consulting a psychologist.

More arguments against collaboration were found in an article from The Psychologist, ‘Is there a psychologist in the building?’ (Jarret, 2006). This brought new thoughts about the lack of collaboration between the two fields. The major argument is that psychologists are suffering from ‘physics envy’, meaning, ‘they want their work to be seen as hard-nosed and they are afraid if they make it too qualitative, they won’t be taken seriously’. Effectively, psychologists are overcomplicating their research with too many quantitative findings, which is not easily understood by the clients and architects that could benefit from their research. This has led to psychologists instead preferring their work to be purely academic and not supporting its practical use. A lack of interest from psychologists

In addition to the published research, I also carried out my own primary research. This involved the creation of a short questionnaire which was sent to both architects and psychologists. This provided a small amount of contemporary data about how the two disciplines felt about collaborating. Interestingly, only 30% had collaborated with the other discipline with varying levels of success. However, 90% of respondents felt there should be more collaboration. Thinking about the barriers to greater collaborating, respondents gave varying reasons such as cost, lack of contacts, and time. Architects, such as Eleanor MacCallum, stated she ‘does not know any psychologists in [her] professional life’ and Sarah Riley outlined a ‘lack of network and connections’ to psychologists. These issues are especially related to the uncertainty that architects have around benefits a psychologist could bring. One of my respondents to the questionnaire was Professor David Canter who described how architects and psychologists ‘have two totally difference epistemologies; from psychologists lacking visual understanding of buildings and architects thinking in more spatial terms’, which again suggested how different the two fields are.

Conclusion

Both the primary and secondary research confirm that there is a strong argument for psychologists and architects to collaborate more. The examples of the Scottish student project and the New York Public Spaces project highlight the benefits of including a psychological perspective in environmental design. Equally, the case of Glasgow Red Road flats painfully shows the enormous social costs of not considering the influence of design on both individual wellbeing and social behaviours.

The impact of better design also has huge economic benefits. A 2010 ECOTEC consultancy article (Friedman, 2010) highlighted the costs for health, which considered previous important psychological findings concerning light and space. Health had an assessed cost of £600 million to the NHS from patients being physically and psychologically impacted by poor housing design.

The premise of my EPQ dissertation was founded on a traditional view of collaboration in which psychologists and architects would connect at the pre-design and design phase. This would enable psychologists to share their expertise at an early stage and help shape architects’ decision making. However, the insight, particularly from Bernheimer and Canter, proposed a possible alternative role for psychologists. Not only are psychologists experts on human behaviour, they are also experts in research methodology. So, perhaps their involvement could be more directed to gathering objective, quality data specifically from end users, while also ensuring the regime or culture within the building is one that promotes wellbeing, cohesion, or productivity.

Reflecting on my research, I identified three recommendations:

1. Case studies need to be more widely available to the design community - whether this is at a micro level, in thinking about factors such as light or colour, or at macro level when designing huge complexes. There are many cases studies with strong quantifiable data which show how wellbeing, productivity and crime rates can be improved with often small adjustments to design. These examples should also be discussed in academic settings with both architecture and psychology degree courses including cases studies from the other discipline.

2. Taking this a stage further, more studies, such as the Scottish student project, should be carried out. This takes the collaboration from a theoretical one into a practical application.

3. Have more collaborative events. A good example was the Conscious Cities Conference held in London in 2015. This brought together architects, designers, engineers, neuroscientists, and psychologists. They would provide an opportunity for the two disciplines to meet and discuss the latest research and challenges and most importantly to make the connections that currently appear to be lacking.

BIO

Dan Holliday is a former student who studied A Levels in Biology, Psychology, and Business Studies. He is studying Psychology at York University from September 2021.

Would a globalized curriculum be beneficial to students?

