By John Gerritsen of RNZ
The rush to change the way schools teach reading, writing and maths is scary and “insane”, some educators say.
They told RNZ they agreed the English and maths curriculums needed an overhaul, but it was being hurried and teachers’ expertise was being constrained.
But Education Minister Erica Stanford said most schools backed the overhaul and the changes had been well signalled in earlier work to refresh the curriculum.
Teachers would be given more time and support to introduce the new curriculums, but the changes needed to start because children’s numeracy and literacy were suffering, she said.
Discontent with the process prompted some regional primary principals associations to write open letters to the Government recently.
Among them was Robyn Brown from the Upper Hutt Principals Association, who told RNZ the Government was rushing the new English and maths curriculums and providing too little support.
“The principals that I’m talking to, everybody is like, ‘this is insane’,” she said.
“I don’t know any principals that I’ve spoken to that have actually gone ‘actually this is great’. And don’t get me wrong, we certainly do need a curriculum refresh. We do need to look at our maths curriculums and lots of schools have already taken on structured literacy.
Without more help, schools’ application of the new curriculums would be piecemeal, Brown said. In maths, there was a real risk some teachers would not get to grips with the new requirements and would instead teach directly from workbooks that schools were expected to adopt.
Principals Federation president Leanne Otene said schools would not be ready to teach the new curriculums next year.
The Government had said the curriculum could be altered as more feedback came in next year, but that was not ideal, she said. Professional learning provided this year was not sufficient and teachers would need ongoing training.
Otene said teachers also needed to retain the freedom to use techniques and approaches they knew would work for individual students, rather than being forced into a single approach in all instances.
The Ministry of Education had been working on the maths and English curriculums for several years already and much of the content should not be a surprise to teachers, Stanford said.
“Both of those curricula are out and to really, really good feedback. We’ve heard nothing but positive things so far.”
Schools that had not yet used the structured literacy approach for teaching children to read would have more work to do than others, Stanford said, but schools would not be expected to implement the new curriculums perfectly from the start of next year and there would be more training for teachers.
“I’ve been around the country in the last few weeks saying this to those principals associations and those schools who are a bit worried, ‘I know that this is a big ask for you given you haven’t done any of these things before and we’re not expecting perfect on day one. This is a process. Just get started. We will wrap around you everything that you need’.”
Stanford said it was important to make a start on the changes.
“We don’t have time to waste. I can’t look parents in the eye and go ‘Oh, we’re just going to wait another couple of years while we kind of get ourselves sorted so we can have perfect on day one’. Let’s get started because there are so many schools and so many kids in schools who will benefit from this.”
Stanford said she was aware of some opposition, but insisted that most teachers and principals supported the changes, especially those that were using structured literacy.
“There are many, many schools and at least 50% have done structured literacy and have said to me ‘we want what’s next, what’s next? Give it to us. We’re desperate for it because our kids are really struggling in maths’,” she said.
Douglas Park School in Masterton is two years into using one of the Government’s preferred “structured literacy” methods for teaching children to read.
New entrant teachers Helen Gard’ner and Hayley Sinton told RNZ the approach, with its emphasis on the sounds of letters, worked well.
“In previous years we’d aim for 45% and we went well above that last year and we got to 60, 65% of our students reading at or above their reading age,” Gard’ner said.
“It sounds low still but we find that if we give them a good grounding when they go through to the next year, it’s much higher once they get to Year 2.”
Sinton, the school’s new entrant-Year 1 team leader, said its current Year 2s were the first group to start school under the programme and had been assessed as having a reading age of 8-and-a-half to 9-and-a-half even though they were only 7 years old.
“It’s had a significant impact especially on the capable kids, however we still do have the tail and that’s our concern.”
What teachers at Douglas Park did with that “tail” – the children who were achieving below expectations – was potentially at odds with the direction the Government wanted schools to take.
“The suggestion has been to just carry on with ‘do it again, do it again, do it again’ but we find that just doing it again isn’t going to work. It might work the second time but the third time they really need something else and that’s where Reading Recovery was our thing and we’ve found that kids that then moved on to Reading Recovery, they did make shifts,” Sinton said.
The Reading Recovery scheme lost its funding and Stanford has spoken disparagingly of the “whole language” approach which encouraged children to guess words based on their context.
But teachers needed the freedom to exercise their professional judgement and use teaching methods they knew would work, Sinton said.
“We should be able to pull the necessary pedagogy that we need to meet the learners in front of us and that might be more of a heavy phonics approach. But it might be more of a whole-language approach and if we can’t be pulling from both of those to tailor that teaching for the children in front of us, I think that’s really dangerous and a really scary place to be.”
“Not every child learns the same and so we don’t think there’s one single programme that’s going to fit every single child,” Gard’ner said.
Past experience showed results would decline if Government funding for training teachers in approaches like structured literacy tailed off after a year or two, she said.
The school’s Year 4-6 team leader Sophie Macdonald said the recently unveiled draft primary maths curriculum looked fine, but there was an expectation students would work by themselves in workbooks and children of a particular age would learn the same things at the same time.
She said that was not how Douglas Park taught the subject, with children working in groups to solve maths problems and working at different levels.
Macdonald said the approach worked well – 86% of the school’s pupils achieved at or above the expected level and Māori students did as well as or better than other learners – and it should be allowed to continue.
“My kids love maths. I’ve got a bunch of kids in here who are excited to make mistakes, who give new things a go, who talk their way to understanding with their friends and I think if we take that away and put a workbook in front of them we’re going to lose that enthusiasm.
“There’s a place for the curriculum itself, with the outline of what kids should be doing at different levels. I think that helps teachers to feel confident about the knowledge kids should have.
“But I think the one-size-fits-all approach is not going to work. It feels like there is a bit of a lack of trust in what teachers know and what they do and what works for kids.”
Stanford said schools would not teach maths out of workbooks – rather the workbooks were for children to practise what they had learned.
The new maths and English curriculums should make teachers’ jobs easier because they detailed what needed to be taught and when, she said.
However, she did not accept that teachers should use Reading Recovery or whole language approaches with children who struggled under the structured literacy approach.
“They would be encouraged to use structured literacy approaches and funded to do so, and given all of the resources and all of the decodables and everything they need because they will see much, much better long-term results when they’re using structured literacy.”
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