Globalization has become a ‘buzzword’ cited by various fields and education is one of the sectors interconnected considerably with it. The impact of globalization on education is supported by the popularity of international curricula: the International Baccalaureate (IB) is one of the most popular and well-known curricula adopted in more than 100 countries; Cambridge International General Secondary Education (IGCSE) is now the most popular course for 14-16 years old students worldwide. In addition, there are soaring numbers of international students around the globe. Nancy Brown’s Internationalising Early Childhood Curriculum: Foundations of Global Competence (2019) triggered me to explore the ‘Globalized curriculum’. I interpreted this term in two different ways: firstly, the curricula designed to be international (such as the IB); secondly, a curriculum that is borrowing and lending pieces of teaching methods and contents from other countries. Indeed, some national curriculums are transforming towards a global standard, as is well presented in the documentary Inside Singapore World-class Education System (SBS Dateline, 2019). It gave me a deep understanding of how globalized education is adopted in countries and enabled me to consider whether this is a definite beneficial transformation to students.

One of the most obvious trends of an internationalised curriculum is adding foreign languages to the curriculum, especially English language. Before Year 7 is the golden time to learn languages; it is innate in babies to distinguish different sounds, even the very similar ones. An experiment was conducted with babies aged 6 to 18 months and their parents in the BBC documentary Babies: Their Wonderful World (BBC Two, 2018). The result demonstrated that the innate ability to distinguish all the sounds in childhood diminishes after babies reach the age of 1 and then young children become only sensitive to the sounds in their mother tongue. The earlier children start learning languages, therefore, the better. A globalised curriculum, in most non-English speaking countries, helps children to start learning English early in schools without slowing down their first language teaching.

In addition, research shows that bilingual children have stronger brain activity (Nacamulli, 2015). When children are processing two languages, they use both hemispheres of the brain, while for monolinguals, only one hemisphere of the brain, usually the left, is used. Bilinguals’ brains are seen to have a higher density of the grey matter which contains most of the neurons and synapses and also more activity in various other brain regions when engaging a second language

(Nacamulli, 2015). The popularization of bilingual studies in a globalised curriculum in early years is bringing advantages to children in terms of development. The book Internationalising the Early Childhood Curriculum illustrates how the same topic is taught in different languages to the same group of children. The author points out that by learning the same projects in various languages, children are, in fact, learning how people speak the same thing but using different languages. Children can, thus, develop their global competence by learning knowledge in various ways. (Brown, 2019).

Understanding and respecting different cultures is important in this era, and language is now carrying meanings beyond itself. Indeed, when students are learning a language, they are also studying the cultures and history of that country. This is beneficial because children have a strong positive identity of their group by the age of three, and they begin to develop ethnic prejudice towards others by the age of six (Fitzpatrick, 2007). A curriculum that delivers culture-respecting content can strengthen children’s cultural understanding, in turn, generating positive results in changing students' behaviours towards various cultural backgrounds. The IB and Montessori curricula, for example, are encouraging inclusivity, tolerance, and respect. Northern Ireland is even developing a curriculum called ‘Respecting Differences in Early Childhood Education’, which will track children’s attitudes and behaviours over 10 to 15 years. The programme shows an optimistic result, improving children's willingness to play with others and develop empathy from a different background. The case in Northern Ireland demonstrates that culturepreference conflicts, such as not playing with those from a different background, are happening in schools and taking actions in schooling to diminish any form of cultural conflicts and inappropriate behaviours can be successful.

Due to the impact of globalisation, national curriculums are globalising as teaching methods and subject curricula are now also often shared and borrowed between nations. The National Curriculum even asks whether ‘globalisation has been driving convergence in the content of national curricula over time’ (The UK Department for Education, 2013). Science curricula, in particular, has experienced a convergence in the content over the years, according to the results shown in the TIMSS survey from 1999 to 2015 (Stacey, 2018). Countries that participated in this survey have shown a

change in their science curricula and growth of the core science topics was common in all participant countries.

Although the curriculum is converging, the teaching and time management styles do still vary across nations. Countries are borrowing the ‘worth-teaching’ topics and adding them to the national curriculum, which makes science subjects more complete in general. There are other examples of curriculum borrowing as well: the ‘Master Approach’ in Maths is one of the most representative transformations in English Maths education. This is a methods of Maths teaching that is widely used South Asia, such as Singapore and Shanghai. These examples all exemplify how curricula are globalising, which is benefiting students worldwide as curricula become more accessible.

Students in globalised curriculums may feel rootless and unable to fully immerse into neither the home country nor the country in which they study. Globally, there are more than 10,000 international students, with the number of students in international schools increasing rapidly. As they are now being taught from more of an international perspective than ever before, they are learning more and more about the world to strengthen their global awareness. However, there can be a lack of case studies or examples relating to a globalised curriculum for specific countries. For example, A-level Economics is mostly about the UK and Europe. The schools outside the Europe that teach A-level Economics therefore cause their students to be unfamiliar with their own country’s economic performance. Overseas students and those in international schools are normally the group that experiences this due to not accessing enough knowledge about their home country in comparison to their peers.

'When students are learning a language, they are also studying the cultures and history of that country'

Research shows that teachers with a better understanding of culture fostered a better classroom environment and have a better relationship with students. James Comer has pointed out that without a significant relationship, there is no significant teaching (Payne, 2008).

Teachers who can set up a respectful relationship with students play a crucial role in schooling. Which means a globalised curriculum is not suitable for all students and teachers. One of the compelling points is that most international schools in non-English speaking countries tend to have a large number of native-English-speaking teachers, and these teachers could have significant

different classroom cultures compared to other teachers in school. For example, making eye contact in most European countries in very common in schooling, and this is an essential part of the non-verbal communication. However, this is not the case in many Eastern cultures. For instance, eye contact in Asia is more likely to be interpreted as aggressive or unapproachable and avoiding eye contact is a way to be respectful. These different practices can come from the lack of cultural awareness of teachers, which is important ( Raeburn, 2018). Hence, the choice of international teachers plays a crucial role in pedagogical efficiency.

A globalized national curriculum that is inadaptable to teachers will minimize the beneficial outcomes. This particularly applies to the transformation of national curriculums. The most difficult step is not adopting the policy or teaching methods, but to let teachers to agree and adapt to the transformation. One case study used in Clever Land, written by Lucy Crehan, shows an example of teachers in Finland not able to adapt their education reform. Finland used to have a system in which children were selected in year 5 for university or vocational training. After this selection, children could not change their pathway during the whole education journey. Then, Finland changed the selection age to 15 years old which is deemed to be the age that students are well developed and can be the drivers of their education. Even though this appears to be the right movement for students, lots of secondary teachers find it hard because now everyone can go up to secondary schools, so the ability gap enlarged. Thus, with the new reformation, teachers need to think new ways of teaching which they find difficult at the beginning.

Tom Franklin, the ‘Think Global’ executive has said that ‘because we live in such a globalised world today, our mission should be to ensure every young person in school feel more confident and able to live in that world’ (Sutcliffe, 2012). Therefore, changing and reforming the education system to focus more on the global awareness is essential. By adding language studies, borrowing education policy and curricula, and bringing international perspectives, teaching, students can benefit not only academically but also culturally and developmentally. Nevertheless, educating students to fit well in the world as a global citizen will face lots of difficulties in the process. These come from both teaching and the selecting suitable systems in every country.

BIO

Selina Shang is a former student at Berkhamsted school. She was School prefect and deputy house captain. She is interested in Education equity in particular and going to study Education Studies at UCL.

Inspiring intellectual curiosity: for students by students

What is the Davies Society?

The Davies Society is an enrichment opportunity for the most driven and capable Year 9 pupils. We meet every half term for a combination of academic talks given by Sixth Formers, discussion groups, and academic mentoring sessions. Since its founding in 2019, it has had 2 years of success led by Dr. Cutler, (Head of Research and an English teacher). As of last year, a new committee of Year 12 students was formed, (Hugo L, Orlando A, Rebecca E, Millie H, George C, Ismay H and Jonah T), who play a key role in planning the content of the meetings and are part of a mentoring system to support the younger pupils in their pursuit of intellectual curiosity.

What are our aims?

The purpose of the Davies Society is to provide an opportunity for students to explore their wider academic interests outside of the constraints of the curriculum. Often school is viewed as a place where you learn things for exams, where ‘academics’ is just about good grades, but our focus is rather different. As A-level students, we realise that learning is so much more than obtaining qualifications. As our own university applications near, we see the huge benefit of reading around subjects and thinking beyond GCSEs and A Levels, not least because this is what the top universities and employers highly value.

There are benefits of developing this mindset well before A Level. As such, we are really passionate about developing intellectual curiosity in younger pupils, and we aim to both inspire and support each pupil in finding their unique interests. We see the utility in nurturing these skills from an early age, and we are motivated to do this partly because, looking back, we wished we had something like the Davies Society when we were in Year 9. That is why our work is focused on preparing the younger students for the future, because we know the journey begins now.

'Exploring the world beyond the school curriculum'

Davies Society last year: 2020-21

The meetings last year began with a focus on mentoring, with the Year 9s split into smaller discussion groups led by a Year 12 mentor. The purpose of these sessions was to create an atmosphere of camaraderie (which we felt was essential to having intellectual discussions, albeit over Teams!), and encouraging them to reflect on their interests and current intellectual pursuits, as well as giving the mentors a sense of what support each student needed. This approach was motivated by my own memory of being a Year 9 boy, frequently being told to be 'intellectually curious' but not knowing where to look. From the feedback, these small-group sessions proved to be successful, as they gave the Year 9s an opportunity to hear about the mentors’ own pursuits outside the classroom, which provided the role-modelling we set out to achieve, as well as an inspiration to be intellectually curious.

After the first few meetings of mentoring and icebreaking, the Davies Society returned to its tradition of inviting Sixth Formers to present talks. These covered a wide range of topics in daily life: from a talk on US politics given by last year’s Head Girl, Daisy H, to the use of statistics during Covid, by this year’s Head Boy, Orlando A. The feedback was that the Year 9s thought the talks were sufficiently varied in their topics, which shows the Year 12 led approach to planning meetings was successful.

We sought further feedback on a number of data points, to find out: how much the Year 9s enjoyed the talks, how much they inspired intellectual curiosity, and whether the topics catered for their interests. This enabled us to measure the success of Davies Society this year, with regard to our aims. We believe this feedback is an honest reflection of success of the Davies, since the questions were asked in a neutral fashion, and there were no incentives to answer either way.

In terms of improvement, the top 3 areas were: greater input from the Year 9s into the topics/ themes discussed in meetings, to ensure they are engaged and Davies best caters to their interests; sending out pre-reading so the Year 9s are better prepared for the ideas/ discussions presented in meetings; and allocating more time to group discussion, which was the original, pre-Covid aim of the new Davies Committee, albeit made more difficult via Teams.

Looking forwards

This academic year, I am hopeful that, Covid permitting, we can meet in-person again as a group. Operating remotely has brought its challenges, but despite the circumstances, I think it has been a very successful year for the Davies Society. The addition of the Sixth-Form Committee and mentoring system has brought a pupilled approach, which Dr. Cutler believes has 'transformed the Davies Society'. As the fresh cohort of Year 9s is introduced, I’d like to keep to the same format, with a few improvements inspired by the feedback. Provided Michaelmas brings a return to face-to-face interactions, it will once again enable a sociable and energetic spirit to the society and give the opportunity for higher quality, thought-provoking discussion. I am very excited for the year ahead at Davies, and the opportunity it brings for us as a Sixth-Form committee to give back to a school that we have gained so much from. We look forward to continuing our goal of providing student-led support to younger pupils as they begin their academic journeys exploring the world beyond the school curriculum.

BIO

Hugo Lindsey is studying for A Levels in Maths, Biology and Chemistry and hopes to read Medicine at university. He is a firm believer in the importance of academic enrichment for every Senior School pupil. As the Davies Society’s Chairman, Hugo aims to inspire pupils by exposing them to ideas and fields beyond the constraints of the curriculum, with a focus on topics relevant to the real world. Alongside some of the most academically-gifted Sixth-Formers, his goal is to stimulate these budding young minds to be curious and think critically, while remembering what is crucial yet often forgotten at school: that success comes from pursuing your passions, rather than just acquiring qualifications.

BOOK REVIEW

Under Pressure:

Confronting the epidemic of stress and anxiety in girls by Lisa Damour. (2019). New York: Ballantine

Damour is a clinical psychologist and her book is rightfully praised for blending ‘research analysis, psychological insight, and stories of girls …. into a compelling narrative about what’s right about our daughters’. Covering a range of topics from coming to terms with stress and anxiety, dealing with peer pressure and ways in which to overcome cultural pressures, it is an insightful read for both tutors and heads of house, as it offers pastoral teams clear guidance to support their coaching and mentoring of their tutees. It is written in a way which very much supports non-directive guidance of tutees to find their own solutions to issues which lead to stress and anxiety.

Damour describes stress and anxiety as ‘fraternal twins'. They are alike, as both are psychologically uncomfortable with stress usually referring to the feeling of emotional or mental strain or tension whilst anxiety usually refers to the feeling of fear, dread or panic. However, in real life, stress and anxiety are often tightly coupled together (e.g. a student who feels stressed by their school workload may come to feel anxious about getting their assignments done). A challenge we all face is that anxiety (and stress) have served us well, from an evolutionary perspective, and so it is deeply ingrained in the human psyche – for how else could primitive humans survive the dangers of their environment without their anxiety and stress antennae? However, chronic anxiety and stress affects deep thinking as a combination of stress hormones

and the amygdala (the emotional centre of the brain) reduces the brain’s executive function which is principally associated with prefrontal cortex processing.

The chapter entitled ‘Girls at School’ discussed the ‘strength-training model of progressive overload’ as a framework to help girls recognise that the anxiety and stress associated with academic pressures can lead to personal growth, as all growth comes with a degree of discomfort and, moreover, increasing discomfort gradually leads to increased mental strength. Girls who demonstrated a ‘stress-builds-strength mindset’ were able to deal better with the increasing challenges of academic pressures from Year 9 to 13. Moreover, girls who were coached to recognise the harmful effects of academic perfectionism were much better at mentally coping with our educational high stakes system of coursework and examinations. The chapter, in keeping with the philosophy of the book, examined various educational contexts coupling evidence-based studies from both cognitive and social psychology with practical, first-hand case studies.

The book will not only equip pastoral teams with the knowledge, understanding and wisdom required to support their tutees but will also offer reassurance that pastoral staff can also play a role in improving student wellbeing despite their lack of formal counselling training. A phrase which I find myself using most often is the notion that anxiety happens when we overestimate how bad something is going to be and underestimate our ability to deal with it. It is certainly worth a read.

BIO

Dr. Paul Hundal has been teaching at Berkhamsted for 20 years and has a keen interest in evidence-informed practice to enhance teaching, student learning, and pastoral coaching.

BOOK REVIEW

Range:

How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. (2019). London: Macmillan.

As Art teachers, we are familiar with following a non-linear path. Students are encouraged to explore a diverse range of media, materials and processes. Higher grades are awarded to those who take creative risks and explore as wide a range of ideas as possible. A strict syllabus, specification, or prescriptive curriculum is somewhat alien to an Art teacher. Colleagues teaching academic subjects might be glancing sideways with envy at the freedom that this allows. And, for the most part, they are probably right to, but this freedom is not without its challenges. In many ways a textbook, specification or syllabus provides a reassuring structure for both student and teacher. We all know where we stand, what we need to learn/teach, and where to start. There is no textbook for Art and if you forgive the pun, we begin with a blank canvas. This lack of structure (we do plan our lessons by the way!) can be a challenge for some students. In another subjects students might arrive with a clearer understanding of what it is they will be doing that day. In a GCSE or A-level lesson in Art they could potentially arrive with no idea of what they will be doing that day and leave with multiple directions in which to take a project. Students are encouraged to embrace the idea of the unexpected and the open ended. So, in some sense we are trying to get our students to embrace ‘generalism’, to explore as wide range of skills and ideas as possible.

When discussing his 2020 book Range in the Outside Magazine podcast, David Epstein opens by discussing the now iconic clip of a 2-year-old Tiger Woods out-putting Bob Hope on The Mike Douglas Chat Show. Woods has been – to downplay things – very successful, but Epstein argues this is perhaps an exception rather than the norm. Epstein offers the alternative path taken by tennis great (GOAT?) Rodger Federer, who in contrast to Woods, tried his hand at a range of sports from rugby, skiing and football to, of course, tennis. He puts forward the idea of generalism as a far healthier approach to learning. The breadth and range of our experiences are allowing us to perform to a higher level.

Epstein argues that life is not linear: we are relentlessly confronted with the unexpected. If our skill set is overly specialised and too narrow in focus, we are left unable to react successfully. This is because our pool of knowledge and experience is too small to draw upon. He goes on to suggest

that the more expert we become in something, the narrower our field of vision. We then begin to make things fit with our understanding of the world.

Epstein cites several studies to evidence his theories. Firstly, his analysis of members of the public with no specialist training or knowledge who outperformed CIA agents when working with the same case files because, he speculates, they don’t bring the same preconceived ideas with them. They look at the evidence in a more objective and open-minded way. He then highlights the work of Professor Dedre Gentner at North-Western University (who works on problem solving capabilities). Professor Gentner tested undergraduates’ problem-solving abilities. This work showed that the students who had no ‘major’ (therefore studying a more generalist curriculum) achieved far higher scores than those who were already specialising.

The book challenges our pre-conceived beliefs around the benefits of specialism and the mantra of ‘10,000 hours to become an expert’. The theories put forward in Range seemed to have applications for teaching and learning in all disciplines, including non-classroom-based learning.

One particularly interesting aspect was the fact that although the specialists generally triumphed early - making quicker progress and appearing to have mastered their field more rapidly - they are less likely to remain on top and see a greater fall off in success. They even have a higher drop out rate from their chosen careers or fields. Think of the travails of Tiger Woods towards the latter half of his career, his recent triumph at the 2019 masters notwithstanding.

Epstein argues that whilst the generalists start slower, take longer to reach the same career points/salaries, etc. they are far more likely to endure and perform over the long haul. Your ability to cope with new challenges depends on how broad your training has been. A wider range of experiences gives you the ability to apply skills and knowledge more flexibly. So, the greater variety in which something is learned, the less one needs to rely on any singular example or reference point. We become better at applying knowledge to a situation we’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity. Epstein’s book highlights the need for a holistic and broad-based approach to learning. It shows the importance of learning through as wide a range of disciplines and formats as possible.

'Whilst the generalists start slower, take longer to reach the same career points/salaries, etc. they are far more likely to endure and perform over the long haul.'

Matt Godman is a Teacher of Art and Photography, 6thForm tutor, and helping to coordinate the new Pathways programme for Year 10.

Introduction by James Cutler

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Does having a therapy dog present in reading lessons have a beneficial effect on student engagement and development in reading? by Stuart Simons Hall, S., et al. (2016). Children Reading to Dogs: A Systematic Review of the Literature. PLoS One, 11.2. Guthrie, J., and Cox, K. (2001). Classroom Conditions for Motivation and Engagement in Reading. Educational Psychology Review, 13, 282-302. Haynes, T. (2018). Dopamine, Smartphones, and You: A battle for your time. Available at: <https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphonesbattle-time/>.

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(Re)finding the Main Verb: Ancient Languages and Educational Inequality by James Green Bulwer, J. (2018). Changing Priorities in Classics Education in Mainland Europe. In: Holmes-Henderson, A., Hunt, S., and M. Musié. Eds. Forward with Classics. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 67-88.

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Ability Grouping at Berkhamsted by Grant McWalter

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Disciplinary Retrieval: A Case Study in English Literature by Dr. Andrew Atherton Bjork, E. & R. Bjork. Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning. In: Gernsbacher, M. A. and J. Pomerantz. Eds. Psychology and the Real World: Essays Illustrating Fundamental Contributions to Society. 2nd edition. New York: Worth, 59-68. Coe, R. (2019). Does research on ‘retrieval practice’ translate into classroom practice? Available at: < https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/ does-research-on-retrieval-practice-translate-into-classroom-practice>.

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Soundscapes of the self by Micheila Brigginshaw

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The role of current affairs: Contemporary subject knowledge acquisition at A level by Katie Duce Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshal, B. and D. Wiliam (2004). Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom. Phi Delta Kappan, 86.1, 8–21.

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An investigation into the Year 9 History curriculum and its impact on the social development of pupils. by Will Findlay Alexander, C., Weekes-Bernard, D., and J. Chatterji. (2015). History Lessons:Teaching Diversity In and Through the History National Curriculum. London: Runnymede Perspectives Collection, 2015. Available at: <https://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/History%20Lessons%20-%20Teaching%20 Diversity%20In%20and%20Through%20the%20History%20National%20Curriculum.pdf>.

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When Less Can Be More by Vaughan Connolly Coe, R. (2013). Improving Education. A triumph of hope over experience. Durham University: Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring. Available at: < http:// eachandeverydog.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ImprovingEducation2013.pdf>.

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Should Architects Collaborate More With Psychologists? by Dan Holliday Bernheimer, L. (2017). The Shaping of Us - How Everyday Spaces Structure Our Lives, Behaviour, and Well-being. Trinity University: Robinson.

BMW Guggenheim. (2013). Testing, Testing A Psychological Study On City Spaces And How They Affect Our Bodies And Minds. Available at: <http://cdn. bmwguggenheimlab.org/TESTING_TESTING_BMW_GUGGENHEIM_LAB_2013_2.pdf>.

Bond, M. (2017). The Hidden Ways That Architecture Affects How You Feel. BBC Future. [Online]. Available at: <https://www.bbc.com/future/ article/20170605-the-psychology-behind-your-citys-design>.

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Would a globalized curriculum be beneficial to students? by Selina Shang BBC Two, 2018. Babies: their wonderful worlds. [video] Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52104978>. Brown, N. (2019). Internationalizing Early Childhood Curriculum. London: Routledge. Cambridgeinternational.org. 2021. Cambridge IGCSE - 14-16 Year Olds International Qualification. [online] Available at: <https://www. cambridgeinternational.org/programmes-and-qualifications/cambridge-upper-secondary/cambridge-igcse/> Crehan, L. (2018). CleverLands. London: Unbound, 2016.

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The Association between Teachers’ Leadership Style and Student Performance by Dr. Paul Parham and Prof. Gloria Moss Moss, G. (2019). Inclusive Leadership. Routledge, Abingdon Moss, G., Sims, C., David, A and I. Dodd. (2016). Inclusive Leadership... Driving Performance through Diversity. London: Employers Network on Equality and Inclusion (ENEI).